Don’t forget. When found to have plagiarized, always blame it on a graduate student.

UD‘s been following plagiarism stories for years, and this is far and away the most popular move.

… on its way.

… this year were plagiarized. Applicants were asked to write on the subject of principled leadership.

… story UD lives for.

It’s got a dab of diploma mill and a pinch of plagiarism…

The longtime CEO of a behavioral-health agency in El Paso that receives millions annually in government grants holds a doctoral degree from an institution the federal government has called a diploma mill… [Cirilo] Madrid was paid about $100,000 over 13 months for the work he performed under the contract with [a firm under investigation for corruption]. The primary product of his work is a 20-page document, which included information he says in the deposition he lifted from other documents and did not give proper credit or attribution.

… Plus it’s got a whole lot of crony capitalism.

Plagiarism being a big, destructive, and mysterious problem, one welcomes plagiarist-testimonies, first-person efforts to explain Why They Did It.

But there are some obvious problems. Did the plagiarist plagiarize her mea culpa? Even if she didn’t, can we trust anything she says?

Q.R. Markham, plagiarist-du-jour, titles his tell-all Confessions of a Plagiarist. There’s a reckless no-holds-barred feel to the word confession (Confession box. Confessional poetry. True confessions.). But the guy’s been a liar for twenty years.

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Markham makes the mistake of pathologizing what he’s done. It’s not that success and fame are so important to him that he’s willing to cheat to get there — which has always seemed to UD a pretty plausible explanation for the James Freyesque plagiarism in which Markham indulged. Like Frey, he blames it all on his addictive personality – a disorder beyond his control.

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Markham starts out not too badly:

We’ve all heard in meetings the description of the alcoholic as the egomaniac with an inferiority complex. That was — is — me in a nutshell. I wanted recognition, I wanted praise, but I had no faith in my own abilities. I had grown so used to being thought of as a wunderkind that a kind of false self emerged, one that was confident and hard-working and thrived on adulation and encouragement. It was an image that was completely at odds with the fear, self-doubt, and dishonesty that occupied my skull… My whole identity had become that of an aspiring writer. I wanted to be famous. [The writers I plagiarized were] satellites in my monomaniacal orbit… There was some kind of built in death wish to the whole process.

Yet this doesn’t describe mental disorder — just garden-variety narcissism.

Markham really begins to slip when he writes, of the people who have stood by him:

The realization that I was loved already and didn’t have to fight to earn that love was mind-boggling. It was quite the opposite of my notion that I had to struggle to show the world I was worthy.

Cutting and pasting from your favorite writers is not struggling to show your worthiness. It’s easy to plagiarize. People do it in part because it’s quick and simple. Their narcissism convinces them that they’re not subject to the same rules as everyone else. Their narcissism also makes them feel happy when they get one over on large numbers of people. Confirmation of their superiority.

Now for the pathology.

It’s easier to make moral pronouncements rather than see human flaw or human weakness. I was that way before I knew I was an alcoholic. Before I knew this was a disease, I saw myself purely as a screw-up. Morally weak. Perhaps one day plagiarism will be seen, if not as a disease, at least as something pathological.

We’re not allowed to give Markham a hard time for what he did because he didn’t do it. He was in the grip of a disease.

The problem is that plagiarism isn’t really the sign of a weak, troubled person. If you read over the many plagiarism posts on this blog, you find that it’s typically the behavior of a very ambitious person who doesn’t mind scheming and cutting corners to get what he wants. That doesn’t sound weak to me; it sounds rather strong. Lots of very high-profile powerful people (Joe Biden, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Charles Ogletree, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg) plagiarize. They’re busy and important and they figure they can get away with it. They certainly don’t have the trembling self-loathing personality Markham claims to have.

UD isn’t denying that there might be some degree of pathology in a high-risk act like plagiarism. She’s simply noting that most of the recent authors of plagiarized books and theses and speeches – at least the authors that have hit the news and been featured on this blog – seem to be successful, well-adjusted people.

… is the title of UD‘s latest Inside Higher Education post at her other campus, University Diaries II. It’s about the most recent plagiarism scandal.

Eh, plagiarism stories are a dime a dozen. UD bothers with this one – about a high-ranking Czech politician’s master’s thesis – only because what he did is even more lame/brazen than usual.

“The thesis has no footnotes… Also, there is a very limited bibliography from which the author allegedly drew …,” [an academic reviewer said]. “Of course, he only really drew from … two works … — … word for word.”

(What with everyone filming everyone these days and putting it on YouTube, UD thinks it would be kind of cool to watch one of these theses in process. Mlejnský (or whoever he’s paying to do the job) sits at a desk, opens the standard history of Charles University, scans its chapters, prints them out… Okay, not visually exciting at all. But haven’t you ever wondered how people look and what they say as they plagiarize? Is Mlejnský laughing that ah-hahahaha! scoundrel laugh as he bears down on each bundle with a big stapler?)

Our man Mlejnský points out, reasonably enough, that “My thesis advisor, who helped me prepare the work, said it was acceptable or good.” Magister M. got his MA here, and UD‘s been trying to figure out which of its MA-granting moving parts Mlejnský mlastered. She thinks it has to be Andragogy.

…for some time about a novel that they claim plagiarized the lot of them. They’ve now filed a lawsuit against the writer, her translator, and her publisher.

It’s a complicated case involving plot rather than language theft. The book at issue first came out in Chinese, and is now being marketed, translated, in Canada:

The plaintiffs claim that Zhang’s novel Gold Mountain Blues, originally published in China and released in English earlier this month, lifts certain plot and character elements from six of their works, which deal with the experience of early Chinese immigrants to Canada.

… “The remarkable success of [Gold Mountain Blues] in China is less surprising when considering that it is alleged to have copied significant elements of multiple award-winning books published over the past 25 years in Canada,” said [a] statement [from the writers], which goes on to point out that because readers in China are unlikely to have read the English-language originals, the fictional stories in Gold Mountain Blues would appear unique and new to them.

“Due to the fact that many of the Collective Works are now slated to be published in Chinese and sold in China, the plaintiffs face significant potential losses, including to their reputations, as it will appear to Chinese readers in China that the plaintiffs have copied portions of GMB when, in fact, the Collective Works were first published long before GMB.”

Irony-ridden because Hauser, who left Harvard having been found guilty of research misconduct, and who has now been accused of plagiarizing the ideas of another scholar, specializes in morality.

A philosopher at Princeton argues that in one of his books Hauser used many of the ideas in an unpublished manuscript by a younger scholar – ideas which Hauser sometimes presented as his own. Not only should Hauser “have waited [for the younger scholar] to publish his book before going ahead,” but the more senior scholar should have acknowledged his indebtedness to the younger much more generously and clearly in his book.

… a major Washington think tank has appointed the felled-by-plagiarism Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg a “distinguished statesman.” In response, the head of CSIS speaks of redemption, etc.

Ok, says McDuffee, but why so soon? The former German defense minister was only a few months ago found guilty of having plagiarized massive amounts of his PhD thesis.

UD is also struck by the suddenness of the appointment.

The ghostwritten, self-exculpating autobiography, for instance, has not yet appeared.

… and trying to worm your way out, once you’ve been accused, can also be ugly.

For an article about the rise of fascist movements, the Polish news magazine Przekrój used a cover image of Hitler’s face with a barcode instead of a mustache.

Very clever. Also very already done.

The cover artist argues it’s all a remarkable coincidence:

[T]wo artists arrived at the same conceptual solution independently … [T]he similarity is more a comment on the fact that we think and solve visual problems alike than anything more.

Unfortunately, the similarity lies in far more than the use of the mustache as a barcode.

UD‘s friend Maurice sends her the most delicious article retraction statement she’s ever encountered. It’s via the site Retraction Watch, and it appeared in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology:

Volume 48, no. 11, p. 4200–4206, 2010. We hereby retract this article. After publication of the article, we realized that we had failed to cite the article “Epidemiology of candidemia in Brazil: a nationwide sentinel surveillance of candidemiain eleven medical centers” by A. L. Colombo, M. Nucci, B. J.Park, S. A. Nouér, B. Arthington-Skaggs, D. A. da Matta, D. Warnock, and J. Morgan for the Brazilian Network Candidemia Study (J. Clin. Microbiol. 44:2816–2823, 2006). This article should have been cited as reference 9 in the References section instead of the article by A. L. Colombo, M. Nucci, R. Salomão, M. L. Branchini, R. Richtmann, A. Derossi, and S. B. Wey (Diagn. Microbiol. Infect. Dis. 34:281–286, 1999). Moreover, we realized after our article had been published that major parts of the text had been plagiarized almost verbatim from Colombo et al. (J. Clin. Microbiol. 44:2816–2823, 2006). Prof. Cisterna and Dr. Ezpeleta express their deep and sincere apologies to Prof. Colombo and his Brazilian Network Candidemia Study team, to the clinical microbiology community, and to Journal of Clinical Microbiology readers for this embarrassing situation. In addition, we state that Jesus Guinea, Julio García-Rodríguez, Juliana Esperalba, and Benito Regueiro should not have appeared in the author byline, as they contributed to the paper only by supplying isolates and clinical data for the patients and were not involved in the writing of the paper.

Retraction Watch muses on the ethics of guest authorship:

[T]he question of whose name appears on a manuscript is clearly political and jealously guarded. Perhaps that’s as it should be. But does the person who collects the data really deserve less credit than the lab head who was on sabbatical while the vast majority of the work was being conducted, or the section chief who likes to stick fingers in every pie simply to accumulate numbers on a CV?

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UD thanks Maurice.

I’m just reading through this now.

Details in a few moments.

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The story hasn’t hit the English language yet, so the following quotations are my translation from various French sources. Joseph Macé-Scaron, an important member of the French literary community, recently published a novel, a satire about the world of contemporary journalism in Paris, Ticket d’entrée (Ticket). It has just received a high-profile award.

A few days ago, a woman named Evelyne Larousserie happened to read the French novel just after having read the Bryson, and the copying “immediately jumped out at me.”

The author prefers the term intertexuality. Who wouldn’t?

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An attempt at a defense.

… says UD (in an echo of Tolstoy’s famous “happy families” remark). UD has studied plagiarists for many years on this blog, and they are astonishingly similar to one another.

Bahman Bakhtiari, a University of Utah political scientist who has just lost his job, is true to the form.

First, he is a serial plagiarist. UD cannot think of any instance of professorial or artistic plagiarism about which she’s written on this blog where the plagiarist did not turn out to have plagiarized quite a lot before his or her latest plagiarism.

Second, he plagiarizes promiscuously. Anything – a scholarly article, a grant proposal, an opinion piece, a syllabus – can be an occasion for plagiarizing.

And third, he blames his troubles on other people. Graduate students, laboratory subordinates, and editorial assistants are the plagiarist’s traditional fall guys, but anyone will serve, and Bakhtiari offers a broad array of enemies who sought to undo him.

A state Board of Education member resigned last week amid a Purdue University investigation into whether she plagiarized parts of her doctoral dissertation… [P]ortions of the doctoral dissertation turned in by [Gwendolyn Griffith] Adell to Purdue in 2004 are nearly identical to information in a 1999 dissertation submitted by a doctoral candidate at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va.

Now if they can remove her influence from the charter school she’s got hold of…