One of the writers whose work Gerald Posner plagiarized showed up in the audience of a talk Posner recently gave at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden.

The plagiaree is not happy about having been plagiarized, and told Posner about it, as you can see in this film clip of the event.

If everyone Posner has plagiarized had showed up, they’d have had to turn away the rest of the audience. But it was apparently just this guy. And the guy’s wife:

[A]fter the reading, [the plagiaree’s wife] asked Posner[:] “Are we still going out for a drink to discuss this?” Posner exploded. His plastic face turned red: “Yeah, I’m a thieving cocksucker.” “Yes, you are a thieving cocksucker,” [she] replied. And then an elderly lady came running towards them: “This is a botanical garden. It’s a peaceful place. Can you please take it some place else?”

Martin Stone, professor of philosophy, is one of the most brazen plagiarists UD‘s covered on this blog.

But this is his only distinction. Otherwise, his plagiarism is much like the other cases of academic plagiarism UD has written about: Because a professor rather than a student did it, his university issued no punishment, but on the contrary allowed him to leave the institution quietly by lying about having fallen ill; and the particular plagiarized material was only one of many acts of plagiarism on his part.

I suppose another small distinction in the Stone case involves his having been a philosopher of religion who pontificated about morality.

The Leuven University student newspaper is not happy about this man, his plagiarism, and the university’s response:

… [The] Institute and the K.U.Leuven together intentionally kept silent relevant information on the functioning of a highly-esteemed member of the academic staff. Though protecting the professor and the reputation of the Institute can be seen as an act of nobility, it is unfair towards the students – as they have the right to know what is going on. Apart from that, it becomes clear once more that the university uses different standards when it comes down to deciding on cases of sentencing plagiarism committed by either students or professors. Also ex-students who were supervised by professor Stone and especially the ones who earned their PhD under his guidance may have been treated unjustly by covering up info of this matter and size.

The member of the Finnish parliament whose work Stone stole found that “tens of pages were identical or nearly identical [to my thesis], although my name was not mentioned at all.”

That was just one of Stone’s publications plagiarized from the work of this man. Stone mined the parliamentarian’s work very extensively. “[N]ot only one, but four articles published by Stone were [in] large part …plain copies of my dissertation.”

“Stone has plagiarized several other researchers, too.”

The Wall Street Journal is annoyed that one of its reporters had his prose stolen by a New York Times reporter.

And so quickly!

Mr Efrati’s Wall Street Journal story, titled “Madoff Sons, Brother, Niece, Being Sued by Trustees for Victims,” was published on Dow Jones Newswires at 12:25 pm on Friday, February 5, and was published on WSJ.com shortly thereafter. At 2:31 pm Mr Kouwe published a related, in fact, a remarkably related story…

Side by side examples follow.

The NYT acknowledges the lifting here.

Remember her? Harvard undergrad who published a chick-lit novel at 19?

UD, who’s been around forever, blogged about her back in 2006.

Everyone got all excited about this woman until much of her novel turned out to have been plagiarized.

Now 17-year-old Helena Hegemann also turns out to have cut and pasted her amazing, scandalous, about-to-be-prize-winning novel.

No one ever seems surprised by these slews of Francoise Sagans. No one thinks it odd that people just learning to insert tampons can pen tomes of astounding maturity and darkness.

Just like BHL (Europe’s hoax-quotient is certainly high lately), Hegemann’s brazening it out, lecturing us on the difference between originality and authenticity, etc., etc.

She’ll be fine. Unlike Gerald Posner, she doesn’t work for a magazine that can fire her. She’s an independent agent. Plus, the whole point of Hegemann is what a bad girl she is. Plagiarism can only help.

… as the Captain and Tenille sing. Once is never enough… whoaaa…

Same thing when it comes to plagiarism, as you know if you read University Diaries, because she never stops telling you. Plagiarized articles are like roaches. Find one, and ten others will come scurrying out of the plagiarist’s past.

So it ever was, so it shall be … and so it is, Dear Reader, with Gerald Posner.

Last week, a reader tipped me to an instance of potential plagiarism by Gerald Posner in the Daily Beast, for which Posner is chief investigative reporter. After I called the plagiarism to the attention of Daily Beast Executive Editor Edward Felsenthal, the site deleted five pilfered sentences and added an editor’s note to explain the deletions and to apologize.

… But this isn’t the only example of Posner pinching copy without attribution. Slate reader Gregory Gelembuik and I have uncovered additional examples of plagiarism by Posner in the Daily Beast from the Texas Lawyer, a Miami Herald blog, a Miami Herald editorial, a Miami Herald article, and a health care journalism blog…

Jack Shafer at Slate has done what Jolisa Gracewood did with Witi Ihimaera’s work — he has simply Googled.

Posner has been suspended.

From Stuff New Zealand:

A second plagiarism row has engulfed book publishers [New Zealand] Penguin, with allegations a book about 19th century Maori land wars was withdrawn and republished because its author, a senior Victoria University historian, plagiarised parts of it.

The case comes less than two months after leading New Zealand writer Witi Ihimaera admitted his latest novel, The Trowenna Sea, contained plagiarised material, and vowed to buy back remaining copies of the book and republish it with full acknowledgments.

In the latest plagiarism row, Dr Danny Keenan – an associate professor of Maori Studies – is alleged to have copied from archaeology expert and historian Nigel Prickett without attribution in his book Wars Without End.

Sections from Prickett’s 2002 book, Landscapes of Conflict: A Field Guide to the New Zealand Land Wars, appear in Wars Without End and are not referenced in the bibliography.

It is understood Prickett instructed lawyers to take Keenan’s publisher, Penguin, to task over the matter. Penguin also published Ihimaera’s book.

Penguin publishing director Geoff Walker refused to comment on the company’s processes to ensure works were properly attributed.

“I can confirm that we withdrew Wars Without End by Danny Keenan… and just republished a revised version.”

He said the revised book contained a “degree of rewriting” and was published earlier this month. The original was published earlier this year…

From Prague Daily Monitor:

Two renowned Czech university teachers and scholars in the field of psychology, Jiri Hoskovec and Jiri Stikar, have confessed to plagiarism they committed two years ago, the daily Pravo reports Thursday.

They apologised on the web page of the Charles University publisher’s for having passed a scientific text written by another author off as their own in their joint book Safe Mobility at the Old Age from 2007, the paper adds.

In their book, which is to be used in university courses as well as by researchers and general public, both authors included almost word-for-word excerpts from Psychology for Drivers written by Karel Havlik without citing the source, Pravo writes…

There won’t be any punishment. The press only responded when Havlik threatened to go to court.

A guy goes into Unity Books and says: “Can I have a copy of Witi’s latest novel signed by all the authors, please?”

When the jokes start up, you’re really in trouble.

… UD was writing a longish post about plagiarism, which should appear at Inside Higher Education any second now.

Ah. Here it is.

And an update on media stuff: Mr UD was indeed interviewed yesterday by the guy from ABC. He told the guy not to listen to Mr UD‘s wife on the subject of laptops in the classroom. Something like that. We’ll see if any of this makes it to the screen.

Tomorrow, the New Zealand Listener – in which reviewer Jolisa Gracewood broke the story two weeks ago with examples of plagiarised content – reveals more unattributed lines in The Trowenna Sea from other people’s work.

It is not clear whether these have been acknowledged by Ihimaera.

The latest Listener quotes Margaret Soltan, a professor of English at George Washington University in Washington DC, who criticises Ihimaera.

But she mostly criticises Auckland University, where Ihimaera is a distinguished professor and lecturer.

She says the university has too-readily accepted the author’s word that the plagiarism was inadvertent.

“Pretending it did not happen is the sort of thing a very provincial university will do,” she says.

I’ll link to The Listener when the issue appears. Not sure if you’ll be able to read the article online.

Oh, and — I told you plagiarists were lifers.

… “It’s really like saying `well yes I did steal from 16 people but I only took a dollar from each’,” [CK Stead] told Radio New Zealand.  [There were sixteen instances of plagiarism in New Zealand novelist and professor Witi Ihimaera‘s latest book.]

… Stead, who is a professor emeritus [at the University of Auckland,] the same university [where Ihimaera teaches], said he was disappointed at comments from Associate Prof Crosthwaite minimising the seriousness of the fault.

He said students had it hammered into them that they must acknowledge borrowed work and not pass work off as their own.

“You reject students’ essays for doing this and you fail them in exams for doing it.

“It makes you wonder what the title of a distinguished professor means in the University of Auckland if they then say what Witi Ihimaera has done doesn’t matter.”

Stead said the situation would reflect badly on the university until professors acknowledged the seriousness of what had happened…

Coming down hard on university students who plagiarize, but letting plagiarizing professors get away with it is a well-established national scandal… International, really, as in the recent case of New Zealand novelist and professor Witi Ihimaera.

When I say well-established, I mean not only multiple individual cases at our best schools, like Harvard Law; I mean the department-wide, accepted practice of plagiarism throughout many American medical schools, where a combination of courtesy authorship and ghostwriting thoroughly undermines research integrity.

By December 8, a group of our best med schools must answer a questionnaire sent to them by Senator Charles Grassley, who wants to know why some of their faculty publish

medical journal articles in which an outside writer — sometimes paid by a drug or medical devices company whose product is being studied — has done extensive work on the article without being named on the publication. Instead, one or more academic researchers may receive author credit.

Mr. Grassley said ghostwriting had hurt patients and raised costs for taxpayers because it used prestigious academic names to promote medical products and treatments that might be expensive or less effective than viable alternatives.

It’s just like the prestigious names at law schools, except that there the articles and books are written not by drug companies and their agents at ghostwriting firms, but by teams of students who essentially write the book for the professor, who then puts his or her name on it. This practice has its own name — it’s not called ghostwriting or courtesy authorship, but rather the atelier method.

Mr. Grassley asked the universities to describe their policies on both ghostwriting and plagiarism and to enumerate complaints and describe investigations into both practices since 2004.

… Mr. Grassley’s letter highlighted the disparate treatment of students and professors who claimed authorship of a paper that was not their own.

“Students are disciplined for not acknowledging that a paper they turned in was written by somebody else,” Mr. Grassley wrote. “But what happens when researchers at the same university publish medical studies without acknowledging that they were written by somebody else?”

The story of the New Zealand novelist whose latest work is a cut and paste job gets weirder. Having been found out by a careful reader who stuck various phrases from the novel into Google Books and came up with the books from which he plagiarized, the author has decided, in the proud words of his publisher, Penguin Books New Zealand, “to purchase the remaining warehouse stock of the novel The Trowenna Sea from his publisher Penguin Group (NZ). … Witi Ihimaera has taken this extraordinary step to show that he is actively engaged in resolving the issues involved. We congratulate him on that.’

Yes, take a bow. Not only has Ihimaera done himself proud; he’s also introduced a new business model to Penguin. As detection technology reveals more and more plagiarism among a publisher’s authors, it can institute a Witi Clause, in which writers of plagiarized manuscripts buy up the entire plagiarized run. In this way, publishing houses are guaranteed to sell out the first edition.

A newspaper editor comments on the word-for-word plagiarism of one of a number of opinion pieces he published.

The pieces were plagiarized by a local school superintendent who has now resigned his position.

“I do remember the article; it was one of the more thoughtful submissions on education funding,” said Herb Pinder, the newspaper’s Opinion page editor. “We just wish, of course, that the work had been wholly original.”

We’ve recently seen two math professors at Central Michigan University (whoever they are; the school won’t say) plagiarize both their NSF grant application and research conducted in their project itself. CMU must now repay hundreds of thousands of dollars to the NSF.

Now there’s the Auckland University English professor who cut and pasted his way through his latest novel (and probably did something similar in earlier novels, though no one, far as UD knows, has checked):

Plagiarism was revealed in Witi Ihimaera’s newest novel when a book reviewer googled phrases from The Trowenna Sea.

… In her blog, Jolisa Gracewood said that while reading the novel, she had a feeling something was not right with parts of the text.

“Google was my first port of call – it turns out that Google Books is bad news for authors, in at least one more way than previously suspected …”

However, there was “no joy” in stumbling across 16 examples … [The author’s university department forgave him immediately, calling sixteen examples of plagiarism from a variety of sources ‘an oversight.’]

Gracewood said that as a writing teacher, “I’d occasionally come across a phrase or a paragraph that was somehow out of kilter with the surrounding text. It’s a curiously physical phenomenon: the hairs on the back of your neck go up, and your heart sinks.

“Sometimes it’s a false alarm,” she said. “But I never expected to encounter that feeling as a book reviewer, let alone with a new work by a respected writer.”

Ihimaera, a professor at Auckland University, declined to be interviewed, but he apologised for “inadvertently” using other authors’ work [in sixteen inadvertent instances].

… Listener examples of Trowenna passages put to Ihimaera include paragraphs from author and journalist Peter Godwin, American academic Karen Sinclair and works edited by Charles Dickens.

“The tragedy is that this is a very, very fine piece of New Zealand fiction,” he said. [Tragedy. Sniff.]

“It deserves to be read and it’s a terrible shame that this has happened.” [Not that he did this. That this happened.]

It wasn’t really, as Gracewood graciously claims, Google Books that outed this man. It was Gracewood’s impressive sense of prose — the way style always displays the mark, subtle or not, of one person only; the way language flows or doesn’t flow — that revealed this imposter of a book.

**************

Update: Commentary in the New Zealand Herald:

… What is curious is the attitude of the university. The Dean of Arts, Jan Crosthwaite, says the university has investigated “and is satisfied there was no deliberate wrong doing”.

Excuse me? How do you plagiarise in a way that is not deliberate? How do you plagiarise by accident? If you have plagiarised, presumably you had the other author’s work next to you as you typed, knowing you were using another person’s sentences. How do you do that unconsciously?…

Pretending it didn’t happen is the sort of thing a very provincial university will do.

Someone should check through this professor’s other books. UD is pretty confident, having followed tons of plagiarism cases on this blog, that he’s done it before.

If so, it will be amusing to watch his university immediately dismiss, say, five books worth of plagiarism as inadvertent.