… is that only the powerless get punished for it.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, a plagiarist who, as Slate‘s Timothy Noah writes, lied about what she did, has suffered nothing for her behavior; on the contrary, she continues to be honored with awards of the sort Vanderbilt’s about to give her. The only people at Vanderbilt pissed off about this are its students.

Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Richard McCarty maintains his support for Vanderbilt’s decision to honor historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in spite of criticism from students.

Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and well-known historian, is the recipient of the 2009 Nichols-Chancellor’s Medal and will be the keynote speaker on Senior Class Day. Goodwin was also the center of a plagiarism scandal…

In 2002, Goodwin was accused of plagiarism in two news articles. Goodwin addressed the accusations in Time Magazine, asserting the errors were unintentional. Although Goodwin provided footnotes for her sources, she attributed her failure to “provide quotation marks for phrases I had taken verbatim” to mislabeling in her notes due to the large-scale nature of her research. She also confessed to having previously reached a “private settlement” with an author of one of her sources.

Senior Meghana Bhatta, an investigative member of the honor council, said Goodwin provided a “feeble excuse that would not even stand up in a high school classroom, much less in the world of academia.”

“Vanderbilt is sending a flawed and hypocritical message to its students and to other institutions by hosting an admitted plagiarist,” Bhatta said. “I hope that the administration realizes that we risk losing credibility in the eyes of the public by demonstrating support for a woman who does not stand for the ideals of our school.”

The allegations resulted in her resignation from several positions, but she still retained the support of many scholars and readers.

“I think she has answered those accusations and she gave ample credit to a source that she used,” McCarty said. “She worked out an arrangement with that author, but she in no way attempted to present that work as her own.” [Er. Yes she did. That’s why she paid said source an ample sum of money to shut her up.]”

“I find it odd that Vanderbilt, a university that makes every freshman sign the honor code, would reward her for work that was admittedly taken without notation from other sources,” [said a student] in regard to Goodwin’s past….

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Update: The DKG Plagiarism Archive at University Diaries. Note that she ran into exactly the same trouble at the University of Virginia. Those pesky damn students.

But you also know that they’re all pretty much alike. They feature Harvard law professors and overseers (Ogletree, Tribe, Dershowitz, Goodwin) using slave labor to write their books for them (a technique fraught with dangers, of which plagiarism is only one); or they’re about desperate illiterates (Glenn Poshard, president of Southern Illinois University) drawing upon their betters…

Very straightforward, these plagiarism tales. But here’s one that’s really twisted.

A loving, demented son decides to defend his father’s controversial research by assuming the identity of one of his father’s critics and making the critic out to be a plagiarist.

[Raphael] Golb is accused of using stolen identities of various people, including a New York University professor who disagreed with his father, to elevate his father’s theory and besmirch its critics, Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, said at a news conference.

Mr. Golb, 49, was arrested Thursday morning and charged in Manhattan Criminal Court with identity theft, criminal impersonation and aggravated harassment. He faces up to four years in prison if convicted.

Prosecutors said Mr. Golb opened an e-mail account in the name of Lawrence H. Schiffman, the New York University professor who disagreed with Mr. Golb’s father. He sent messages in Professor Schiffman’s name to various people at N.Y.U. and to others involved in the Dead Sea Scrolls debate, fabricating an admission by Professor Schiffman that he had plagiarized some of Professor Golb’s work, Mr. Morgenthau said. Raphael Golb also set up blogs under various names that accused Dr. Schiffman of plagiarism, Mr. Morgenthau said.

Raphael Golb, who lives in Manhattan and received his law degree from N.Y.U., also created e-mail addresses using the names of other Dead Sea Scrolls scholars, Mr. Morgenthau said.

“This exemplifies a growing trend in the area of identity theft,” Antonia Merzon, an assistant district attorney, said during the news conference. “It’s very easy to open an account using any name you want on the Internet. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. But when you start using another person’s true identity for some purpose, you’re crossing the line into a possible identity theft crime or impersonation crime.”

The district attorney’s office began investigating the case after Professor Schiffman, who is chairman of the Hebrew and Judaic studies department at N.Y.U., came to them saying he believed that Mr. Golb was impersonating him on the Internet.

Golb’s father, an 81 year old University of Chicago professor who seems to share the paranoid tendencies of his son, thinks these charges are all part of the larger conspiracy against his work.

The president of University of Texas Pan American announced Tuesday she will retire at the end of the month, citing “pressures” that taxed her health and distracted her from leading the university. [Background here.]

Blandina “Bambi” Cardenas will step down after 4 1/2 sometimes turbulent years at the university. Last October, anonymous allegations mailed to the University of Texas System and media outlets around the state suggested Cardenas had plagiarized portions of her dissertation. The senders claimed to be UTPA faculty.

The UT System said in late October it would investigate. But David Prior, the system’s executive vice president for academic affairs, said the inquiry was halted before concluding.

“Once we understood Dr. Cardenas’ intention to resign we abandoned it,” Prior said. Asked if Cardenas was pressured to step down, Prior said, “not to my knowledge.” In a letter to the campus, Cardenas said she informed UT System Interim Chancellor Kenneth Shine of her decision in late December.

Under Cardenas, the university in Edinburg increased the number of students receiving degrees by 58 percent, to more than 3,200 annually. It also raised the number of graduate degrees offered, the number of nursing graduates, the amount of available financial aid and the freshman and sophomore retention rates, according to Cardenas’ letter.

But in 2007, Cardenas had to pay back more than $7,000 to the university she used to pay for landscaping service and install an air conditioning unit, sprinkler system and alarm in her home. She had also been billing the university for mileage for her commute to work…

This story is about faculty persistence. They kept at her, writing anonymously about her, um, unorthodox billing practices, her plagiarism… And she finally decided it would be better for her if the plagiarism investigation didn’t happen. Good call.

Her nickname’s Bambi.

An investigation begun in October of a plagiarism allegation against Blandina Cardenas, president of the University of Texas at Pan American, is still under way.

Barry Burgdorf, vice chancellor and general counsel of the UT System, said today that the system’s Board of Regents was briefed on the review during a closed-door session on Friday. Burgdorf is overseeing the investigation along with David Prior, executive vice chancellor for academic affairs.

The review was prompted by a packet of materials, sent anonymously to UT System administrators and news organizations, alleging that Cardenas plagiarized her doctoral dissertation. She received her doctorate in educational leadership from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1974, according to UT System records.

In 2007, Cardenas reimbursed UT-Pan American for more than $7,000 in improvements to her home and for use of a campus vehicle after auditors found UT System rules were violated…

Background here.

Neale Donald Walsch, author of the best-selling series “Conversations with God,” recently posted a personal Christmas essay on the spiritual Web site Beliefnet.com that was nearly identical to a 10-year-old article originally published by a little-known writer in a spiritual magazine. He now says he made a mistake in believing the story was something that had actually happened to him.

… Except for a different first paragraph in which Mr. Walsch wrote that he could “vividly remember” the incident, his Dec. 28 Beliefnet post followed, virtually verbatim,… previously published writing, even down to prosaic details like “the morning of the dress rehearsal, I filed in ten minutes early, found a spot on the cafeteria floor and sat down.”

… In a telephone interview, Mr. Walsch, 65, who said he regularly gives 10 or 20 speeches a year, said he had been retelling the anecdote in public as his own for years. “I am chagrined and astonished that my mind could play such a trick on me,” he said.

… In a statement, Beliefnet said that Mr. Walsch had withdrawn from the Web site’s blogging roster. “As a faith-based web portal, Beliefnet will continue to hold ourselves and our writers to the highest standards of trust,” the statement read….