… but – as we learned from that ol’ rascal Rand Paul – some opt for snarling full-frontal attack on the unmaskers. It’s not, in the long run, a winning strategy, as the latest snarler will soon learn.

She’s Sulura Jackson, principal of Chapel Hill High School, and if reports are correct she’s been plagiarizing as long as the senator. And just like Paul, she’s royally pissed that anyone has the unmitigated gall to call her on it.

Jackson acknowledged she will use form letters, books and articles to inform her writings, but she denied any wrongdoing.

“I’m not under the impression that I can’t use that,” Jackson said. “This is not anything that I’m selling. This is not anything that I’m using for personal gain.”

Jackson indicated she was surprised some teachers are angry, adding that had they questioned her, she would have cited her sources.

“I’ve never intentionally said these are my words, these are my thoughts,” she said. “I’m getting these thoughts from other places. I don’t pull them out of thin air. I’m always reading.”

But the documents, which are signed by Jackson, seem to contradict that statement.

…Jackson [further] said it’s unfair to [compare her plagiarism to her students’ plagiarizing]. “It’s like apples and oranges,” she said. “I don’t think you can put those two together because students are submitting work for a grade. I’m not submitting it for a grade. I’m not submitting it for any kind of compensation.”

That last bit is … UD doesn’t know what to call it. It goes beyond the president of Kean University explaining that the conduct code for students certainly doesn’t apply to him. The bit about compensation is … I dunno. It’s only 8:30 AM and … you know… you need to draw together some energies to deal with these things… She’s not being paid for her writing … But of course this is a crucial part of her job for which she’s compensated… Giving speeches and releasing statements and all… Whereas … Did she say students are getting compensation for their writing…?

For an award-winning principal this woman is both confused and – like the senator – queenly. Rand Paul and Sulura Jackson have perfected off with their heads arrogance. UD doubts it will carry either of them through.

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UPDATE: The school board will discuss a personnel matter in their meeting this evening. It is appalling but not surprising that leaders of the school system have defended this woman. UD has seen this haughty contempt for students and their parents in several of this country’s public school systems.

Some universities are such class acts that UD has trouble covering them. Take the massively inappropriately named Kean University.

Kean’s on probation because… well… because everything, including having a president who apparently lied on his cv and blamed the lies on his staff. My headline is taken from an article about the board of trustees having enthusiastically backed the president in his time of trial. What a relief for him to know that only Kean students are expected to act with integrity.

Oh, plus the university’s associate vice president for academic affairs is a plagiarist. A top-flight plagiarist, though. When stealing large chunks of text, she’s careful to replace the name of the school in the original text with the name Kean University.

Source document:

“It is vitally important to Parkland that meaningful research focus on the factors which influence student decisions, to ascertain which ones have a positive influence on student retention behavior. In addition, a key to help retaining students is the ability of Parkland to identify ‘at-risk’ students early enough to permit intervention strategies to work.”

VP Academic Affairs document:

“It is vitally important to Kean that meaningful research focus on the factors which influence student decisions, to ascertain which ones have a positive influence on student retention behavior. In addition, a key to helping to retain students is the ability of Kean to identify ‘at-risk’ students early enough to permit intervention strategies to work.”

She even found an obscure school (top-flight plagiarists know to look for obscure sources for their material) to steal from!

Despite all her hard work, the woman has been asked to resign. I’m sure the accreditation people won’t notice this latest awkwardness.

See, here’s the thing. Even though (wow – fun red helicopter landing at the White House as I write) Senator Paul assures us plagiarism is no biggie and the whole thing’s been cooked up by haters, newspapers really don’t appreciate being used as data dumps by people too busy and important to bother actually writing anything for them.

If you ask UD, the whole rich famous important person as plagiarist thing (as opposed to desperate pathetic high school superintendents and the like) is really about the culture of entitlement – a culture a lot of people (see another reference to helicopters, just below this post) really really don’t like. Monsieur Tea Party looks – post-plagiarism – like exactly what he is, which is just about as far from a populist as you can get. He looks like a high-handed give-a-shit SOB who breaks rules and blows things off because he can. Because he’s got a squad of staffers doing everything for him. Rand Paul’s initial response to the plagiarism revelation was echt entitled person. UD believes she can put it into two words. It is: Fuck You.

This response has made things worse for Rand Paul, so he’s gone to Entitled Option Two: He’s blamed it all on said squad and fired everybody in sight. Let’s see how that works out for him. Meanwhile, the Washington Times rightly rids itself of a parasite.

An entire section of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s 2013 book Government Bullies was copied wholesale from a 2003 case study by the Heritage Foundation, BuzzFeed has learned. The copied section, 1,318 words, is by far the most significant instance reported so far of Paul borrowing language from other published material.

… The copied text relates to the 2003 case of David McNab, a Honduran businessman who, along with three American businesspeople, was convicted of multiple felony counts related to the illegal harvest and importation of Caribbean spiny lobster tails in violation of the 1900 Lacey Act.

But it’s all so trivial.

If things get any hotter for Paul on the plagiarism front, UD recommends his team dig up the spokesperson for Newt Gingrich during his presidential campaign. That guy really knew how to defend his guy.

… frightens us with a robotic future.

The Rand Paul Plagiarized Speech Song

That speech:
Isn’t it Rand? Isn’t it great?
Isn’t it swell? Isn’t it fun?
Isn’t it… plagiarized…

Isn’t it, Rand? Isn’t it great?
Isn’t it swell? Isn’t it fun?
Nowadays…

The New York Times, May 2008:

Last September, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel courageously broke ranks with her predecessors and met with the Dalai Lama. China predictably objected – soon joined by Merkel’s own vice chancellor and foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who accused her of trying to “showcase” human rights.

Now Steinmeier has one-upped himself, refusing to meet with the Dalai Lama while the Tibetan spiritual leader was on a five-day visit to Germany …

France 24, September 2013:

Germany’s centre-left parliamentary opposition leader Frank-Walter Steinmeier denied allegations Sunday that he plagiarised parts of his PhD thesis after similar charges have claimed several political scalps in recent years. … [E]conomics professor Uwe Kamenz of Muenster in North Rhine-Westphalia had said he found “extensive” evidence of plagiarism in Steinmeier’s 1991 law thesis.

“There’s nothing in there, quite honestly, that’s uniquely mine. I believe what the Bible says: There’s nothing new under the sun.”

People don’t seem very happy to find out they’ve been plagiarized. They don’t seem very flattered. They don’t seem very receptive to their plagiarists telling them it was all an act of love.

Matthew Welton, for instance – a British poet who teaches at the University of Nottingham – seems to have found it downright sneaky that serial plagiarist C.J. Allen altered Welton’s poems just enough to avoid easy detection. Indeed only Welton himself, on buying a collection of Allen’s poems after one of Allen’s poetry readings, recognized the extensive lifting.

This long article parses the difference between an homage to/being inspired by/doing a free translation of a cited work/etc. and being a lazy motherfucker who takes someone else’s artwork and publishes it as one’s own. The author quotes a friend:

‘There’s a world of difference between Prokofiev formally basing the 2nd movement of his 2nd symphony on the 2nd movement of Beethoven’s Op.111, and Graham Nunn flattening out his notebook alongside a book by Helen Dunmore’.

Yes – it’s not really subtle, is it?

And speaking of subtle: UD has zero interest in the psychological excuses offered by plagiarists when they’ve been found out and when their first line of defense (homage, pastiche, that shit) fails. They’ve always been insecure; when their mother died it really did a number on them…

When the psycho line also fails to generate sympathy, plagiarists move to Position Three, drug and alcohol abuse. I did it because I’m a desperate mess. How did I manage to conduct a grueling book tour, run university seminars, give poetry readings, and produce a new plagiarized book while so debilitated by drugs? I don’t know, but…

(Position Four)…

… I’m happy I’ve been found out! I plagiarized so blatantly in order to be found out! I craved being brought low enough, being hollowed out thoroughly enough, to find my way back to my lost faith. I have recently joined a Catholic parish, spent hours in a confessional box, and experienced forgiveness. I will share my rebirth in my next book.

Oh, by the applicant. The writing sample is supposed to be written by the applicant.…

The school superintendent who plagiarizes, word for word, his heartfelt personal welcome to students at the beginning of the school year is never embarrassed. He explains that he happened to have found on the web a heartfelt personal welcome to students at the beginning of the school year that said exactly what he wanted to say, so he used that. If you insist he contact the original author, he’ll do that, but he assures you that the guy’s gonna be flattered; what he has done, after all, is an homage.

The poet who plagiarizes the work of better poets who say exactly what he wants to say but say it ever so much better so why not take their words is similarly shocked when people act as if he’s some sort of villain. It’s a postmodern pastiche, for fuck’s sake, an appropriation art comment on the death of originality in our time. If you’ve got a corncob up your ass and can’t get with the program it’s not his fault.

Violent spectacle encourages manliness, and manliness ensures a nation’s capacity to defend itself and its values in organized warfare. Max Boot, defending football in the pages of the Wall Street Journal (against those who want to shut it down or make it less violent so that players avoid brain injury), clarifies the nationally sacrificial function of the players:

[T]hough football can be a violent sport, those who watch it are, on the whole, peaceable and tolerant — especially as compared with foreign fans of soccer (“football” to the rest of the world), who make up for the relative lack of violence on the field with melees in the stands.

It’s an either/or: You either sublimate man’s intrinsic violent anarchism by allowing him regular staged access to it; or you end up with compensatory chaos. (A milder version of this argument, by Walter Russell Mead, defends university football’s firing up of male atavism as crucial to the continued survival of universities.)

It’s a delicate balance; you want a culture that makes men capable of violence; you want that capacity stoked by violent sport; but you want always to be able to control the violence. That’s why Boot stresses the comaraderie, teamwork, and discipline, at the core of football, even as he anxiously echoes Teddy Roosevelt’s worry that if you outlaw football you’ll turn out “mollycoddles instead of vigorous men.”

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What sort of person would be a mollycoddle?

Well, let’s say some guy impugns your honor. If you’re a mollycoddle, you say I’m gonna tell Mom! You say I’m gonna tell my lawyer! If you’re a vigorous man, you challenge the guy to a duel. Or if you want to be civilized and sublimate that violence, you challenge him to go public with his impugning, to go one-on-one with you in a public forum, where he can repeat his charges and you can defend yourself.

But all that football watching hasn’t made Boot himself particularly vigorous. Just as he uses a research assistant to do the grunt work on his columns, he plans to use a lawyer to do his fighting against a fellow writer who claims Boot plagiarized him:

“I will defend my hard-earned reputation with legal action if necessary if you decide to print these scurrilous and unsubstantiated allegations.”

Take that, you naughty, naughty boy!

… revisited.

Taiwan’s defense minister copies him.

Wow – now the president of the Bundestag is accused of plagiarism. UD‘s German friend Chris explains to her that in Germany (in Europe in general I guess) having a PhD is considered very important, very much the done thing, for politicians. (I explain back to Chris that here in the States it’s the opposite. We tend to like our leaders unlettered. Neither Barack Obama nor Elizabeth Warren has been able to escape the professor slam. Sarah Palin put the word professor in front of Obama’s name damn near every time she used it. In his debates with Warren, Scott Brown compulsively called Warren professor.) So perhaps in your haste to get the thing, you copy some or all of it, as Norbert Lammert seems to have done at the University of Bochum.