The sport of competitive plagiarizing is upon us, in which people accused of plagiarism use the same software their accusers used, in order to demonstrate that everybody plagiarizes. In fact, some people plagiarize more than the accused do, so why are the accused being singled out?

How many of these objects of plagiarism claims, though, can lay claim to the title of provost? Your chief academic officer may herself be a plagiarist?

This must be Chicago State University, corrupt dropout factory extraordinaire. (Background here.)

So the provost is suing the school that passed and is now investigating her degree (privacy issues), which for CSU means another embarrassing high-profile lawsuit to go with the free speech one FIRE just filed against the school, and the just-concluded one in which a judge made CSU pay a whopping three million dollars to a campus whistle blower against whom the institution retaliated.

I’m sure the taxpayers of Illinois, who pay for this school (I don’t think it has any students anymore… maybe a few…?), take comfort in the fact that the money they’re paying for the provost’s salary is going to someone who apparently plagiarized less than some of her classmates.

… lay down a brief resume of a book for his friend.

UD can’t get too excited about the gathering Zizek plagiarizes from a “white nationalist hate group” magazine storm. As the editor of Critical Inquiry (which published what UD is pretty certain will turn out to be only the first widely known piece of plagiarism from Zizek) admits, the guy did indeed plagiarize, and from a most unlikely source…

Yet what is in this story that isn’t already there in the Jonah Lehrer, Johan Hari, Chris Hedges, Stephen Glass, Phil Jacob, Jason Blair, etc., etc., etc. story?

We seem to like to be fooled. Bernard Madoff’s returns were outrageously too good to be true. Didn’t stop everybody from investing with him.

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UD thanks Dave for tipping her off to the story.

There they sit, the proud medical school graduates and their parents, the proud high school students and their parents, and there you go honoring their efforts by not even being willing to get off your ass and write your own speech. Fuck ’em. The fools won’t notice I stole the speech because they’re too fucking stupid.

But even in the sorriest group there are always a few people who figure things out. (One audience found the speech online as it was being mouthed and they were able to follow along, word for word, in real time.)

Unlike the Canadian med school dean up there, who fessed up immediately and resigned, the Mansfield Massachusetts school superintendent seems to be trying to talk her way out of the thing. She didn’t plagiarize!

Let UD be as clear as she can be: This woman is an insult to the school and should be fired.

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And off she goes.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm agrees that plagiarism is a very bad thing, but grilling seems to her an overreaction.

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OTOH, assuming the nominee survives, SOS has doubts about his capacity for logic (a capacity for logic, like a capacity for independent thought, being a good thing in an education minister). When confronted with his spectacularly large plagiarism portfolio, the nominee said:

“(The theses) contain information that is widely available,” he said. “I don’t think that can be called plagiarism.”

This comment put SOS in mind of the Doonesbury collection titled “But the Pension Fund was Just Sitting There”

It’s right and meet, I guess. If your country represents scholarly plagiarism to the world, you want the public face of your educational establishment to be a plagiarist. It’s the Korean way.

And Kim Myung-soo really fits the bill. He’s been stealing his students’ papers and publishing them under his own name for decades.

UD also likes the particular form of plagiarism favored by Korea’s intellectual elite. Pretty much everyone does it like Kim Myung-soo: You steal your students’ papers.

There’s an extra cramp of revulsion one feels in contemplating plagiarism that involves taking advantage of your superior position to exploit the hard work of an inferior who can do absolutely nothing about it, except to turn around and do the same thing to her underlings when she gets the chance.

When the principal of your school is a career plagiarist, satire’s the only way to go.

… on the question of whether he’s a career plagiarist; and you would too, especially if you’re carrying around not only your own divinity degree, but honorary doctorates from two seminaries.

Still, this New Republic piece does seem to have the goods on Chris Hedges, prolific political writer…

The case, if proved, reminds UD of Johan Hari, another self-styled George Orwell (Hari even won the Orwell Prize, though he had to give it back) whose plagiarism bore the same reckless mark as Hedge’s apparently totally over the top use of other people’s ideas and prose.

Lots of other wonder boys come to mind here too: Jonah Lehrer. Phil Jacob. Stephen Glass. Jayson Blair. So many others.

Some are born plagiarists, some achieve plagiarism, some have plagiarism thrust upon them, and some charge states half a million dollars for plagiarism.

The played-for-a-sucker state of Maine offers an alliterative definition of plagiarism, a definition similar to Zygmunt Bauman’s. For Bauman, what others call his plagiarism is merely trivial punctuation error, the sort of thing only trivial people would notice. In the same way, when the state of Maine discovers (via the pissed actual authors) it has given almost a million dollars of taxpayer money to a consultant who plagiarized rather lengthy sections of a report he submitted to the state on the subject of welfare (shades of James Feinerman – though he used Wikipedia), it plays the punctuation card. Plagiarism is an imperfect placement of parentheses (UD is trying to keep the alliteration going); a picayune pleonastic protuberance; a paltry parsing of prose… The consultant himself puts it down to “footnoting problems,” but the real problem is that the consultancy guessed wrong. It guessed the original authors wouldn’t read the consultancy’s obscure little report, or wouldn’t care that they were plagiarized.

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UPDATE: You knew this was coming. You knew it if you read this blog. I have almost never reported a case of one copied source. Plagiarists are career copiers.

[T]he authors took information from as many as five other sources, without attribution or with improper citations of the original source…

Among their many plagiarized sources: the University of Southern Maine’s Muskie School of Public Service.

Well, what’s public service, after all? Providing plagiarizable material to a guy being paid – well, so far he’s been paid $500,000 and I’m not sure the state’s going to be able to get that back – a guy being paid to produce a report about the state welfare system … I mean, the guy’s firm is private, not public; its job is to make money with the least labor output. The Muskie School is there to provide a Public Service… Really, to provide for the public welfare, if you will… And it has done so!

It has written his report for him!

MAINE: THE CONSULTANCY WELFARE STATE

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What a waste.

Waste, embarrassment, lots of things of interest to people who pay taxes in Maine. If I lived in that state, I wouldn’t be happy to know that I was subsidizing a plagiarist.

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Funny the way incredibly stupid public statements come back to bite you on the ass.

“While we do not excuse errors in the report, we are also concerned that the media and Democrats have chosen to politicize punctuation over policy, instead of evaluating these critical reform recommendations on their merits,” Mayhew said in an email to the Press Herald on Wednesday.

Seriously, Commissioner? You pay a guy almost a million bucks for a report that is dead on arrival, then you learn belatedly that he plagiarized parts of it, and now you’re dismissing any and all criticism of this boondoggle as a partisan plot to “politicize punctuation?” What’s next, a statewide ban on semicolons?

CNN ran the material through plagiarism-flagging software, according to the CNN source. That initial scan, says the source, turned up “two or three things,” which caused a deeper examination of “all of [Marie Louise Gumuchian’s] work.” That uncovered an “insane” number of problems, according to the source.

Fifty stories plagiarized. Probably more. The investigation is ongoing.

As UD always says, plagiarism is like Lays Potato Chips. Bet you can’t copy just one.

As UD also always says, Gumuchian’s next move is too obvious for words. It’s just a matter of which mental disorder she chooses. She’s probably studying the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual even as we blog.

UD‘s not sure how she missed Australia’s Troy Buswell (my headline comes from a 2011 story about his ex-marriage), but along with having committed “11 traffic offences … in one night,” he seems to have plagiarized a report justifying the extreme expense of a taxpayer funded trip he recently took to Europe and Asia.

American political seasons are always rife with plagiarism, and it’s almost always the same thing: Campaigns poach each others’ boilerplate (hideously mixed metaphor, but UD will go with it). That is, in what UD would call a “party-lateral” move, a democrat running in Iowa will steal a paragraph describing a candidate’s position on, say, immigration, from another democrat running for office, typically in some other state. You want to stay out of your own state, since greater geographical distance tends to mean less chance of detection. (So, by the way, does greater temporal distance. UD has covered tons of plagiarism cases where the plagiarist found a dusty tome appearing in 1950 …)

Nothing special, then, about an Iowa democrat having plagiarized website material from the website material of an Illinois democrat. But UD likes her campaign manager’s defense: Plagiarized writing is a placeholder. When you’re writing, you distribute plagiarized paragraphs here and there as a temporary measure. While you pull your own prose together. Even if that material gets published, it’s not really plagiarism, because you were always intending to discard it for something more permanent.

In Athens, the Olympic Ideal is not just for the Olympics. Scenes from the Greek Cup final:

[The game was] halted when a firecracker was thrown onto the pitch.

Before the match Panathinaikos supporters threw broken plastic seats at riot police on the pitch and flares, firecrackers and other objects were thrown between supporters.

Police used tear gas to bring order and the presidents of both clubs, Giannis Alafouzos of Panathinaikos and Ivan Savvidis of PAOK, pleaded to fans from the stadium’s loudspeakers for calm.

Outside the stadium a police car was destroyed by a firebomb thrown by a motorbike rider.

One coach carrying PAOK supporters was attacked with rocks by Panathinaikos fans causing minor damage to the vehicle.

A large section of Athens Olympic Stadium was left empty to separate the two groups of supporters while a police helicopter kept a watch from above.

… Police … arrested the two owners of a PAOK supporters’ clubhouse in the centre of Athens after confiscating fireworks, iron bars, bottles filled with petrol, knives and baseball bats.

Some 4,000 police officers were deployed to keep the peace in the Greek capital for the match.

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And as for the Platonic Academy:

Photini Tomai, a Wilson Center favorite, and Director of the Service of Diplomatic and Historical Archives of the Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is running for the European Parliament. Her background:

Foreign Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos appointed her as the country’s special envoy for Holocaust issues, a decision that withdrawn that June after 40 historians and other figures petitioned the minister over their concerns at the “unethical way” Tomai has run the ministry’s archives.

They said access to the archives involved “a very complicated and lengthy process in which the head of the archive takes part herself, and sometimes intrusively”. They also claimed that the “30-year rule” is not applied in many cases, meaning files from the 1950s remain inaccessible. Nevertheless, Tomai publishes extracts from files otherwise out of bounds to researchers in her Sunday newspaper articles.

“In a time when dozens of civil servants are suspended without judicial or disciplinary convictions, we, the undersigned, believe that if Ms Tomai remains the head of the Diplomatic and Historical Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, especially after her conviction, it will raise major issues in academic ethics and in equal treatment. For the same reason we believe that Ms Tomai could not represent Greece in international organisations, conferences and meetings, jeopardising the prestige of our country.”

But that’s not all, folks!

In an October 2013 appeal court decision that has only recently been published, Photini Tomai, director of the foreign ministry’s archive, was told again that she must pay €20,000 in compensation to two authors after she published a children’s book that they wrote under her own name.

The decision confirmed an earlier ruling by Athens first instance court that Tomai was guilty of copyright infringement. That court ruled that a book entitled 1,2,3 … 11 True Olympian Stories, … was the work of screenwriter Eleni Kefalopoulou and her husband, film director Aris Fotiadis.

The couple told the court that, ahead of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, they came up with an idea to make an animated series on ancient Greek Olympians and sent a script to the national broadcaster ERT and a number of private companies. On the recommendation of friends, they also sent a copy to Tomai, in her position as head of the foreign ministry’s archives.

The authors received no offers and animation was never made. But in 2008, they noticed 1,2,3 … 11 True Olympian Stories in a bookstore and immediately recognised the characters in it as ones they had created. In many instances, they saw that text had been copied verbatim and the court agreed.

Plagiarism on high – plagiarism among professors at excellent universities (Charles Ogletree), plagiarism among the celebrated and venerated (Jane Goodall) – is always a little smudgy. Miscreants suffer little or no penalty, and language (mistakes were made, inadvertent, over-reliance on research assistants…) is brought forward to… smudge matters…

And so it was at Brown University, until a group of English professors decided to break through the smudge and complain about one of their soon-to-be-erstwhile colleagues.

As is almost always the case in high-plagiarism incidents, what seems to have been massive and obvious plagiarism (around 35 instances of virtually verbatim lifting were reportedly found in this professor’s book) took place, after which a series of smudging, tamping down, looking the other way, events took place. The press very quietly pulped the book. And, while the professor was taken off the tenure track, she was also – bizarrely – given a deanship.

It’s a temporary deanship, to be sure, but it involves working with graduate students on their teaching, which will, in turn, no doubt involve her writing letters of recommendation for some of them, etc.

Her once-colleagues are unhappy about a number of things here. They’re unhappy that a gross instance of plagiarism is being called not plagiarism by Brown but a mistake. (Thirty-five mistakes.) And therefore identified as not really research misconduct. (Smudge smudge smudge.)

“Everyone I talked to in the English department understood [the Brown University document reviewing this professor’s book to] be saying that research misconduct included plagiarism, that plagiarism is a form of research misconduct,” [an English professor] said. “Therefore any judgment that a faculty member’s work contained errors that were plagiarism but not research misconduct was a kind of category mistake. It was contrary to the logic of the University rules.”

They are also unhappy that her punishment is to be promoted to a deanship.

[M]any department members are displeased that [the] new position entails working with graduate students…

[One faculty member] cited the possibility of graduate students asking [her] for letters of recommendation or indicating on their resumes that they took part in a teaching program under her auspices without knowing that outside scholars might be aware of her errors.

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UD takes a deep wizened breath here. Twas ever thus. UD is impressed with the professors who complained. But twas ever thus.

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Another recent example of high-plagiarism smudgery.