If you give take-home exams, you get what you deserve, which is probably some degree of cheating. There’s no “news” in this big news story about Harvard students collaborating on a take-home exam.

Online exams, take-home exams — they’re invitations to cheat.

Professors shouldn’t give these forms of exams unless they don’t give a damn about how some students are going to write them.

… from the Yale Corporation.

No university wants a first paragraph like this in its newspaper.

Yale Trustee Fareed Zakaria ’86 was suspended by Time Magazine and CNN today after plagiarizing parts of his Aug. 20 Time column on gun control.

He’s a Yale graduate. A Yale trustee. An important voice on behalf of the very controversial Yale Singapore campus. He’s out there. And although he’s one of the most privileged people on earth, he wouldn’t break enough of a sweat to do his own writing. The image that comes to mind is Marie Antoinette.

…that has to be asked, these days, when anyone even slightly high-profile plagiarizes:

Might [Fareed] Zakaria … have fobbed off the drafting of his ill-fated Time article to an assistant or intern … and given the draft his glancing approval before letting it run under his byline in Time?

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There are, of course, varieties of plagiaristic experience (as William James might put it). UD has simplified the matter for you with her tripartite A scheme. There’s:

1. ATELIER

3. ADDICTED

Jim’s assuming Zakaria’s is the atelier method, a variety made famous by busy Harvard law professors who, to use Jim’s word, appear to fob off much of the writing of their books to student assistants. Other busy Harvard people (Doris Kearns Goodwin) also seem to have gotten to P in this way. You get there not out of ambition (see #2). On the contrary, all of your ambitions have already been realized. Rather, you get there out of grandiosity. Having more than achieved your ambitions, you decide you’re too important to do your own work. Atelier is très pomo, being all about one’s transubstantiation into a simulacrum.

2., Ambition, is when you’re still young and struggling to be grand. This is Jayson Blair, Jonah Lehrer, Johann Hari, Stephen Glass, Glenn Poshard, Baron von und zu and unter von Googleberg or whatever his name is (put these names in my search engine for details). This is all those eager young German, Romanian, Czech, etc. PhD students panting toward political careers and totally not interested in actually writing something. This is saying yes to every project and assignment that comes your way, and therefore making it impossible to do everything.

Bringing up the rear is Addicted, in which, having been caught plagiarizing, you explain that you do it because you’re a drug or alcohol addict. Addicted is a tricky one, because successful plagiarism takes a steady hand and mucho planning. It’s not the sort of thing you can do staggering down the street. James Frey, Q.R. Markham (again use the search engine), and plenty of others blame their stealing on a deep-seated insecurity which drives them to drink and then the drink clouds their judgment yada yada.

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One other thing to keep in mind about plagiarism is the More Principle. There’s always more. Once the guy (Doris alone holds the banner aloft for the girls) is found out, anyone who wants to discover more of his plagiarized work only has to look.

… is too delicate to use the word ‘plagiarism’ in his apology. It was a ‘mistake,’ a ‘lapse,’ and UD is sure he feels as terrible about it as Jonah Lehrer did about his. Like Lehrer, Fareed Zakaria had already been called out for self-plagiarism (for each duplicated speech he gets $75,000). Now he’s at Step Two. Step Three is the discovery of a pattern of plagiarism.

Zakaria has been a big defender of Yale’s controversial venture in Singapore. This might be a good time for him to take a visiting position there.

For real.

Last year the Munich tabloid Abendzeitung questioned the legitimacy of the PhDs of two of [former CSU president of Bavaria, Edmund Stoiber’s] children – daughter Veronica’s doctorate in law from the University of Konstanz, and son Dominic’s treatise on politics from the University of Innsbruck. Veronica was subsequently stripped of her PhD, according to Spiegel Magazine.

This year Spiegel reported Dominic was being investigated over allegations he’d plagiarised his thesis – a dissertation on the work of his father. Dominic has reportedly been given the red carpet treatment in his own career in the CSU.

“The book was swiftly removed from the shelves and the authors vowed to find the culprits.”

Yes, it’s a mad mad mad mad mad mad world when it comes to plagiarism. Find the culprits? “[O]ne must wonder what the role of the people listed as authors is, if they did not actually write the book themselves.”

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“Living?” said Villiers’ Axël. “Our servants will do that for us.”

Writing? say the plagiarists that this poor overworked woman tracks. Our servants will do that for us.

… Grushenko (start at 1:50), a creative writing professor at the Open University repurposes the stories of writers like Dylan Thomas.

A Romanian commenter succumbs to despair in response to an article in which the prime minister of the country is outed as a plagiarist.

Prime Minister Victor Ponta has been accused of copying large sections of his 2003 PhD thesis in law … more than half of Ponta’s 432-page, Romanian-language thesis on the functioning of the International Criminal Court consists of duplicated text. Moreover, the thesis was republished with very minor amendments as a Romanian-language book in 2004, and also forms the basis of a 2010 book on liability in international humanitarian law. A former PhD student of Ponta’s, Daniela Coman, is named as co-author of the books. Substantial sections of text in all three publications seem to be identical, or almost so, to material in monographs written in Romanian by law scholars Dumitru Diaconu and Vasile Creţu. They also feature direct Romanian translations of parts of an English-language publication by law scholar Ion Diaconu.

Co-plagiarist? Co-copyist? Co-collator? Co-author doesn’t sound right. My guess is that Ponta, who already had a high-ranking government job when he was, er, producing this thing, did almost nothing. Coman was his Appointed Plagiarist. I mean, I doubt he wanted her to plagiarize. But these things will happen when you deputize people to write your thesis for you.

Coman will take the fall, of course. I mean that’ll be Ponta’s first move – to blame it on her. She’s a woman and a subordinate and all. He can’t be everywhere. Coman the Barbarian did it. I myself am a fancy schmancy prime minister and above such things.

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A word of compassion here, if I may. It’s one thing when the German defense minister (soon to be the plagiarizing star of a major motion picture) plagiarizes his thesis; or when the president of an American university, like pitiable Glenn Poshard, does the same thing. These are people living in strong, free, and comparatively uncorrupt countries. What I mean to say is that it’s disgusting when people plagiarize entire theses under these conditions.

It’s another thing when people emerging from decades of totally corrupt academic and social life plagiarize. It’s still bad, and they should still take a fall when they are found to have done it. But even now – long after they dispatched the Ceauşescus – the Romanians live within a pretty bogus social reality, with plagiarism merely one part of the general fakery. It’s harder to resist plagiarism under these circumstances.

The Movie.

Maitre: Tragically, not well-connected enough.

“The oldest rule of thumb in journalism is quote the source and quote it accurately,” said Marvin Kalb, director of Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy.

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de Screengrabe: Happily, very well-connected!

“…[I]t comes to a certain point in [Arnaud de Borchgrave’s] life, I believe he’s 85, and he makes a mistake, you can be sure once he’s called out on it he’s not going to do it anymore,” [said Marvin Kalb].

Ironically, [Vladimir] Medinsky’s credentials as an historian were seriously questioned when it emerged early this year that his doctoral dissertation, “The Problem of Objectivity in Elucidating Russian History From the Second Half of the 15th through the 17th Centuries,” which he successfully defended in 2011, was extensively plagiarized. Medinsky has denied the charges, claiming that he simply used general phrases that happened to have been used by others, but a textual analysis posted on a Russian website for historians makes it clear that the plagiarism was substantial.

But then, of course, Medinsky’s mentor, Vladimir Putin, also lifted chunks of his doctoral thesis directly from other sources. According to Clifford Gaddy at the Brookings Institute, several pages of Putin’s dissertation, “The Strategic Planning of Regional Resources Under the Formation of Market Relations,” which he completed at the St. Petersburg Mining Institute in 1997, were copied directly from the Russian translation of a 1978 business textbook written by two American professors. (It is common practice in Russia for officials to pay researchers to ghost-write their dissertations, so Putin and Medinsky might not have been aware of the plagiarism. But this of course puts them in even worse light.)

… didn’t plagiarize after all (background here). Alex Pareene, in Salon, explains:

The Unification Church and his think tank pay him money for little weekly columns that no one will ever read; he gets to pretend he is still an important journalist, and they get to be associated with a respected old man who has very powerful friends. [Arnaud] De Borchgrave is — understandably — confused as to why anyone would accuse him of plagiarism. He’s an award-winning D.C. fixture with a long and storied career, not some undergrad journalism major! Plagiarism is what unimportant people do. Friends of Marvin Kalb make minor attribution errors.

It’s exactly Roy Cohn’s explanation, in Angels in America, of why he’s not gay.

Roy Cohn: Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words. On labels. “Gay”, “homosexual”, “lesbian”; you think they tell you who a person sleeps with, but they don’t tell you that. Like all labels, they refer to one thing and one thing only: Where does a person so identified fit in the food chain? In the pecking order. Not ideology or sexual taste, but something much simpler — clout. Who owes me favors. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call. To someone who doesn’t understand this, homosexual is what I am because I sleep with men, but this is wrong. Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who, in 15 years of trying, can’t get a pissant anti-discrimination bill through City Council. They are men who know nobody, and who nobody knows. Now, Henry, does that sound like me?
Henry: No.
Roy Cohn: No. I have clout. Lots. I pick up that phone, dial 15 numbers, and guess who’s on the other end of the line? In under five minutes, Henry.
Henry: The President.
Roy Cohn: Better — his wife.
Henry: I’m impressed.
Roy Cohn: I don’t want you to be impressed, Henry — I want you to understand. This is not sophistry, and this is not hypocrisy. This is reality. I have sex with men; but, unlike nearly every other man of which this is true, I bring the guy I’m screwing to Washington, and President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand. Because what I am is defined entirely by who I am. Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man who fucks around with guys.

It’s 5:15 AM, and just this moment the morning bird chorus started up. Catbirds, if mine ears don’t deceive me.

Strange plagiarism story developing here in UD‘s hometown, Washington, DC, involving one Arnaud de Borchgrave, a curious local figure, a sort of journalist, with the brains and charm of Donald Trump. Having grown up with this figure of fun, and having wondered all along why no one else seemed to notice his bogosity, UD isn’t surprised to find him at the center of a big text-theft scandal.

Plagiarists, serial plagiarists, are the ultimate empty suits, the nowhere men of the cosmos. Most plagiarize out of fear of their own incompetence; a select few (Germany’s von Googleberg is a good recent example) plagiarize because they’re demigods, too important to earn their by-lines and degrees in the way of mortals.

In this elite company lies de Borchgrave, who, like his religious counterpart, Richard Land, barks out his bombast without bothering to have written it.

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Update: de Borchgrave responds to multiple side-by-side examples with adorable insouciance:

If I dropped a few quote marks inadvertently, mea culpa. Everyone makes mistakes. I will make certain the appropriate quotation marks will be there in the future.