… 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.

(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.

France’s chief rabbi sounds like a real prince. When plagiarism from Jean-Francois Lyotard was found in his book Forty Jewish Meditations, he tried to suggest that Lyotard had plagiarized from him.

Now that the whole damn book looks plagiarized, he blames it on his ghost writer.

Not that he acknowledged having a ghost writer. Only now does it turn out… Je suppose it doesn’t look very good for your meditations to have been written – er, collated – er, plagiarized – by someone else. Although Ghosted Meditations is a very beautiful, very suggestive title! … How would it be in French? … Fantôme Méditations… C’est beau!

I think… I think therefore I… I think therefore I hire a ghostwriter…

It’s strange how even the chiefest among us never learn. Didn’t Gilles Bernheim notice all the attention Jane Goodall got? Doris Kearns Goodwin? All those Harvard law professors? How high-profile does the hire-a-ghost-writer-because-you’re-too-grand-to-write-your-own-words-and-then-fail-to-read-the-resulting-plagiarized-manuscript routine have to be for someone like the chief rabbi of France to notice?

…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?

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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.

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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.

Plagiarism being a big, destructive, and mysterious problem, one welcomes plagiarist-testimonies, first-person efforts to explain Why They Did It.

But there are some obvious problems. Did the plagiarist plagiarize her mea culpa? Even if she didn’t, can we trust anything she says?

Q.R. Markham, plagiarist-du-jour, titles his tell-all Confessions of a Plagiarist. There’s a reckless no-holds-barred feel to the word confession (Confession box. Confessional poetry. True confessions.). But the guy’s been a liar for twenty years.

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Markham makes the mistake of pathologizing what he’s done. It’s not that success and fame are so important to him that he’s willing to cheat to get there — which has always seemed to UD a pretty plausible explanation for the James Freyesque plagiarism in which Markham indulged. Like Frey, he blames it all on his addictive personality – a disorder beyond his control.

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Markham starts out not too badly:

We’ve all heard in meetings the description of the alcoholic as the egomaniac with an inferiority complex. That was — is — me in a nutshell. I wanted recognition, I wanted praise, but I had no faith in my own abilities. I had grown so used to being thought of as a wunderkind that a kind of false self emerged, one that was confident and hard-working and thrived on adulation and encouragement. It was an image that was completely at odds with the fear, self-doubt, and dishonesty that occupied my skull… My whole identity had become that of an aspiring writer. I wanted to be famous. [The writers I plagiarized were] satellites in my monomaniacal orbit… There was some kind of built in death wish to the whole process.

Yet this doesn’t describe mental disorder — just garden-variety narcissism.

Markham really begins to slip when he writes, of the people who have stood by him:

The realization that I was loved already and didn’t have to fight to earn that love was mind-boggling. It was quite the opposite of my notion that I had to struggle to show the world I was worthy.

Cutting and pasting from your favorite writers is not struggling to show your worthiness. It’s easy to plagiarize. People do it in part because it’s quick and simple. Their narcissism convinces them that they’re not subject to the same rules as everyone else. Their narcissism also makes them feel happy when they get one over on large numbers of people. Confirmation of their superiority.

Now for the pathology.

It’s easier to make moral pronouncements rather than see human flaw or human weakness. I was that way before I knew I was an alcoholic. Before I knew this was a disease, I saw myself purely as a screw-up. Morally weak. Perhaps one day plagiarism will be seen, if not as a disease, at least as something pathological.

We’re not allowed to give Markham a hard time for what he did because he didn’t do it. He was in the grip of a disease.

The problem is that plagiarism isn’t really the sign of a weak, troubled person. If you read over the many plagiarism posts on this blog, you find that it’s typically the behavior of a very ambitious person who doesn’t mind scheming and cutting corners to get what he wants. That doesn’t sound weak to me; it sounds rather strong. Lots of very high-profile powerful people (Joe Biden, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Charles Ogletree, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg) plagiarize. They’re busy and important and they figure they can get away with it. They certainly don’t have the trembling self-loathing personality Markham claims to have.

UD isn’t denying that there might be some degree of pathology in a high-risk act like plagiarism. She’s simply noting that most of the recent authors of plagiarized books and theses and speeches – at least the authors that have hit the news and been featured on this blog – seem to be successful, well-adjusted people.

Desert me…

We’re just like that. We deceive each other. This Wheeler whippersnapper, this latest Great Deceiver … So in love with him was Harvard…

Harvard’s just like everybody else. It has its idealizations, and if you can simulate them…

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I’m going to remind you, in this post, of some of Harvard’s Great Deceivers — students, professors, overseers. Just some of the people University Diaries has covered over the few years of this blog’s life.

Nothing special about Harvard, mind you. All universities, all over the world, are taunted, hurt, and deceived. I’m using Harvard as an example.

A particularly strong example, actually, because Harvard has immensities of money and power, and therefore as an institution it should be better equipped than others to protect itself against deception.

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But look at the Wheeler thing. He was about to graduate. He almost made it all the way through. He got this close to totally lying his way to a Harvard University degree.

Blair Hornstine was another matter. She was admitted to Harvard, and then, before she arrived, Harvard revoked the offer. She had cheated her way to valedictorian of her high school, plagiarized articles she claimed to have written in her local newspaper…

Hornstine was solidly on the Wheeler track to success, in other words, but a lawsuit she filed against a competing candidate for valedictorian was so disgusting that it hit all the papers, and Harvard began looking more closely at her.

Harvard kept Kaavya Viswanathan, even though by the time she was a sophomore she was a world-famous plagiarist.

Faculty deceivers? Charles Ogletree, Laurence Tribe. Alan Dershowitz (he has denied it). Most of the faculty plagiarists come from the law school. Lee Simon came from the medical school.

Overseers? Doris Kearns Goodwin.

So many. And others, you have to figure, who won’t get caught.

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Words of wisdom, UD?

Only a few.

First, since we’re always hurting and deceiving each other, and since, given the potential rewards, you can expect idealization simulators to be particularly active at places like Harvard (as Jayson Blair was active at the New York Times), those places in particular have to be vigilant. Where were the people entrusted with Harvard’s integrity while Wheeler was doing his thing?

Second, since Harvard doesn’t punish faculty and overseer deceivers (in a couple of cases it announced it was going to do something or other to them, but it didn’t tell us what, so that doesn’t count), it shouldn’t be surprised to find deceivers among its students. The Crimson rightly points out that if you’re known to be an oligarchy that protects its own, you can expect to attract the malsain, or at the very least to predispose your students toward cynicism.

For the public face of Harvard and for internal relations as well, it is crucial that the university maintain more consistent disciplinary rules for instances of academic dishonesty. Until then, the glaring double standard set by Harvard stands as an inadequate precedent for future disappointments.

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He isn’t true, he beats me too, what can I do?

You can examine your idealizations. You can stop using double standards.

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UPDATE: Another list. And what about that guy… that Iranian-American…? Hold on.

Name’s Nemazee. (Scroll down.)

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UPDATE AGAIN: The Harvard Crimson interviews a guy who knows a lot about admissions procedures. How did Wheeler slip through?

Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, said that Harvard could not be wholly blamed for Wheeler’s ability to slip through the admission process.

“There is not any institution in this country that can afford to or does verify everything people submit. It’s just not a practical possibility,” Nassirian said. “You can’t really fault Harvard for not calling every high school and obtaining a duplicate copy of every transcript and every recommendation people submit.”

True. But here’s something you can blame Harvard for. In order to get their cherished, lowest-in-the-world admit number each year (6.9% is the 2010 figure), Harvard sends out tens of thousands of You-oughta-apply-to-Harvard letters every year. Harvard knows perfectly well that almost none of the people it sends these letters to will get in; it also knows how astonished and flattered these same people will be to get such a letter… How likely they will be, in their youthful naivete, their cluelessness as to how Ivy League schools select students, to indeed apply…

These pawns, these soon to be heartbroken pawns, are crucial to Harvard’s ever-escalating number of applicants. Rejecting this enormous crowd makes for a hell of an admit number.

If these useful rejects were smart, they’d agree to apply only if Harvard guaranteed them, say, a one hundred dollar payment for doing so. They are a crucial part of Harvard’s maintenance of its market position, and should be rewarded as such.

Anyway… My point, in connection with the Wheeler fiasco, involves the impossibility of Harvard maintaining much control over the application process, given how many people they’ve told to apply.

… with UD’s immediate, uncensored, unedited reactions in parenthesis:

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has admitted to using a paragraph virtually word-for-word from a prominent liberal blogger without attribution. [Wish I’d been that blogger.] [And they wonder why newspapers are dying.]

Dowd acknowledged the error in an e-mail to the Huffington Post on Sunday, the Web site reported. [A moral error, to be sure. Hard to see – paging Doris Kearns Goodwin! – how it could have been done in error. We call this plagiarism.] The Times corrected her column online to give proper credit for the material to Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall. [I read him all the time during the presidential election.]

The newspaper is expected to issue a formal correction Monday. A request for comment made by The Associated Press was not immediately returned by the Times late Sunday. [Sluggish, as always. Bloggers are quicker. And they usually come up with their own material.]

The error appeared in Dowd’s Sunday column, in which she criticized the Bush administration’s use of interrogation methods in the run-up to the Iraq war.

In the original column, Dowd wrote: “More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

Marshall last week wrote virtually the same sentence. But where Dowd’s column used the phrase “the Bush crowd was,” Marshall used “we were.” [The “Bush crowd” change makes it clear that this was not a mistaken importation of someone else’s sentence. She — UD bets it was one of her assistants — took the sentence and gussied it up a bit.  UD bets that, like all those Harvard law professors who plagiarize, Dowd’s a victim of her dependence on assistants who do much of her writing for her.  She sweeps in toward deadline, perhaps, and Dowdizes it here and there, and she relies on her staff to write the body of the thing and not to plagiarize while they’re doing it.  This is the most elite form of plagiarism, if that’s any comfort to Dowd.]

Dowd, who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1990, told the Huffington Post that the mistake was unintentional. She claims she never read Marshall’s post last week and had heard the line from a friend who did not mention reading it in Marshall’s blog. [Well. Now we’re paging Nancy Pelosi.  UD‘s a big fan of Pelosi, but she doesn’t believe her version of events in terms of what she knew about torture.]

In the updated version on the Times’ site, Dowd’s column had this note: “An earlier version of this column failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Points Memo.”

… 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.

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.