It’s a list of categories UD introduced in 2012, and it has held up well over the years. Details of each type here.

The case of busybusybusy USC professor David B. Agus – known hereafter as David B.OGUS – seems overwhelmingly to have been ATELIER; his downfall, that is, probably involves his having hired an atelier of underlings to write his books for him cuz he’s too important to actually sire the little whippersnappers himself.

But, as UD always has occasion to say on these, uh, occasions, you can’t get good help these days. You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think, as Dorothy Parker pointed out; likewise, you can pay an atelier to write your book, but you can’t make it not plagiarize.

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

A little Keck School of Medicine context: This school has the world’s most comically disreputable faculty: Drew Pinsky, Rohit Varma, Carmen Puliafito (oh wait; he wasn’t faculty: he was DEAN), etc etc etc; the larger institution has been right there out in front of the Varsity Blues scandal, a humongous political bribery scandal, and of course SCADS of sports scandals.

I mean to say that USC cannot really afford its latest Dr Bogus. But it’s got him.

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

UPDATE: Cherchez la femme! The big mean lady who wrote books with my name on their covers is responsible for

more than 120 cribbed passages in three titles, some of which went on for pages. 

So UD was right – it was Atelier.

Her advice for Dr. Bogus should he try for a fourth title: Read your employees’ work before you append your name to it. Use a plagiarism-detector. Seek new hired help.

(Details here.) Fareed Zakaria’s high-profile pilfering is distinctly A-One: Atelier. If UD may plagiarize herself:

Atelier is a variety made famous by busy Harvard law professors, [some of whom] appear to fob off much of the writing of their books to student assistants. Other busy Harvard people (Doris Kearns Goodwin) also seem to have gotten to P in this way. You get there not out of ambition (see #2). On the contrary, all of your ambitions have already been realized. Rather, you get there out of grandiosity. Having more than achieved your ambitions, you decide you’re too important to do your own work. Atelier is très pomo, being all about one’s transubstantiation into a simulacrum.

Michael Kinsley is the latest writer to review Zakaria’s output and conclude:

He went too far. Far too far. I would love to be able to say that Fareed is being penalized for doing what everybody does. That’s what he believes about some of these episodes, I think. But when you’re making points—one, two, three—that another writer has made, and in the exact same order, though with different exact words, you’re not just participating in a great swap meet of ideas in which nobody owns anything. You are claiming ownership of ideas that aren’t your own. That’s not a “mistake.” That’s on purpose.

Is Harvard preparing to concede that President Gay should be let go?

The controversy swirling around Dr. Gay raises questions about what it means for a premier American university when its scholarly leader — who at Harvard has final approval on all tenure decisions — has been accused of failing to adhere to scholarly standards. The allegations against her [have] prompted some to wonder whether Harvard is treating its leader with greater latitude than it would its students.

Says the NYT. Then it takes a trip down memory lane. Devoted UD readers will recall these earlier stunningly hypocritical Harvard plagiarism cases.

In 2005, after two prominent law professors, Charles Ogletree Jr. and Laurence Tribe, were publicly accused of plagiarism, The Harvard Crimson ran an editorial decrying the “disappointing double standard,” noting that “students caught plagiarizing are routinely suspended for semesters or even entire academic years.”

In both cases, the investigations — which were led by Derek Bok, a former Harvard president, and unfolded over months — found that each had in fact committed plagiarism. The professors were publicly chastised by the administration, but Harvard did not say whether there were any sanctions, according to news reports at the time.

In an apology, Mr. Ogletree, who died this year, acknowledged that his 2004 book “All Deliberate Speed” included several paragraphs from another law professor almost verbatim, without any attribution, according to a New York Times report at the time. (He said it was the result of a mix-up by his research assistants.)

In Mr. Tribe’s case, he was deemed by Harvard’s president and the law school dean to have unintentionally included “various brief passages and phrases that echo or overlap with material” in a book by another scholar, who was not credited. Mr. Tribe, who still teaches at Harvard, apologized.

These were ATELIER plagiarism (read about UD’s tripartite scheme here], plagiarism committed by the flunkies who write your books for you because you’re far too busy and important to write them yourself. (See, among other Harvard luminaries, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jill Abramson, and Alan Dershowitz.)

The getting off scot-free bit is a prototypical instance of oligarchic privilege, an outcome no one in any of the world’s many class-based, corrupt from top to bottom, countries would have any trouble recognizing.

Recall UD’s tripartite plagiarism scheme (details here):

ATELIER

AMBITION

ADDICTED

A very successful public intellectual from Poland is credibly accused of plagiarism.

This case, as reported, has Ambition written all over it. A young man in a hurry seems to have been far too fast-lane to bother actually writing portions of his work, starting with his graduate school thesis.

Some of the plagiarism is apparently straightforward translation from English language sources; some of it seems to draw on other sources.

This is the long, Polish-language essay about the plagiarism; not only do you have to translate it, but you can’t get far in the text without subscribing to the newspaper. But anyway it’s a close analysis of the guy’s apparently prolific lifting.

Of course he’s hysterically screaming about suing the people who claim that he plagiarizes — and good luck with that, panie.

… 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.

…that has to be asked, these days, when anyone even slightly high-profile plagiarizes:

Might [Fareed] Zakaria … have fobbed off the drafting of his ill-fated Time article to an assistant or intern … and given the draft his glancing approval before letting it run under his byline in Time?

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

There are, of course, varieties of plagiaristic experience (as William James might put it). UD has simplified the matter for you with her tripartite A scheme. There’s:

1. ATELIER

3. ADDICTED

Jim’s assuming Zakaria’s is the atelier method, a variety made famous by busy Harvard law professors who, to use Jim’s word, appear to fob off much of the writing of their books to student assistants. Other busy Harvard people (Doris Kearns Goodwin) also seem to have gotten to P in this way. You get there not out of ambition (see #2). On the contrary, all of your ambitions have already been realized. Rather, you get there out of grandiosity. Having more than achieved your ambitions, you decide you’re too important to do your own work. Atelier is très pomo, being all about one’s transubstantiation into a simulacrum.

2., Ambition, is when you’re still young and struggling to be grand. This is Jayson Blair, Jonah Lehrer, Johann Hari, Stephen Glass, Glenn Poshard, Baron von und zu and unter von Googleberg or whatever his name is (put these names in my search engine for details). This is all those eager young German, Romanian, Czech, etc. PhD students panting toward political careers and totally not interested in actually writing something. This is saying yes to every project and assignment that comes your way, and therefore making it impossible to do everything.

Bringing up the rear is Addicted, in which, having been caught plagiarizing, you explain that you do it because you’re a drug or alcohol addict. Addicted is a tricky one, because successful plagiarism takes a steady hand and mucho planning. It’s not the sort of thing you can do staggering down the street. James Frey, Q.R. Markham (again use the search engine), and plenty of others blame their stealing on a deep-seated insecurity which drives them to drink and then the drink clouds their judgment yada yada.

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

One other thing to keep in mind about plagiarism is the More Principle. There’s always more. Once the guy (Doris alone holds the banner aloft for the girls) is found out, anyone who wants to discover more of his plagiarized work only has to look.