The played-for-a-sucker state of Maine offers an alliterative definition of plagiarism, a definition similar to Zygmunt Bauman’s. For Bauman, what others call his plagiarism is merely trivial punctuation error, the sort of thing only trivial people would notice. In the same way, when the state of Maine discovers (via the pissed actual authors) it has given almost a million dollars of taxpayer money to a consultant who plagiarized rather lengthy sections of a report he submitted to the state on the subject of welfare (shades of James Feinerman – though he used Wikipedia), it plays the punctuation card. Plagiarism is an imperfect placement of parentheses (UD is trying to keep the alliteration going); a picayune pleonastic protuberance; a paltry parsing of prose… The consultant himself puts it down to “footnoting problems,” but the real problem is that the consultancy guessed wrong. It guessed the original authors wouldn’t read the consultancy’s obscure little report, or wouldn’t care that they were plagiarized.
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UPDATE: You knew this was coming. You knew it if you read this blog. I have almost never reported a case of one copied source. Plagiarists are career copiers.
[T]he authors took information from as many as five other sources, without attribution or with improper citations of the original source…
Among their many plagiarized sources: the University of Southern Maine’s Muskie School of Public Service.
Well, what’s public service, after all? Providing plagiarizable material to a guy being paid – well, so far he’s been paid $500,000 and I’m not sure the state’s going to be able to get that back – a guy being paid to produce a report about the state welfare system … I mean, the guy’s firm is private, not public; its job is to make money with the least labor output. The Muskie School is there to provide a Public Service… Really, to provide for the public welfare, if you will… And it has done so!
It has written his report for him!
MAINE: THE CONSULTANCY WELFARE STATE
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Waste, embarrassment, lots of things of interest to people who pay taxes in Maine. If I lived in that state, I wouldn’t be happy to know that I was subsidizing a plagiarist.
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Funny the way incredibly stupid public statements come back to bite you on the ass.
“While we do not excuse errors in the report, we are also concerned that the media and Democrats have chosen to politicize punctuation over policy, instead of evaluating these critical reform recommendations on their merits,” Mayhew said in an email to the Press Herald on Wednesday.
Seriously, Commissioner? You pay a guy almost a million bucks for a report that is dead on arrival, then you learn belatedly that he plagiarized parts of it, and now you’re dismissing any and all criticism of this boondoggle as a partisan plot to “politicize punctuation?” What’s next, a statewide ban on semicolons?