… Wave.

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.)

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.