University Diaries » We’ll have an old-fashioned plagiarism; excused in the good old-fashioned way…

I’ll vow it’s coincidental;

They’ll vote me rector on the very next day…

Elizabeth, a UD reader, sends me word of Jerzy Gwizdała, an economist at Gdańsk University, who just loves him some plagiarism.

Jerzy plagiarizes in the absolutely classical professorial mode, a mode familiar to any reader who’s been on board University Diaries for any time (check out my PLAGIARISM category if you need refreshing): You steal from the work of smarter, more industrious, students; you steal repeatedly, from a variety of such sources; you steal almost entirely verbatim; you expand your markets by translating the plagiarized material into various languages and publishing in foreign outfits; when cornered, you brush it off as a not very interesting, and very minor, set of coincidences.

Entire sections of [a student’s paper] were “copy-and-paste” plagiarized from [the student’s] PhD thesis.

Gwizdała also translated sections of [the same student’s] PhD thesis to English in 2018, sent it to the University of Gdańsk Publishing House, and had it published as a book chapter.

The student notes JG’s response:

Gwizdała issued a statement in which he claimed that the alleged plagiarism instances were just an “ostensible (seeming) coincidence of some excerpts (pozorna zbieżność pewnych fragmentów).”

And after all, stealing from… students… peons … isn’t really stealing… They should be honored that we … incorporate their work into our own…!

Here is King Jerzy, reveling in his finery shortly before he was stripped of it. Not that the Polish university establishment has found the balls to fire him; he has been “suspended” from all duties. So his punishment seems to be that he pulls down a full salary (?) while sitting on his ass.

**********

And why old-fashioned? Because it was all a coincidence has become threadbare, and is rejected by most modern plagiarists. The next time Jerzy gets caught, UD would advise him to use one or more of the following:

My assistant did it.
I suffer from cryptomnesia.
I have substance abuse issues.
I have problems at home.

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