… 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?
Imagine a male professor up for tenure at Amherst who was found to have been, from his dissertation on, a plagiarist. Would the article about it in the campus newspaper write sympathetically of his “struggles and insecurities with writing”? The commenter I quote in the title of this post is struck by the same thing that strikes UD: We’re supposed to soften our response to this person – a person about to be promoted to Amherst’s senior faculty – because “writing is hard for some of us.”
Women won’t get far in the face of this sort of sexism.
Such a wonderful country!
But with a bit of a plagiarism problem. Starting with the prime minister.
Now a group of Romanian scientists is boycotting a big fancy conference at the prime minister’s residence because it’s kind of lurid to go to a big fancy conference for researchers hosted by a plagiarist.
On 9 September, Cristian Dogaru, a Romanian health and social scientist studying pediatric respiratory epidemiology at the University of Bern’s Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine, launched an online petition “urging researchers to boycott the conference and thus send a message that the scientific community does not endorse (and has zero tolerance for) academic fraud,” he explains in an e-mail to ScienceInsider. The petition has garnered more than 180 signatures at this point. Dogaru adds that it’s “extremely offending” that the upcoming conference is chaired by the prime minister given the conclusions about his thesis from several scientific committees.
Does anyone actually buy this bullshit anymore? A high-profile Canadian scientist, recipient of much government research largesse, claims
1. he didn’t know an article on which he was the senior writer was plagiarized; and that
2. an underling of his, a woman, did all the bad stuff; but that
3. as a fine upstanding human being he’ll take the fall for it because he
4. should have known what was in the article.
How noble! Far from imposing any punishment on this great and good man, cruelly betrayed by his sneaky subordinate, who earned second-author status on the article because she was responsible for all the writing in it and he did jackshit, let us increase government support for his research!
… the universal connection between overexertion and plagiarism.
The prolific writer is also a stand-up comedian and was a Liberal Party candidate for Marrickville in the 2008 NSW local council elections.
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(My original post title said Canada’s. UD thanks Jeremy for correcting her teeny geographical error.)