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Friday, November 11, 2005
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A Few More Words About Plagiarism. One simple thing people should do when it comes to allegations of plagiarism is look for patterns. How do plagiarists typically operate? One thing many of them do is find an innocuously old and/or obscure precursor document to appropriate. Whether it’s Laurence Tribe, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Brad Vice, or now, in the world of cartoons, Dave Simpson, plagiarists tend to root around in stuff that’s lain dormant for decades, and/or stuff that didn’t set the world on fire when it first came out, until they find something that’s pretty good, but which readers are unlikely to remember in its original context. Another thing to keep in mind is that for a lot of plagiarists, plagiarism is a habit, a way of life, an established operational mode. It’s not uncommon for people revealed as plagiarists in 2004, say, to turn out to have plagiarized also in 1990 and 2001. (Vice’s 2001 dissertation contained the same lifted material that’s gotten him into trouble four years later.) So, for instance, a furious Bob Englehart, on discovering that the newspaper cartoonist Dave Simpson has just stolen one of his early cartoons (it appeared in 1981), comments: “Having not learned his lesson in the late 1970s when he was busted for stealing Jeff MacNelly’s cartoons, he has recently stolen one of mine.” (Simpson has been fired.)   This latest plagiarism case exhibits all of the features I’ve isolated here, features that emerge again and again: 1. The plagiarist has plagiarized before. 2. The plagiarist focuses in his or her work upon documents and images that have been out of circulation for a longish time. 3. The plagiarist’s reigning assumption is that people won’t remember back beyond a decade or so. Oh, and number four: As with Harvard professor Charles Ogletree, watch for the plagiarist, on discovery, to make the amazing assertion that he assumed the plagiarized material was actually his own work -- that is, to claim that he is incapable of distinguishing between multiple pages of his own prose, or pictures from his own hand, and pages and pictures from others. “Simpson, who was dismissed Thursday, said he found an unsigned copy of the cartoon in his creative files and mistakenly believed it was his own.” |