… Atul Gawande. But what made this the plagiarism winner and still champeen was that students in the audience got on their cell phones, discovered the plagiarism, and began mouthing the dean’s words in real time. That was very cool of them, and the guy resigned.
The current plagiarism story out of Smith College is less cool, but has its own fun wrinkle. The singer who got an honorary degree there plagiarized her speech and the degree was withdrawn; but what makes this one fun is the official statement from the school’s president, who noted that the speaker explained to her that she “sought to infuse the words of others with her own emotional valence.”
The University of Minnesota has tried; Lord, how it has tried. But vicious and self-serving theft of other peoples’ work (background here) makes lots of people angry, see, and they speak up and speak up until even cynical administrators who try – insanely, stupidly – to dismiss blatant extensive repeated plagiarism as an ‘honest mistake’ (a phrase destined to haunt the UM school of public health for years to come) have to face the consequences.
More than ordinarily nauseating plagiarism story out of the University of Minnesota, this one involving the director of a research unit stealing verbatim an underling’s dissertation prospectus. The director has scurried away from her position at UM, and UM has duly lied to cover its ass (the whole thing was “an honest mistake”), and everyone’s now hoping that the damage has been contained. But you only need to read the injured party’s narrative to know that this repulsive tale ain’t over.
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“Without Hardeman at the helm of CARHE, it appears the future of the research center is in question.” Sounds as though the place has been a mess pretty much from the start, and UD wouldn’t be surprised if UM hasn’t already shut it down.
And remember, as UD has been saying on this blog for ages, plagiarists plagiarize abundantly, promiscuously:
Brittney Francis, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said Hardeman had taken a graphic that Francis made to illustrate the complexities of structural racism and used it in her own presentations and grant applications, without proper attribution or permission.
Husband:“Across UW-Madison, … less than 3% of employees annually receive bonuses. In [DEI chief Levar] Charleston’s division, he approved bonuses to 85% of his staff without consulting senior leadership. [M]ore than half of the division’s 71 employees had already received a bonus in the previous year… Between Dec. 1, 2023, and Nov. 30, 2024, Charleston also approved salary increases ranging from 10% to 23% for 12 employees… Charleston’s division spent the most on travel, training and events of any unit on campus — about $11,000 per employee in 2024. Other divisions averaged about $3,300 per employee.
… Travel and event spending rose sharply compared to previous years. The division spent $1.2 million in 2019. This ballooned to $1.7 million in 2023 and $2.65 million in 2024.
Supply spending also increased, from $326,00 in 2019 to nearly $600,000 in both 2023 and 2024. Some of the expenses were questionable, [a] report said.
Among the charges: $18,000 for student massage therapy services, $21,000 for a senior leadership retreat at a Lake Geneva resort, $14,000 for Maui lodging costs for seven students and staff for recruitment purposes.
See this post, where UD lists some of the motives for plagiarism. She forgot an obvious one: money. Expert witnesses often get paid TONS (I’m looking at you, Feinerman), and professional expert witness Fancy Harvard MD has been in the trade for awhile. As with the Georgetown Law guy in my parenthesis, Harvard’s Dipak Panigrahy knows a get rich quick scheme when he sees one. Get paid – I dunno, $500 an hour? – to get one of your underlings to plagiarize vastly in your expert report. Pad it up good with gobs of plagiarized material for more moolah and place your bigshot name upon it. Voila.
Only, as with that parenthetic Georgetown guy, someone bothered to examine the report, and discovered – in the judge’s dismissive word – a ‘mess.’
Yeah, he threw the whole thing out.
Will the dude get paid anyway?
What a deal. Thousands and thousands of dollars for … uh …
“Indeed, the plagiarism is so ubiquitous throughout the report that it is frankly overwhelming to try to make heads or tails of just what is Dr. Panigrahy’s own work,” [said Judge Dalton].
UD does wonder, as the plagiarism pins keep falling, why people do it. Naive question, ja, but in weighing whether to
1.) ruin your career and humiliate yourself by doing something you really don’t have to do; or
2.) grind the thing out (what do they want? fifty? a hundred pages?) even though you really have to drag your ass to do it, and the result may be an ill-favoured thing, sir, but mine own,
doesn’t it seem obvious you should just grit your teeth and write the fucker?
Because one of the many bad things about plagiarism is that it makes people wonder whether you actually ever had the capacity to write a serious scholarly work of a certain length. Why, after all, did you plagiarize?
None of the answers is good. Cynical ambition. Laziness. Incapacity.
See when it’s this bad, it’s on Iowa State as much as the plagiarist. To pass a dissertation that plagiarizes more than twenty-four other authors!!!! seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.
No, that’s Bracknell. Make it a contempt for the ordinary decencies of scholarly life. Make it a remarkable incuriosity about a document that must be a pretty fucking weird read. If anyone at Iowa State read it.
That’s Georgy Kurasov‘s work on the right. (Kurasov’s totally charming self-description is here.) The plagiarism — featured, until blasted off, in a Cairo metro station — is on the left. Ghada Wali has been sentenced to six months in prison.
… but if it’s true that Harvard’s chief diversity officer is a plagiarist, everyone’s gonna start talking.
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Just today, a new complaint emerged against Harvard’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, alleging that she, too, engaged in scholarly misconduct. (Neither Charleston nor the university has responded to a request for comment on those allegations.)
Story jumps to Atlantic mag.
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The Harvard Crimson covers it today. Here’s the part that makes UD sit up.
The complaint also alleged that extensive passages in Sherri Charleston’s 2009 Ph.D. dissertation lifted language from a 2005 book written by Rebecca J. Scott, a professor of history and law at the University of Michigan. Scott co-chaired Charleston’s doctoral committee and advised Charleston on her dissertation.
Many passages describe or analyze historical events using phrases — and sometimes whole sentences — identical to those in Scott’s book. In each case, Charleston cites Scott but does not quote the shared language.
If they really were extensive, and if they were not quoted, it’s legitimate to ask why Scott didn’t notice anything.
Why no one noticed anything. The language was taken from a very high-profile book.
Even if one accepts that Gay’s transgressions are relatively trivial in themselves, the sheer number of citation errors is deeply troubling. As of this writing, dozens upon dozens of instances of “improper citation” across her published work indicate a systematic problem with the basics of academic writing. Perhaps this really does not rise to the level of research misconduct, but it constitutes strong evidence that the former president of Harvard struggles to cite properly.
Aleksandar Stević
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Click on this post’s category – PLAGIARISM – to see all of these observations, and more, expanded upon over many years.
Is Harvard preparing to concede that President Gay should be let go?
The controversy swirling around Dr. Gay raises questions about what it means for a premier American university when its scholarly leader — who at Harvard has final approval on all tenure decisions — has been accused of failing to adhere to scholarly standards. The allegations against her [have] prompted some to wonder whether Harvard is treating its leader with greater latitude than it would its students.
Says the NYT. Then it takes a trip down memory lane. Devoted UD readers will recall these earlier stunningly hypocritical Harvard plagiarism cases.
In 2005, after two prominent law professors, Charles Ogletree Jr. and Laurence Tribe, were publicly accused of plagiarism, The Harvard Crimson ran an editorial decrying the “disappointing double standard,” noting that “students caught plagiarizing are routinely suspended for semesters or even entire academic years.”
In both cases, the investigations — which were led by Derek Bok, a former Harvard president, and unfolded over months — found that each had in fact committed plagiarism. The professors were publicly chastised by the administration, but Harvard did not say whether there were any sanctions, according to news reports at the time.
In an apology, Mr. Ogletree, who died this year, acknowledged that his 2004 book “All Deliberate Speed” included several paragraphs from another law professor almost verbatim, without any attribution, according to a New York Times report at the time. (He said it was the result of a mix-up by his research assistants.)
In Mr. Tribe’s case, he was deemed by Harvard’s president and the law school dean to have unintentionally included “various brief passages and phrases that echo or overlap with material” in a book by another scholar, who was not credited. Mr. Tribe, who still teaches at Harvard, apologized.
These were ATELIER plagiarism (read about UD’s tripartite scheme here], plagiarism committed by the flunkies who write your books for you because you’re far too busy and important to write them yourself. (See, among other Harvard luminaries, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jill Abramson, and Alan Dershowitz.)
The getting off scot-free bit is a prototypical instance of oligarchic privilege, an outcome no one in any of the world’s many class-based, corrupt from top to bottom, countries would have any trouble recognizing.
