Glenn Poshard got away with it.

But Yoo Kwang-chan, head of Korea’s Jeonju National University of Education, has gotten caught plagiarizing almost all of a textbook that appeared under his name. The newspaper JoongAng Ilbo reviewed the text and found, for instance, that the entire first chapter, word for word, was taken from another book.

Yoo, by the way, makes his students buy the book.

A new entry for the revised Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Background here.

The newly appointed director of the University of South Australia’s Hawke Research Institute has resigned following the revelation of his role in a plagiarism scandal in South Africa.

Appointed three months ago. Exposed as a veteran plagiarist five days ago. Immediately fired. (They haven’t had time to change the website.)

But why didn’t the Hawke Research Institute know about Abebe Zegeye’s long history of plagiarism? Two years ago, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Stuart Hall, and David Theo Goldberg wrote a letter to Zegeye’s last place of employment, South Africa’s Wits Institute, complaining that he’d been plagiarizing their work, and the work of others, for years. Apparently these three (or perhaps others) had “warned [Zegeye] explicitly in the past of its unacceptability,” but he kept at it.

Wits investigated, found him guilty, and canned him.

Zegeye, like scads of miscreants before him, blamed it — all of it — on a research assistant.

Then he packed up and took an excellent job as director at Hawke.

How was he able to do this?

Nobody told Hawke about the man they had hired to direct their institute. Only because the Mail and Guardian newspaper got hold of the investigative report on Zegeye and wrote about it did Australia learn about his past.

Universities have to release information about faculty plagiarists. Otherwise, like Zegeye, they’ll keep bouncing around.

“I cannot be accused of cogently borrowing any intellectual capital from other writers, although, as admitted, their text was sometimes reproduced in my works,” [Zegeye’s] statement said.

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Update: They’ve now changed the webpage.

With the second case of apparent plagiarism on the part of a German politician noted for sticking DR. in front of all mentions of her name, we have to ask whether this behavior is general over there. When will one of the DR.s blurt out, in a moment of frustration, Everyone does it ?

Brad DeLong first quotes Benjamin Barber calling plagiarism charges against Saif Gaddafi “garbage.” Then he quotes a bunch of plagiarized passages.

Everyone knows that important busy people who want to refer to themselves as Doctor have a tendency to plagiarize or just outright buy their theses. So what? Speeches and op-eds are ghostwritten; articles get penned by graduate assistants or subordinates in the lab or pharma-hired consultants. BFD. Everybody’s doin’ it, doin’ it, doin’ it…

But people are remarkably unforgiving about it. You’d think by this time, all of us postmodernized to within an inch of our lives, we’d find the revelation of yet another totally simulacral political leader a real shrug.

Apparently not.

… a professor of history at Kansas State, looks into Saif Gaddafi’s London School of Economics PhD:

I spent an hour on google and found big chunks of plagiarized material, evidently not caught by the academics whom Saif thanks in his dissertation: Nancy Cartwright, David Held, Alex Voorhoeve, and Joseph Nye.

Go to his group website, The Russian Front, for details.

In parliament, Mr. zu Guttenberg said his “clearly faulty” dissertation sent a “poor signal” to academia, but didn’t impair his ability to serve as defense minister.

[The German Defense Minister] told a swarm of reporters enquiring about the plagiarism allegations swirling around him: “I will temporarily – I repeat temporarily – give up my doctoral title.”

[Baron Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg] will do so, he said, while the university that gave him the doctorate completes its investigation into whether it really was all his own work.

Inherit one title, inherit another.

… on whether he plagiarized much of his University of Bayreuth dissertation.

Ja, the German defense minister is accused of “brazen plagiarism.”

“The duplication appears throughout the work and in all its substantive parts,” [Andreas Fischer-Lescano] said.

See for yourself.

Je ne peux pas l’aider. Je LOVE plagiarism stories.

No, not all plagiarism stories. Your garden variety undergrad grab is a yawn.

BUT.

Give me certains éléments de l’intrigue… give me une histoire particulière … give me things that permettant d’opposer les termes de « hétérodiégétique » et « homodiégétique » (ou « autodiégétique » si tel est le cas); pour le second critère, il s’agit du niveau narratif du narrateur. Cette dernière distinction met en exergue les termes de « extradiégétique » et « intradiégétique » … and of course I am in heaven.

The case of Prof. Dr. Rene Lafreniere of the University of Calgary has everything UD loves in a plagiarism story:

The plagiarized article lectures us about ethics. The plagiarism is committed by heap big chief researcher who refuses to say anything about the matter and goes entirely unpunished. The plagiarism is discovered by an anonymous unimportant “sharp-eyed student,” who goes and tells the plagiarized author, who complains to the journal, which retracts the thing.

But what UD also loves about this species of plagiarism story is that no one is talking. The ethics report had four authors, with Lafreniere singled out as the plagiarist. But the journal editors, the publisher, the university, the authors – nobody’s saying a thing. Let’s all step lightly over this stinking turd and go back to the lab.

Well, one guy – a philosopher at the University of Illinois – has been willing to eke out a statement. He doesn’t take a stand on the matter pro or con, but he does narrate what I just narrated. I mean the thing about the sharp-eyed student.

Why does he say only this? Why doesn’t he condemn the man who stuck his toes into the turd? Why don’t the other two authors do this? Wouldn’t you be pissed off? Eager to dissociate yourself from Dr. Tartuffe?

The same year [as the plagiarism], the University of Calgary’s medical school feted Lafreniere, creating the “Rene Lafreniere Lectureship” to recognize his “13 years of outstanding leadership as department head.”

Okay fine yes it’s embarrassing. The man is busy and does what tons of busy people asked to put their names on things do – he finds someone else to do the work for him, and then he affixes his precious signature. I mean, probably there are layers and layers between Lafreniere and his plagiarism. He’s got a staff of assistants and if he’s really pushed to the wall he’ll blame them. He can’t be responsible for the plagiarism of the people he hires to do his writing for him!

The fine new blog, Retraction Watch, will no doubt be keeping an eye on this one. I’ve added its name to my Bookmarks.

This is a tricky sort of plagiarism charge.

The allegation [is] that [the novel] Gold Mountain Blues, written in Chinese [and in the process of being translated into English and published in Canada], plagiarizes the works of well-known Chinese Canadian authors who write in English, including Denise Chong, Wayson Choy, Sky Lee and Paul Yee.

… The key blogger leading the attacks, known as “Changjiang,” and identified on his site as Robert Luo, alleges that Zhang [Ling] has been playing the margins: taking advantage of the fact that Canadian Chinese writers cannot read Chinese, and Chinese readers and critics do not understand English.

The plagiarism obviously can’t involve verbatim lifting.

[The] website accuses Zhang of borrowing the key character of [Denise] Chong’s book — her grandmother May-ying, the hard-drinking, smoking, gambling “concubine” of the title — then fashioning it into a character in Gold Mountain Blues. … [Another book] opens with a powerful narrative of a male Chinese immigrant who finds himself in peril in the western Canadian wilds of the 19th Century, is rescued and brought back to a native camp, falls in love with a native woman, lives with her, and then abandons her to marry a Chinese wife. Later, he learns that his abandoned lover bore him a son. A very similar set of circumstances occurs to a Chinese man in Gold Mountain Blues.

Penguin has held up publication until the controversy is resolved.

… writing.

An award-winning book of cultural theory has its award withdrawn because of plagiarism.

The copied passages came from a book called Cultural Criticism: A Look at Arab Cultural Patterns by the Saudi Arabian author Dr Abdullah al Ghathami, himself one of the 2010 judging panel.

… has to resign when it’s discovered that he plagiarized portions of his doctoral dissertation. To add to the fun, he’s a specialist in crime, and regularly pontificates to the nation (Australia) on morality.

But the best part of all is his response to the behavior that cost him his job.

He’s thinks one of his colleagues discovered and reported the plagiarism. He’s not sure which colleague. “[B]ut I have my suspicions.”

And when I find that miscreant, I’ll be sure to report him to the authorities…