August 27th, 2020
Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear…

… when UD spent so much time covering academic plagiarism that she evolved a tripartite motivational structure for the act:

ATELIER

AMBITION

ADDICTED

See details here.

A recent high-profile case falls cleanly into AMBITION. A UC Irvine professor is young, smart, already remarkably successful, and admirably ambitious for her education reform ideas to gain traction. She picks up significant material from other sources without bothering to quote it, giving the reader the impression she herself wrote it.

If this woman is like most other plagiarists, more instances of this behavior will almost certainly be found among her published works.

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

So far a typical Ambition case. What distinguishes this person from other non-attributors is not her silence in regard to press inquiries – everyone caught doing this sort of thing is very tight-lipped – but rather the random appearance of a colleague of hers at Irvine, who has written a threatening, semi-literate email on her behalf to Retraction Watch.

UD must say – this doesn’t seem to me a red-letter day for women’s liberation. A woman is challenged, and in gallops some guy to snarl for her.

August 13th, 2020
Self-plagiarist…

bombs.

July 30th, 2020
Jane Lee, the Chinese Nationalist Party Candidate for Mayor of a Major City in Taiwan…

… plagiarized 96% of her university thesis.

(I think this means one hundred percent? I mean like let’s say she came up with her name and some acknowledgements all by herself; that still leaves the entire document.)

Here she is crying her eyes out like a big girl and saying fuck! everyone does it around here….

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

(UD thanks Chris.)

January 10th, 2020
Psychotic Retraction

The committee called for 2528 papers to be retracted from 541 journals.

And I’m pretty sure they’re just getting started.

(Headline source.)

October 13th, 2019
Some sort of distemper has gotten into the Armstrong line…

… as that name generates one shameless POS after another. There’s Lance Armstrong, of course; and now there’s Charles Armstrong, career plagiarist. Both men enjoyed hero status in their professions for decades, even as both were absolute and, to use the word again, shameless frauds. Lance doesn’t need a link over his name; everyone knows what a shameless (there it goes again) liar and cheat that American hero turned out to be. Charles, thanks to enablers like Columbia University and Cornell University Press, has a lower profile, but reputable historians have been trying to tell anyone who will listen (which didn’t, for ages, include his publisher and his employer) that he’s been fabricating and stealing forever. Charles was obviously also helped along by a disciplinary community that failed to detect (willfully overlooked?) gross irregularities in his work.

But shameless. Let me tell you about shameless. When Armstrong, back in 2016, began fielding attacks on his latest book, it went like this:

Soon after the allegations were made public, Armstrong responded … that he “did not comment on any specific issues critics have raised with the book”. On December 30, 2016, Armstrong finally directly addressed the issues raised by the critics, stating: “For those who find the book flawed, inaccurate or insufficiently researched, the answer is simple: write a better book.”

Wee lads and lassies! Obscure jealous persons! Write a better book!

The fucker got away with it for so long; his main victim endured years of ridicule and neglect for daring to question The Great and Powerful Oz. Even now, Columbia has punished him by giving him a full year sabbatical and allowing him to “retire,” while Cornell Press has said jackshit about an episode (the fools even printed a revised version that Armstrong promised was all cleaned up) that reveals a great deal about the quality of their reviewers and editors.

April 26th, 2019
All plagiarism is multi-plagiarism.

In her big ol’ lawsuit against some Brazilian woman who’s been publishing romance novels plagiarized from a thousand sources (earlier post about the Brazilian bad girl here), bohemoth-of-the-bodice-rippers Nora Roberts uses the term “multi-plagiarism” to describe the crime.

While UD prefers the alliterative poly-plagiarism, she’s not sure we need either term, since in her experience (and faithful readers know we’ve been studying and tracking plagiarism on this blog for centuries), most plagiarizers not only plagiarize repeatedly from book to book, article to article, art installation to art installation; they also plagiarize far and wide within the work, gathering many prose patches in order to realize the rich tapestry, the coat of many colors, that is the stupendously simulacral artifact.

And if you think about it from the copyists’ point of view, the more bricolaged the book the better, ja? Less likely any particular plagiaree will notice… Wise word thieves also make an effort to steal from the obscure dead rather than from enraged, high profile, rich, and extant people like Nora Roberts…

Like her many Harvard precursors, Miss Brasilia blames everything on It’s hard to get good help these days.

February 25th, 2019
When it comes to plagiarism, there’s a whole cathecism.

And you can hear it directly from a priest.

[I] relied on material prepared by interns.

[I did it] under the pressure of urgent media deadlines.

[I] often have many articles open on my computer at one time, and make notes by copying work between files, but I have not maliciously stolen others’ work as my own.

I’m glad someone brought it to my attention.

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

Hey lookee there look what I’ve been doing for the last thirty years. What a thing to have happened! Thank you for bringing it to my attention. Yours truly, a high-ranking advisor to the pope.

February 20th, 2019
‘I just woke up to distressing news that my work has plagiarism from other authors. I am taking down all the works I did with a ghostwriter …’

The end of an affair.

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

This is our last book together

This printing will soon be long ago

And in our moment of parting

This is all I want you to know

There will be many more romances like this

I’ll be stealing plots from someone new

There will be other words to copy

But there will never be another you

There will be other paragraphs to lift

But they won’t thrill me

Like yours used to do

I’ll plagiarize a million scenes

A million characters too

But there will never, ever be another you.

February 11th, 2019
Harvardize! Let no one else’s work evade your eyes!

SOOOOO many Harvard professors – the latest is Jill Abramson – have plagiarized parts of their books that UD figures it’s time to update Tom Lehrer’s famous song, “Lobachevsky.” It’s not plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize! anymore: It’s Harvardize!

And why wouldn’t a Harvard professor do the deed? They suffer no consequences (“Realistically, you’re not going to fire Laurence Tribe or Charles Ogletree.“).

February 7th, 2019
Ahem. As concerns the latest high-profile plagiarism story…

… recall UD‘s Tripartite A Scheme for plagiarism — i.e., plagiarism almost always falls into the category Atelier, Ambition, or Addicted (details), and it should be pretty easy for you to conclude that Jill Abramson is Atelier. Very busy successful high-profile people (Jane Goodall, Alan Dershowitz – and a raft of other Harvard law school profs – Doris Kearns Goodwin, Fareed Zakaria, Rand Paul) have ateliers of assistants who do much of their work for them, and … you know … it’s hard to find good help.

January 14th, 2019
‘Ms Sushko apologised and claimed that she sometimes outsourced her editor’s letter to a trusted freelancer as she had a lot of work and could get stuck on the letter for “several days because of the big responsibility and stress.”’

If you’re an academic, it’s an evil grad student/research assistant; if you’re a magazine editor, it’s a trusted freelancer — but whoever the ghostly awful person who plagiarized and then put the product under your innocent name, the important thing, when you’re caught red-handed, is to find someone to blame it on.

But social media users were already posting previous instances of plagiarism by the [Ukrainian] Vogue editor…

BTW: Nice move, international-relations-wise, to be a Ukrainian who rips off a Russian. I mean, who needs independence?

December 3rd, 2018
It’s not the plagiarism. It’s the Osteen.

The prez of LeMoyne-Owen stole some of her motivational speech to students from another writer, and the school has a right to be appalled and to seek her resignation – especially since she denies she plagiarized.

But the real ground for eviction lies in her source material. Instead of reaching for Frost or Thoreau or even Dave Barry, she went for Mr Shit-Eating Grin himself, Joel Osteen.

December 2nd, 2018
Sing it.

This is my trauma
Had it from birth
This is my trauma
Grandest on earth

My fellow poet stole it
O plagiarist! You’re bold!

But this is my trauma
To have and to hold

April 13th, 2018
An Unusual Outcome

In the wake of plagiarism allegations, the president of Hobart William Smith Colleges has resigned. This rapid outcome (allegations against him were made only a few days ago) suggests the charges were probably true, the plagiarism significant, and the fight to retain the position not worth it.

April 9th, 2018
“Nothing in the academy bylaws allowed for ousting a member who had committed scientific misconduct.”

In the current case of Eric Noji, it’s odd that no one ever considered his self-description on his academic web page… odd.

Professor Eric K. Noji is a medical doctor, skilled wildlife biologist, passionate environmentalist and iconic figure in the humanitarian community whose medical work and travels to the most austere and hostile of environments on earth are both mythic in their epic sweep and inspirational in their chronology of self-sacrifice on behalf of children who are homeless, abused, starving, or left destitute by disasters, violence or war.

The phrase mythic in their epic sweep didn’t … seem… odd to anyone?

No one wondered why under skills and expertise he listed over one hundred specializations?

I mean, yes, after decades of alleged plagiarism and lies, Noji has been removed to Disgraced Rogue Central: Saudi Arabia. But no one seems able to convince the Institute of Medicine that they should rescind his membership.

After much anguishing, the IOM has decided that, okay,

membership [can] be rescinded if an individual provided false information before becoming a member.

Falsification, plagiarism or fabrication after a doctor becomes a member of the elite organization isn’t grounds for removal…

This sort of approach explains why Bernie Madoff maintained his country club memberships through much of his … unpleasantness. These places are private organizations and they’re a mite on the stodgy side and they like to do things their own way.

Once Bernie was carted off to prison for life because he stole $65 billion, his clubs apparently decided to take another look at his membership status…

And UD is going to guess that the big splashy New York Times article that just came out about the IOM and its highest-profile member might get its expulsion machinery cranking …

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