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.

A [New Zealand] gardening guru has uncovered another case of alleged plagiarism involving a book released by publishing house Penguin Books.

The accusations against The Tui NZ Fruit Garden, written by Sally Cameron, have caused Penguin to recall the book, which was released on Monday.

The book contains many sentences and passages which seem to have been taken, in some cases word for word, from various websites including Wikipedia.

Penguin came in for scrutiny just last year, after the book The Trowenna Sea by Witi Ihimaera was found to contain unacknowledged copy which appeared to come from other authors’ work.

This afternoon Penguin general manager publicity and promotions Sandra Lees said bookshops were being asked to return all copies of the book…

… as the Captain and Tenille sing. Once is never enough… whoaaa…

Same thing when it comes to plagiarism, as you know if you read University Diaries, because she never stops telling you. Plagiarized articles are like roaches. Find one, and ten others will come scurrying out of the plagiarist’s past.

So it ever was, so it shall be … and so it is, Dear Reader, with Gerald Posner.

Last week, a reader tipped me to an instance of potential plagiarism by Gerald Posner in the Daily Beast, for which Posner is chief investigative reporter. After I called the plagiarism to the attention of Daily Beast Executive Editor Edward Felsenthal, the site deleted five pilfered sentences and added an editor’s note to explain the deletions and to apologize.

… But this isn’t the only example of Posner pinching copy without attribution. Slate reader Gregory Gelembuik and I have uncovered additional examples of plagiarism by Posner in the Daily Beast from the Texas Lawyer, a Miami Herald blog, a Miami Herald editorial, a Miami Herald article, and a health care journalism blog…

Jack Shafer at Slate has done what Jolisa Gracewood did with Witi Ihimaera’s work — he has simply Googled.

Posner has been suspended.

From Stuff New Zealand:

A second plagiarism row has engulfed book publishers [New Zealand] Penguin, with allegations a book about 19th century Maori land wars was withdrawn and republished because its author, a senior Victoria University historian, plagiarised parts of it.

The case comes less than two months after leading New Zealand writer Witi Ihimaera admitted his latest novel, The Trowenna Sea, contained plagiarised material, and vowed to buy back remaining copies of the book and republish it with full acknowledgments.

In the latest plagiarism row, Dr Danny Keenan – an associate professor of Maori Studies – is alleged to have copied from archaeology expert and historian Nigel Prickett without attribution in his book Wars Without End.

Sections from Prickett’s 2002 book, Landscapes of Conflict: A Field Guide to the New Zealand Land Wars, appear in Wars Without End and are not referenced in the bibliography.

It is understood Prickett instructed lawyers to take Keenan’s publisher, Penguin, to task over the matter. Penguin also published Ihimaera’s book.

Penguin publishing director Geoff Walker refused to comment on the company’s processes to ensure works were properly attributed.

“I can confirm that we withdrew Wars Without End by Danny Keenan… and just republished a revised version.”

He said the revised book contained a “degree of rewriting” and was published earlier this month. The original was published earlier this year…

Tomorrow, the New Zealand Listener – in which reviewer Jolisa Gracewood broke the story two weeks ago with examples of plagiarised content – reveals more unattributed lines in The Trowenna Sea from other people’s work.

It is not clear whether these have been acknowledged by Ihimaera.

The latest Listener quotes Margaret Soltan, a professor of English at George Washington University in Washington DC, who criticises Ihimaera.

But she mostly criticises Auckland University, where Ihimaera is a distinguished professor and lecturer.

She says the university has too-readily accepted the author’s word that the plagiarism was inadvertent.

“Pretending it did not happen is the sort of thing a very provincial university will do,” she says.

I’ll link to The Listener when the issue appears. Not sure if you’ll be able to read the article online.

Oh, and — I told you plagiarists were lifers.

… “It’s really like saying `well yes I did steal from 16 people but I only took a dollar from each’,” [CK Stead] told Radio New Zealand.  [There were sixteen instances of plagiarism in New Zealand novelist and professor Witi Ihimaera‘s latest book.]

… Stead, who is a professor emeritus [at the University of Auckland,] the same university [where Ihimaera teaches], said he was disappointed at comments from Associate Prof Crosthwaite minimising the seriousness of the fault.

He said students had it hammered into them that they must acknowledge borrowed work and not pass work off as their own.

“You reject students’ essays for doing this and you fail them in exams for doing it.

“It makes you wonder what the title of a distinguished professor means in the University of Auckland if they then say what Witi Ihimaera has done doesn’t matter.”

Stead said the situation would reflect badly on the university until professors acknowledged the seriousness of what had happened…

Coming down hard on university students who plagiarize, but letting plagiarizing professors get away with it is a well-established national scandal… International, really, as in the recent case of New Zealand novelist and professor Witi Ihimaera.

When I say well-established, I mean not only multiple individual cases at our best schools, like Harvard Law; I mean the department-wide, accepted practice of plagiarism throughout many American medical schools, where a combination of courtesy authorship and ghostwriting thoroughly undermines research integrity.

By December 8, a group of our best med schools must answer a questionnaire sent to them by Senator Charles Grassley, who wants to know why some of their faculty publish

medical journal articles in which an outside writer — sometimes paid by a drug or medical devices company whose product is being studied — has done extensive work on the article without being named on the publication. Instead, one or more academic researchers may receive author credit.

Mr. Grassley said ghostwriting had hurt patients and raised costs for taxpayers because it used prestigious academic names to promote medical products and treatments that might be expensive or less effective than viable alternatives.

It’s just like the prestigious names at law schools, except that there the articles and books are written not by drug companies and their agents at ghostwriting firms, but by teams of students who essentially write the book for the professor, who then puts his or her name on it. This practice has its own name — it’s not called ghostwriting or courtesy authorship, but rather the atelier method.

Mr. Grassley asked the universities to describe their policies on both ghostwriting and plagiarism and to enumerate complaints and describe investigations into both practices since 2004.

… Mr. Grassley’s letter highlighted the disparate treatment of students and professors who claimed authorship of a paper that was not their own.

“Students are disciplined for not acknowledging that a paper they turned in was written by somebody else,” Mr. Grassley wrote. “But what happens when researchers at the same university publish medical studies without acknowledging that they were written by somebody else?”

The story of the New Zealand novelist whose latest work is a cut and paste job gets weirder. Having been found out by a careful reader who stuck various phrases from the novel into Google Books and came up with the books from which he plagiarized, the author has decided, in the proud words of his publisher, Penguin Books New Zealand, “to purchase the remaining warehouse stock of the novel The Trowenna Sea from his publisher Penguin Group (NZ). … Witi Ihimaera has taken this extraordinary step to show that he is actively engaged in resolving the issues involved. We congratulate him on that.’

Yes, take a bow. Not only has Ihimaera done himself proud; he’s also introduced a new business model to Penguin. As detection technology reveals more and more plagiarism among a publisher’s authors, it can institute a Witi Clause, in which writers of plagiarized manuscripts buy up the entire plagiarized run. In this way, publishing houses are guaranteed to sell out the first edition.

We’ve recently seen two math professors at Central Michigan University (whoever they are; the school won’t say) plagiarize both their NSF grant application and research conducted in their project itself. CMU must now repay hundreds of thousands of dollars to the NSF.

Now there’s the Auckland University English professor who cut and pasted his way through his latest novel (and probably did something similar in earlier novels, though no one, far as UD knows, has checked):

Plagiarism was revealed in Witi Ihimaera’s newest novel when a book reviewer googled phrases from The Trowenna Sea.

… In her blog, Jolisa Gracewood said that while reading the novel, she had a feeling something was not right with parts of the text.

“Google was my first port of call – it turns out that Google Books is bad news for authors, in at least one more way than previously suspected …”

However, there was “no joy” in stumbling across 16 examples … [The author’s university department forgave him immediately, calling sixteen examples of plagiarism from a variety of sources ‘an oversight.’]

Gracewood said that as a writing teacher, “I’d occasionally come across a phrase or a paragraph that was somehow out of kilter with the surrounding text. It’s a curiously physical phenomenon: the hairs on the back of your neck go up, and your heart sinks.

“Sometimes it’s a false alarm,” she said. “But I never expected to encounter that feeling as a book reviewer, let alone with a new work by a respected writer.”

Ihimaera, a professor at Auckland University, declined to be interviewed, but he apologised for “inadvertently” using other authors’ work [in sixteen inadvertent instances].

… Listener examples of Trowenna passages put to Ihimaera include paragraphs from author and journalist Peter Godwin, American academic Karen Sinclair and works edited by Charles Dickens.

“The tragedy is that this is a very, very fine piece of New Zealand fiction,” he said. [Tragedy. Sniff.]

“It deserves to be read and it’s a terrible shame that this has happened.” [Not that he did this. That this happened.]

It wasn’t really, as Gracewood graciously claims, Google Books that outed this man. It was Gracewood’s impressive sense of prose — the way style always displays the mark, subtle or not, of one person only; the way language flows or doesn’t flow — that revealed this imposter of a book.

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Update: Commentary in the New Zealand Herald:

… What is curious is the attitude of the university. The Dean of Arts, Jan Crosthwaite, says the university has investigated “and is satisfied there was no deliberate wrong doing”.

Excuse me? How do you plagiarise in a way that is not deliberate? How do you plagiarise by accident? If you have plagiarised, presumably you had the other author’s work next to you as you typed, knowing you were using another person’s sentences. How do you do that unconsciously?…

Pretending it didn’t happen is the sort of thing a very provincial university will do.

Someone should check through this professor’s other books. UD is pretty confident, having followed tons of plagiarism cases on this blog, that he’s done it before.

If so, it will be amusing to watch his university immediately dismiss, say, five books worth of plagiarism as inadvertent.