…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.

… perhaps German’s plagiarist ex-Defense Minister – now known for all eternity as Baron von Googleberg – will give it a break. Perhaps he’ll stop trying to get speaking gigs at places like Dartmouth (where an online protest petition forced him to back out) and Yale (where much of his audience got up and left as he began to speak).

To those who say this is shutting down free speech, a Dartmouth professor responds.

“No one debates his right to express his views …Academic institutions are just not the place.”

[She] said that a person who has committed such blatant acts of academic [dishonesty] does not belong in an academic setting like Dartmouth.

“You wouldn’t invite Lance Armstrong to give a talk at a sports academy,” she said.

… “It sheds a bad light on Dartmouth.”

Like most other plagiarists, Chris Spence, former Director of Education of the Toronto District School Board, made a habit of it. It wasn’t a technique; it was a way of being. Once one instance of his plagiarism was found, hundreds of others emerged.

All of his books contain plagiarism. Steven Kupferman goes through a bunch of examples.

For a reader, the irony [of Spence’s thefts] can sometimes be unbearable. At one point, Spence writes: “It takes hard, steady work to improve student achievement, yet the culture around us values convenience, short cuts, expediency, and painless learning. These and other obstacles can seem daunting, but we must not let them daunt us.”

A fine defense of never taking the easy way out.

Except that those words were first used in a 1999 speech [PDF] by a career education advocate named M. Hayes Mizell.

Pretty funny first sentence.

Another high-ranking German is being investigated for having plagiarized the thing that enabled her to call herself doctor.

Well, this one wins a prize.

As explanations for plagiarism go, it’s a winner.

And this guy needs a prize, just having lost one for plagiarizing – virtually in its entirety – a poem that had won him a contest.

Like almost all copiers, he’s done it many times.

He’s begun examining his other poems for plagiarism. Apparently you never know where the muse will send you.

I have begun to examine my published poems to make sure there are no similar mistakes. I want to be as honest as I can with the poetry community and I know it will take some time to regain their trust. Already I have discovered a 2009 poem called The Neighbour is very similar to Tim Dooley’s After Neruda and admit that a mistake has been made. I am still digging and want a fresh start.

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UPDATE: People have begun writing limericks about Ward. Here’s one, from comments on a Telegraph article:

There was a young poet called Ward,
Whose verses appeared to be fraud,
When questioned about it,
He claimed he’s been ‘careless’,
An excuse that is seriously flawed.

Not bad. Here’s one from UD, American-accent style:

There was a young poet called Ward
Who thought of his childhood and soared
To heights of great feeling…
These turned out to be stealing
Which he thought would go largely ignored.

In her years of following plagiarism stories, UD has seldom come across a plagiarist who did it just that one time. Virtually all of them, once one case comes to light, turn out to have done it for ages. You can bet on it.

So when the story about the Director of Education for the entire Toronto District School Board having plagiarized appeared a couple of days ago, UD sat tight and waited while reporters found all his other plagiarized material.

Now that they’ve done that, UD will post on the story. Let’s see… It’s always icky when a high-level academic type, an example to many students, turns out to be a serial plagiarist. The character of this guy’s plagiarism is particularly disgusting: For instance, he lifted someone else’s story about talking to her child after the Sandy Hook massacre and pretended he was talking to his child…

Will he be fired? I think yes.

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UPDATE: Off he goes.

… and found his own work. Under that person’s name.

That person is Dongqing Li, at the University of Waterloo. Li has now been found guilty of plagiarism and will suffer the hideous consequence of four months without pay. Let that be a warning to any other evil-doer!

You’re in China or India or whatever and you take an English-language manuscript, translate it word for word into your language, and publish the translation as your own work.

Or you do it in bits and pieces. One chapter of your dissertation turns out to be a verbatim theft/translation.

The dean of Wuhan University law school is accused of having published as his own a translation into Chinese of an article by Willamette University law professor Symeon C. Symeonides.

UD‘s guess is that Xiao Yongping didn’t even do the translation. Someone else did it for him. Someone else probably submitted the article for him. Xiao Yongping probably didn’t do anything.

This is why, if he really does get cornered (this is unlikely – it’s China), he’ll blame it on that person.

China is famous for its copy-cat architecture: you can find replicas of everything from the Eiffel Tower and the White House to an Austrian village across its vast land. But now they have gone one step further: recreating a building that hasn’t even been finished yet. A building designed by the Iraqi-British architect Dame Zaha Hadid for Beijing has been copied by a developer in Chongqing, south-west China, and now the two projects are racing to be completed first… [The plagiarized project] the other is being built at a much faster rate than [Hadid’s].

The German political establishment is at it again.

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UD thanks Chris.

… has been suspended without pay because of plagiarism.

That’s it. That’s all the school will say, and no journalist has anything to add so far.

This is a pity. It’s actually kind of irresponsible. Students and colleagues have a right to know how extensively he plagiarized, what in particular he plagiarized, etc. This sort of non-announcement leaves us uncertain whether Clinton Beckford has plagiarized everything he’s written, or just a few things. A lot of his publications are co-authored. Did his associates also plagiarize?