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…

… 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

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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.

… plagiarize.

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.”