… can be found here, at Inside Higher Education.

They’re coming after the chief rabbi of France again.

… Jean-Noel Darde, a senior lecturer at Paris 8 University, wrote on his website that he found at least one other instance of apparent plagiarism in “Caring for Others: At the foundation of Jewish law,” a book Bernheim published in 2002. Darde claims the rabbi copied excerpts from a book by Jean-Loup Charvet, “The Eloquence of Tears,” published in 2000.

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Ah, hell. Tablet got to that title before I did.

… now swirls around the Chief Rabbi of France: plagiarism, academic fraud…

Which goes to prove one of the fundamental rock solid oft-stated UD principles:

Find one instance of plagiarism for any one person, and you’ll find lots more; and, almost certainly, you’ll find that the same person has engaged in other forms of malfeasance.

Details on the plagiarism here. And now that people are scrutinizing Gilles Bernheim, other stuff has emerged.

Further investigation …showed Bernheim noted on his CV a high academic status that he may not actually hold.

His Who’s Who entry, based on information he provided, says he was awarded from Sorbonne University an “agregation de philosophie”, a prestigious but extremely difficult to obtain achievement that permits the teaching of philosophy in French institutions.

However university “agregation” lists from 1972 to 2000 have no entry for Bernheim.

The head of the association managing the lists, Blanche Lochmann, said the Grand Rabbi’s name was not in the agregation lists kept by the French education ministry either.

“It is very difficult for a public figure to try to fool people as to whether he has an agregation,” she said.

“This is the first instance that is so blatant.”

France’s chief rabbi sounds like a real prince. When plagiarism from Jean-Francois Lyotard was found in his book Forty Jewish Meditations, he tried to suggest that Lyotard had plagiarized from him.

Now that the whole damn book looks plagiarized, he blames it on his ghost writer.

Not that he acknowledged having a ghost writer. Only now does it turn out… Je suppose it doesn’t look very good for your meditations to have been written – er, collated – er, plagiarized – by someone else. Although Ghosted Meditations is a very beautiful, very suggestive title! … How would it be in French? … Fantôme Méditations… C’est beau!

I think… I think therefore I… I think therefore I hire a ghostwriter…

It’s strange how even the chiefest among us never learn. Didn’t Gilles Bernheim notice all the attention Jane Goodall got? Doris Kearns Goodwin? All those Harvard law professors? How high-profile does the hire-a-ghost-writer-because-you’re-too-grand-to-write-your-own-words-and-then-fail-to-read-the-resulting-plagiarized-manuscript routine have to be for someone like the chief rabbi of France to notice?

… the head of the system’s ethics committee has resigned due to massive plagiarism.

As with most plagiarism cases, Jane Goodall’s plagiarism, and – see this post’s quotation – sloppiness, is far worse than initially thought.

… titled Seeds of Hype:  Wisdom, Wonder and Plagiarism from the World of Plants, is now up at Inside Higher Education.

… with good puns in them.

The story is so new that only this one has so far emerged:

Jane Goodall is Sorry for Monkeying Around Proper Attribution in New Book

Which is lame.

So… Can we do better? Monkey. Chimp. Goodall. Primatologist. Must be something here.

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OK:

GOODALL APES OTHERS’ PROSE

Yeah. Still lame.

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Totally predictable lame puns on the book title starting to appear:

Jane Goodall: Seeds of Plagiarism

Yeah.

… How about:

ME: Tarzan.
YOU: Plagiarist.

Yes, don’t they have one of their own?

In a bout of surreal postmodern self-reflexivity, the German writers of a satirical tv account of plagiarist ex-Defense Minister Von Googleberg themselves plagiarized freely from earlier political satires, including Britain’s Yes, Minister.

It’s just part of our times, something in the postmodern air, that we produce so many people like Jonah Lehrer, charming, inveterate, high-level liars. Publishers have been pulping his books left and right, as plagiarism and made-up interviews are discovered in them. The latest is How We Decide, which, among other things, includes what Lehrer describes as an interview he conducted with an airline pilot. Lehrer quotes him in the book:

“For most of my career, we kind of worked on the concept that the captain was the authority on the aircraft,” says Al Haynes, the captain of Flight 232. “And we lost a few airplanes because of that. Sometimes the captain isn’t as smart as we thought he was…We had 103 years of flying experience there in the cockpit [on Flight 232], trying to get that airplane on the ground. If I hadn’t used CRM, if we had not had everybody’s input, it’s a cinch we wouldn’t have made it.”

Twenty years earlier, at a lecture, the pilot said this:

“Up until 1980, we kind of worked on the concept that the captain was THE authority on the aircraft. What he said, goes. And we lost a few airplanes because of that. Sometimes the captain isn’t as smart as we thought he was … And we had 103 years of flying experience there in the cockpit, trying to get that airplane on the ground … So if I hadn’t used CLR, if we had not let everybody put their input in, it’s a cinch we wouldn’t have made it.”

…Igor Fedyukin, a rookie official with a Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and just eight months’ experience as the [Russian] Deputy Minister of Education and Science… was part of a group of academics who in January exposed the extent of Russia’s plagiarism crisis by reviewing 25 dissertations chosen at random from the prestigious history department of Moscow Pedagogical State University. All but one were at least 50% plagiarized, with some as much as 90% copied from other sources.

You can say it was a long time ago… standards were different then… you were in a hurry… the university passed you, after all, so it’s their problem… it’s all political… you’re going to sue the school because you swear that you didn’t… you were just a little sloppy…

You can say all the things people caught plagiarizing say; but at the end of the day you’ve been done in by a plagiarism-detection technology you could never have foreseen, and you’re going to lose your job.

Annette Schavan, German Education Minister, has resigned.

… you become a laughingstock.

“With the revocation of her Ph.D. title, the life’s work of Annette Schavan has been destroyed. As German education minister, she is the leading figure for professors, postgraduates and students. She has been education minister for more than seven years — education and research are her core values, the basis of her political actions. When now, of all things, it comes to light that the education minister has cheated on her doctoral thesis, it’s as if the finance minister were caught hiding his money in Switzerland or the transportation minister were driving drunk.”

Swathes of MBA candidates are being rejected across this land of ours because they plagiarized their admissions essays. This article cites the “Managing Director” of Penn State’s b-school –

Many of the new cases are international applicants from East Asian countries, where borrowing from published sources without attribution is not considered wrong…

– and UD’s gotta ask: Huh? Did you just say that people in East Asian countries don’t think plagiarism is wrong? I mean, yes, people plagiarize like it’s going out of style in East Asian countries… But do you really think that means these people – who come from cultures of education Americans are supposed to envy – don’t understand the ethical implication of …

Are you sure you wanna call it ‘borrowing’?

Are they planning to return it? Are you saying they think it’s okay because they fully intend, after they use We shall fight on the beaches, to return it to Churchill?

… may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.

The University of Düsseldorf on Tuesday evening stripped the doctorate of German Education and Research Minister Annette Schavan for plagiarism…. In 2011… popular defence minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, was forced to resign when it was uncovered he had copied large chunks of his doctoral dissertation.

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UD thanks Chris.