But Forbes should be much more ashamed for having published the mindless POS the principal plagiarized.

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Scathing Online Schoolmarm is impressed with one wrinkle here. The plagiarizing principal personalized the stolen material:

[The original author] wrote in the Forbes column about Lori Garver’s rise to deputy administrator of NASA,: “Like so many other successful people, Lori has always been driven more by what inspires her than what scares her. She’s always been willing to challenge assumptions, and push the boundaries of possibility.”

[The plagiarist] switched the focus to herself, writing: “Like so many others, I have always been driven more by what inspires me than what scares me. I have always been willing to challenge assumptions and push the boundaries of possibility.”

SOS suggests that for her next plagiarism (as you know if you read this blog, plagiarists almost never stop at one), the principal aim higher. Make Edward Kennedy’s famous eulogy for Robert Kennedy your own!

I saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

Aim even higher!

I am a woman, take me for all in all. You shall not look upon my like again.

Higher!!

For I the Lord thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear not; I will help thee.

If you’re the plagiarism-positive German university establishment, the last thing you want is a bunch of bloggers investigating and outing biggies like education and defense ministers who plagiarized their dissertations. So it should come as no surprise that the Rectors Conference has come out with the helpful suggestion that these bloggers shut the fuck up.

[T]he Rectors’ Conference – Hochschulrektorenkonferenz, or HRK – seeks to restrict the activities of internet forums like Guttenplag or Vroniplag, which played a key role in developments.

Yes, you go ahead and try to do that. Already 1300-plus German and other academics have petitioned against you. (Ol’ UD is of course among them.)

Here’s the problem, as I see it, for Loose Lips Sink Plagiarists Hippler: He and his organization have no good options. Here are their options.

Option One: Become the butt of free speech jokes.

Option Two: Add publicity and outrage to the campaign to bring legitimacy to German academia, thereby increasing the number of people investigating plagiarism.

Option Three: Remind people of the hilarious details of the von Googleberg case — and of others — thus refreshing and deepening the ridicule your educational institutions have already suffered.

Since they’ve already showed their hand as a secretive, plagiarism-enabling guild, it’s too late for the good rectors to do what they ought to have done. Probably some day, after they’ve suffered enough contempt, they will do it:

Try reading the dissertations your students submit to you. Hell, try working with them as they write their dissertations.

I know how busy and important you are… How unbelievably degrading such scutwork is… I mean, where would you start? For decades you’ve sat on your ass and passed one unseen thesis after another. But a journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.

Ulrich Ulrich Lichtenthaler
Is a most peculiar scholar:
Fucks with data for a dollar
Ulrich Ulrich Lichtenthaler.

Alas poor Ulrich’s just been collared.
Mass retraction – ach, the squalor.
Now his output looks much smaller.
Ulrich Ulrich Lichtenthaler.

… and it’s been clear for years to UD that she needs – like some highlight/copy/paste Draculetta – regular infusions of the stuff.

After following academic and artistic plagiarism over the course of a decade, UD knows that a new high-profile p-story pops up on average every twelve days. But sometimes – lately – things dry up. No politician has been found to have lifted her dissertation from Wikipedia. No fancy schmancy pundit has been found to have plagiarized his columns. No law professor has been found to have plagiarized his books. No wunderkind has been found to have copied his neuroscience best sellers. Etc.

BIG etc. You can just count on plagiarism.

So maybe it’s spring fever… a certain lassitude among the paste-chasers as the summer begins… But I could swear it’s been at least a month since a really solid case of word theft.

Keep in mind that we’re not counting, here, the high school principal (heartfelt commencement speech) or the man of God (sermons). Although they always bring a sparkle to UD‘s eyes, these cases are too measly to be worth noticing.

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Award-winning poets who have stolen their intensely personal ruminations on suffering and passion – that’s good.

The poetry community is now asking itself just how widespread plagiarism is.

Yes, and that’s because there’s now a second case within just a few months of a poet having transferred his palpitations directly from the palpitations of others.

Many others. As you know if you follow this blog, UD has seen confirmed again and again the reality that almost all plagiarists plagiarize promiscuously and obsessively. Whenever, wherever, whoever. Once people start looking in a particular plagiarist’s direction, they almost always find a solid wall of stolen words.

This is heartening to plagiarism-buffs like UD, since extensive theft extends each story. But eventually the thrill is gone. You can only enjoy the revelation that a particular person is a sneaky unscrupulous creep for so long. You begin to seek fresh blood.

So here is David R. Morgan, whose “Monkey Stops Whistling” is his raw sardonic hard-bitten Dylan Thomasesque lament about the

dark glass we look through darkly when we
want to see the ghosts of our former selves

dear God the booze and how it’s undone me … dear… uh… oh, dear Colin Morton. That’s Colin Morton’s scotch-soaked mulling…

Okay so the rule is: Every tormented poet gets to be an alcoholic. Alcoholism is community property. But every poet has to render his drunken despair in his own words.

After doing absolutely everything he could to hold onto his job – lying, blaming his plagiarism on his ghost writer, lying low and hoping it would blow over, smearing a dead man, pompously claiming that quitting would be “desertion” – France’s chief rabbi Gilles Bernheim has been pushed out.

… 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.

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

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.”