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.

***********************

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.

*******************

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

********************

Another recent example of high-plagiarism smudgery.

… of the Republican party.

Its leader.

… is perhaps the most common variety of plagiaristic experience – see Jonah Lehrer and Johan Hari for a couple of high-profile recent cases. And at only 25, Phil Jacob, of Australia’s The Daily Telegraph, is another perfect case in point. Stealing quotations and pretending you got them in an interview with the subject, copying and pasting large chunks of text from other sources, tweaking other sources (updating; providing specific local content) to make the content look like your own – they’re all there, all the patented techniques. And, of course, as is true of almost every high-profile case of plagiarism UD has covered on this blog, there are multiple examples of it in Jacob’s work. Plagiarists tend toward the prolific.

Jacob has resigned.

… KOMPROMITACJE, a first-rate (according to Mr UD, who speaks the language) blog out of Poland. Its proprietor linked to UD‘s comments about Zygmunt Bauman’s plagiarism.

Read and learn. Should you attempt the delicate feat of being at once a revered intellectual and an occasional plagiarist, and should your plagiarism be discovered by some graduate student, say this:

[W]hile admiring the pedantry of the authors of the Harvard Guide to Using Sources, and acknowledging their gallant defence of the private ownership of knowledge, I failed in those 60-odd years to spot the influence of the obedience to technical procedural rules of quotations on the quality (reliability, effectiveness and above all social importance) of scholarship: the two issues that Mr Walsh obviously confuses…

Let’s note the elements of Zygmunt Bauman’s response, one by one.

[W]hile admiring the pedantry of the authors of the Harvard Guide to Using Sources, [I laugh condescendingly at the small-mindedness of anyone who would compile a book of rules about proper citation. Such books are for little people – like the little person who has had the presumption to try to attack my eminence.] and acknowledging their gallant defence of the private ownership of knowledge, [I am a committed (way committed in my youth but that’s none of your business) man of the left who stands way above the petty and absurd defense of private property which is the entire concept ‘plagiarism.’] I failed in those 60-odd years to spot the influence of the obedience to technical procedural rules of quotations on the quality (reliability, effectiveness and above all social importance) of scholarship: the two issues that Mr Walsh obviously confuses… [Sure, I could be a citation nazi; I could lose all my social importance via lockstep ‘obedience’ to ‘rules,’ but this behavior is beneath me. Plus my attacker is ‘obviously’ an idiot.]

Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got a winner.

[Annette Schaven,] former education minister in Germany who resigned over plagiarism allegations has lost a legal bid to have her doctorate restored.

… A Duesseldorf administrative court upheld [its revocation] Thursday.

… [Angela] Merkel’s government plans to make Schavan … Germany’s next ambassador to the Vatican.

“The scandal over [Vladimir] Putin’s [plagiarized] dissertation led nowhere. But because the head of state’s deed had no repercussions whatsoever, a new trend emerged in the country: plagiarism in the writing and defense of dissertation works began on an unprecedented scale.”

Mechanically reproducing the labor of others is all the rage in the post-communist world. Romania’s prime minister, another plagiarist, just got off the hook too.

In a scientific culture that values quantity over quality charges of plagiarism should be neither surprising nor unbelievable. The obsessive drive to publish, to garner as many references and citations as possible, is extremely unhealthy. Quantity has become the enemy of quality and individual responsibility. I am always amazed when scientists and authors boast (or have others boast for them) about their CVs containing hundreds of publications. In my opinion this should be considered a badge of shame. The author is, essentially, admitting that he or she is willing to take credit for work for which he or she has had no involvement.

But big guns like Thomas Luscher are western culture’s last true heroes! Onward they ride, on the backs of their lessers, to glory!

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The Charge of the Write Brigade

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Theft
Wrote the six hundred.
“Forward, the Write Brigade!
Ghost for the big guns!” he said:
Into the valley of Theft
Wrote the six hundred.

Annette Schavan will be moving to the Vatican, in Rome, her office confirmed on Monday. The former [education] minister is a practising Catholic and used to be head of the Central Council of German Catholics.

The new post means she will represent the German government abroad, despite the University of Düsseldorf stripping her of her degree [because of plagiarism], leaving the education specialist with only a high school leaving certificate.

Chicago’s most scandalous university (see earlier posts about it by typing Chicago State University in my search engine) boasts a provost who allegedly plagiarized significant portions of her dissertation.

While he said it seems unlikely that [Angela Henderson] was “trying to pull a fast one,” the work shows that she does not have “a full and complete understanding of academic protocols and scholarly expectations.”

“That is a problem if that person is provost of a university,” [Daniel] Wueste said.

With its risible graduation rate (around 10%), its disappearing student body, its constantly shifting but always inept and crony-ridden administration, and its useless board of trustees, Chicago State boasts virtually every attribute of a truly terrible university. As its own faculty rebels, Chicago State’s paranoia grows out of control. The university’s spokesman, asked to comment about the plagiarism allegations, said “[W]e are talking about a series of claims made by some individuals who have shown they will go to great lengths to undermine any member of this administration in any way they can.”

Too right. The claims have been openly made by CSU faculty members who want legitimate people running the university. These faculty members are indeed trying to undermine the administration. It ought to be undermined.

$350 an hour for copying a clutch of Wikipedia pages: While his students go into debt and fail to get jobs, a Georgetown law professor shows everyone exactly how postmodern simulacral culture works. He gets an expert witness for the prosecution gig and lifts much of his expert report from the web. Look Ma – No hands! And I’m getting $350 an hour at the same time! Are you proud of me?

But now he’s gone and fucked up the case.

“[James] Feinerman’s pervasive plagiarism from this unreliable and error-prone source, which has been rejected by federal courts all over the country, casts serious doubt on the reliability of his entire testimony,” … said [a defense lawyer] in a court filing.

Now you know what Feinerman’s gonna say when he’s finally forced to say something. You know because for years you’ve been reading this blog on the subject of the atelier crowd, right? Feinerman’s gonna blame it on the people he hired to write his expert report for him.

Really, really look Ma no hands.