… recounted here. Fun cast of characters, and makes for some interesting subsidiary reading.
The part about the sloppy professor threatening to sue the careful graduate student is a high point.
There’s much in this story that explains why a lot of people hate professors. As long as stories like this one keep happening (University Diaries has chronicled quite a few of them), Sarah Palin has a clear rhetorical field.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm has a slightly different take, though. SOS says Look at the passage he got sloppy with.
But this power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the “privilege” of a dominant class, which exercises it actively upon a passive, dominated class. It is rather exercised through and by the dominated. Indeed, it is perhaps unhelpful to think in terms of “classes” in this way, for power is not unitary and its exercise binary. Power in that sense does not exist: what exists is an infinitely complex network of “micro-powers”, of power relations that permeate every aspect of social life. For that reason, “power” cannot be overthrown and acquired once for all by the destruction of institutions and seizure of the state apparatuses. Because “power” is multiple and ubiquitous, the struggle against it must be localized. Equally, however, because it is a network and not a collection of isolated points, each localized struggle induces effects on the entire network. Struggle cannot be totalized–a single, centralized [pagebreak 139-140] hierarchized organisation setting out to seize a single, centralized, hierarchized power; but it can be serial, that is, in terms of horizontal links between one point of struggle and another.
What sort of person, reeling with nausea from prose beyond anything George Orwell savaged in Politics and the English Language, would say Now this is exactly what I want to write in my book. In fact, I think I’ll lift verbatim a bunch of his beautiful phrases.
LOCALIZED LOCALIZED TOTALIZED CENTRALIZED HIERARCHIZED CENTRALIZED HIERARCHIZED LAY IT ON ME BABY DO IT TO ME ONE MORE TIME ONE MORE IZE BEFORE IZE CRIZE MIZE IZE OUT BABY OVER YOU
*************************
Update, from the very long comment thread:
One problem in academia these days is that hardly anyone reads anyone else’s work.
… discovers that significant portions of his BA thesis have been lifted, unattributed, by two South African academics.
… Alex Park ’09… discovered parts of his Sociology senior thesis “A Tale of Two Townships: Political Opportunity and Violent and Non-Violent Local Control in South Africa” were unattributed seven times in a University of Johannesburg paper titled “Khutsong and Xenophobic Violence: Exploring the Case of the Dog That Didn’t Bark.”
The Johannesburg article is co-authored by two figures in the university’s Centre for Sociological Research. One of the authors is a Harvard graduate and a doctorate, Park and his Macalester advisor Erik Larson said, but it is unknown as to which author improperly used Park’s work.
Park learned of the incident this summer while searching for any references of his paper that might have been made…
Park’s thesis director complained to the publisher, who pulled the piece and then republished it after the authors provided citations.
There are many variants of plagiarism. The one Rodney Glassman, Democratic candidate for Senate in Arizona, seems to have committed is the young-man-in-a-hurry type, in which a very ambitious person accumulates many advanced degrees in order to produce a burnished cv. Corners get cut.
When Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe was found to have plagiarized parts of one of his books, he issued a self-aggrandizing apology (It happened because of a “well-meaning effort to write a book accessible to a lay audience.”) and suffered no consequences at Harvard. Indeed his colleagues rushed to his defense.
After Tribe got trapped the other day in a supermarket elevator for a few minutes, he announced that “They need to be publicly accountable.” No doubt he will sue.
Tribe has never been held accountable for stealing someone else’s work. He figured he could get away with it. His colleagues got angry at the journalists who discovered it.
Now, because he was inconvenienced for a few minutes, he’s pontificating about public accountability.
… seem to be happening again…
Yes, it’s the same old same old here at University Diaries, where valedictorians who plagiarize their commencement speeches are as common as … well, as common as loyal alumni who donate stolen money to their school.
These are both Ivy League stories, which is the only reason they’ve risen to the level of national news. It may turn out to be more or less amusing to see whether Yale returns the money, or whether Columbia will explain why its class valedictorian is unable to write a short speech by himself. But if you’ve been a faithful companion to me on my Blog Journey, you know these are retreads.
… columns and letters that go out under her name. At her termination hearing, she explains:
… [Terry] Kinavey …addressed the plagiarism charges against her. She said the text for the letters that she published under her name came from examples that she received in several binders full of information that she received at the New Superintendents Academy held by the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators.
She said the administrators who conducted sessions at the academy said that any of the information in the binders could be used and that she chose letters or parts of letters that she felt reflected the district’s mission and philosophy
“Some of these things they said they didn’t even know where they got them, they got them from booklets. There’s been a lot of programs where you can buy canned letters,” Mrs. Kinavey said…
A [New Zealand] gardening guru has uncovered another case of alleged plagiarism involving a book released by publishing house Penguin Books.
The accusations against The Tui NZ Fruit Garden, written by Sally Cameron, have caused Penguin to recall the book, which was released on Monday.
The book contains many sentences and passages which seem to have been taken, in some cases word for word, from various websites including Wikipedia.
Penguin came in for scrutiny just last year, after the book The Trowenna Sea by Witi Ihimaera was found to contain unacknowledged copy which appeared to come from other authors’ work.
This afternoon Penguin general manager publicity and promotions Sandra Lees said bookshops were being asked to return all copies of the book…
… [W]hy did [Stephen Ambrose] lift passages from other writers and use them without quotation marks? Did someone make fun of his lack of erudition, growing up in Whitewater, Wisconsin? Did he feel inferior to his doctor dad? A longtime smoker (who died of lung cancer in 2002), maybe Mr. Ambrose was given to tempting fate and playing with fire.
Plagiarism is suicide. It stems from envy, I suppose, or in Ambrose’s case, the rush to produce books in rapid succession, but no matter, it’s a stain that peroxide won’t lift out. All your hard work over a lifetime, blighted by the word “plagiarism” every time somebody writes about you. It’s in the third or fourth graph of your obituary, a splotch on your escutcheon…
Thoughtful, well-written, even well-titled article about a case of plagiarism at Connecticut College. A popular and high-profile senior, chosen to deliver one of the commencement addresses last year, was found to have plagiarized much of it.
His last name is St. John, and the student journalist writing the piece titles it The Revelation of St. John. Nice.
UD‘s covered quite a few commencement speech plagiarism stories. People really seem to panic when contemplating how to deliver tired truisms in a new way.
… St. John gave his speech alongside Class President Nick Downing, President Lee Higdon and the keynote speaker, philosopher Martha Nussbaum. St. John’s speech was by far the most well-received of Commencement – more relatable and persuasive than even Nussbaum’s.
“The hardest part will be to convince ourselves of the possibilities, and hang on,” he told the crowd on Tempel Green. “If you run out of hope at the end of the day, you must rise in the morning and put it on again with your shoes. Hope is the only reason we won’t give in, burn what’s left of the ship and go down with it. You have to love that so earnestly – you, who were born into the Age of Irony.
“Imagine getting caught with your optimism hanging out in today’s day and age. It feels so risky.”
… In November, according to Vice President of College Relations Patricia Carey, a member of the Administration received an anonymous note suggesting that St. John’s speech was plagiarized. Upon closer inspection, they found that extensive passages and many phrases were not St. John’s but writer Barbara Kingsolver’s, from her 2008 commencement address to Duke University. Roughly a third of his speech, including the most noteworthy lines and general theme, clearly derive from Kingsolver’s writing. Her speech became the skeleton for his.
Kingsolver’s address, entitled “How to be Hopeful,” is one of Education Portal’s 10 Famous and Noteworthy College Commencement Speeches, listed alongside speeches by Winston Churchill, Jon Stewart and Steve Jobs. It has been reprinted on various websites in its entirety.
“The hardest part will be to convince yourself of the possibilities, and hang on,” her address said. “If you run out of hope at the end of the day, to rise in the morning and put it on again with your shoes. Hope is the only reason you won’t give in, burn what’s left of the ship and go down with it. The ship of your natural life and your children’s only shot. You have to love that so earnestly – you, who were born into the Age of Irony. Imagine getting caught with your Optimism hanging out. It feels so risky.”
From the Slovenian Press Agency:
Secretary General of the government Milan M. Cvikl is facing allegations from a law expert that he copied an entire section of his book on reforms of EU legislation …
The head of the European law department at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana, Matej Accetto, said in an article published on the web that the core section of the book “Reformed Law of the European Union” is in many ways a Slovenian translation of the Wikipedia entry on the subject.
“Sentence after sentence of Cvikl’s book follows from the Wikipedia entry. Including the last sentence…which is meant as an example of what has been said,” said Acceto.
He believes that “reasonable doubt has been dispelled” that Cvikl used plagiarism in his book and added that the book should never have been published.
In response Cvikl, who is Slovenia’s candidate for a member of the European Court of Auditors, denied Acceto’s allegations…
An engineering professor at the University of Regina has been accused of plagiarizing a student’s work and trying to publish it in an academic journal in a case the university is declining to talk about.
Former student Shahryar Ali Khan, now a petroleum engineer in Calgary, laid a complaint with the university but says officials haven’t told him what, if anything, they’re going to do about it.
Khan said he learned something was wrong in the summer of 2008, when he submitted a paper for publication in the Journal of Canadian Petroleum Technology.
It was based on the research he did for his Master’s thesis at the University of Regina, a document titled “A Simulation Study of Water-Coning Using Downhole Water Sink Technology.”
Khan got a surprising response — the journal staff said his submission closely resembled another paper received six months earlier, one that bore the same title.
The earlier paper, which was never published, listed his academic supervisor — associate professor Ezeddin Shirif — and three other people as authors. …
China today:
Academic corruption is on the rise, while the quality of papers is declining. Paying for papers to be published has become common practice. A great many professors and students are not ashamed of plagiarism on the excuse that [it is] the norm. How absurd that a medical paper has been plagiarized six times by 25 people!
Prague Daily Monitor:
German economist Christian Roehl, one of the authors whose book Czech university professor Martin Svoboda allegedly copied, told Czech Radio (CRo) Wednesday that Svoboda was one of the authors of the book and no plagiarist.
Svoboda was accused of plagiarism and forced to resign from the post of dean of the Faculty of Economics and Administration of Brno’s Masaryk University on Tuesday.
Zdenek Rucka, member of the faculty’s academic senate, said Svoboda published two books as his own works in the past years but they were actually mere translations of the German work Generation Zertifikate – Die Emanzipation der Geldanlage by Roehl and Werner Heussinger.
The book by Roehl and Heussinger was issued in 2004 and Svoboda is mentioned in the acknowledgements. Svoboda published both Czech books a year later and he does not mention Roehl and Heussinger anywhere in them.
Roehl told Czech Radio that Svoboda is one of the authors of the book. The three authors had agreed that while in Germany the book would be issued under Heussinger and Roehl’s name, in the Czech Republic Svoboda would be its official author, Roehl said…
A plagiarist so vile his colleagues persisted in outing him despite their university’s attempts to shut down their complaints has now sued the people who outed him.
A 45-year-old professor at the prestigious Xi’an Jiaotong University in Northwest China’s Shaanxi province was sacked on Sunday after six of his colleagues repeatedly posted letters to the university and on the Internet exposing his academic scandals.
… “The university even questioned our motives,” said [one of the six]. “Some university leaders told us that we could share some awards with Li, if we kept quiet about the scandal. It was such a humiliation!” the 81-year-old academic was quoted by China Central Television (CCTV) as saying on Saturday.
… Using their real names, the six professors then exposed about 30 examples of Li [Liansheng] plagiarizing the work of others online, which attracted more than 60,000 comments from netizens in a single month.
… In response to the allegations, Li sued his former teachers who exposed his plagiarism on the Internet, blaming them for sabotaging his reputation, according to a July 2009 report in the Shanghai Daily.
Li’s lawyer told Xi’an Beilin district people’s court that the six senior professors used insulting phrases such as “academic thief” and “rat on campus” in their posts on a website about Li, the newspaper reported.
His counsel also demanded the six professors make a public apology and each pay compensation between 120,000 and 150,000 yuan ($17,600 to $22,000), said the report…
Madonna Constantine seems to be the model here.