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Tuesday, December 13, 2005
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MILDRED DICK? Let’s see what I have for you today… Oh here’s something. A story that combines plagiarism and football! A professor of Hospitality and Tourism Research at San Diego State University was asked to write a report detailing the economic impact on that city of the Holiday Bowl, some football game. Based on the report, the city decides on funding levels every year for the event. Did it occur to the city to wonder about the results they’d get from a guy who’s also in the San Diego hotel business, as the SDSU professor is? (UD’s particularly fond of university professors who have extensive business interests in the fields about which they teach -- spa-lady Mary Tabacchi at Cornell being UD’s perennial example.) No, no, San Diego happily pocketed this year’s report, which “shows an $8 million increase in the Holiday Bowl's impact on the city, despite no significant increase in attendance from the previous year,” which is a great result, who cares what that attendance number means, and San Diego was all ready to up the taxpayer burden for the game accordingly… Until out of the woodwork crept Casinelli. Casinelli’s the guy who’s written this report for the city for years. He expected to do it this year too, and “offered to do it at fair market value,” he explains, “but then here's somebody who was willing to do it for basically what I was doing it for before.” So the city saves money on the report by having the SDSU professor do it and it gets this terrific result, and so it‘s a terrific outcome all around! Why then has Casinelli “filed a claim for $56,000 with the state of California”? Because the professor who was paid to do it this year decided that “you can make money” just by “grab[bing] what was already done, scan[ning] it into the computer, hand[ing] it to the client and collect[ing] the money," notes Casinelli. Indeed with remarkably few emendations, this year’s report is verbatim Casinelli’s last year report. It’s an example of what UD calls gold standard plagiarism. The SDSU professor, now majorly up shit’s creek, is doing and saying all the things people at this, er, juncture do and say: 1.) I didn’t do it, man! There was this “student from Thailand” working with me! He did it! 2.) I “reviewed the report before it was released and did not notice the similarities.” Casinelli is amazed that having now found the guy guilty of plagiarism, SDSU isn’t removing him from the faculty. Here’s a guy who at cost to the school in terms of reputation and money and who knows what else, blatantly plagiarized, and he’s up there modeling this penalty-free behavior to SDSU’s students. Why, Casinelli asks, would “the school... allow Rauch to continue teaching after finding he committed plagiarism” and in the process produced a report for the city lacking all credibility? And lied? And blamed it on an innocent student assistant? Casinelli tries to explain what’s been done to him by using a literary analogy: "It's like rewriting Moby Dick and wherever it mentions Moby Dick, saying there are two whales, Moby Dick and Mildred Dick, but keeping everything else the same," Casinelli said. "Then I'll sell it and at the very end, I'll put Herman Melville (Moby Dick's author) as a source.” |