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Wednesday, November 24, 2004
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THIS JUST IN ---
OGLETREE, TRIBE, etc., Revisited From today's New York Times [UD got it via The International Herald Tribune online ] "PLAGIARISM SCANDAL CLOUDS HARVARD'S NORMS OF SCHOLARSHIP By Sara Rimer The New York Times Thursday, November 25, 2004 CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts "When it comes to students at Harvard, university policy shows little tolerance for plagiarism. . Undergraduates found guilty of "misusing sources" will "likely" be required to withdraw from the college for at least two semesters. They will lose all coursework they have done that semester (unless it is virtually over), along with the money they have paid for it. They must also leave Cambridge. . With such a policy for students, what is Harvard to do when two of its most prominent law professors, Charles Ogletree Jr. and Laurence Tribe, publicly acknowledge that they have unintentionally misused sources, as happened this autumn? Weighing in on the matter, Harvard's student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, said the university appeared to have one set of rules for its famous professors and another for its students. . The disclosures came in an atmosphere of heightened concern about academic integrity, with the increasing reliance on the Internet as a research tool making it both easier to plagiarize, whether intentionally or not, and to catch those who do. . The two professors said their errors were accidental, and no scholar has suggested otherwise, but as Howard Gardner, a Harvard professor of cognition and education, pointed out, many students could make the same argument. . "I've never had a student tell me that they intentionally plagiarized," said Gardner, who studies moral and ethical standards among academics and other professionals. . In a mea culpa posted on his Web site, Ogletree said several paragraphs in his book "All Deliberate Speed," a 380-page memoir about his life as a child of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, had been taken "practically verbatim" from a Yale law professor, Jack Balkin. The error, he said, had occurred in his rush to meet a deadline, when a pair of research assistants inserted the material into a draft of his manuscript and accidentally dropped the quotation marks and attribution. . The six duplicate paragraphs were discovered by a law professor who sent anonymous letters to both the dean of the law school, Elena Kagan, and to Balkin. "It was a crushing experience," Ogletree said, referring to learning of the error. . He immediately notified his publisher, he said, who then inserted an errata note in all the undistributed books. . After Tribe, one of the nation's leading constitutional law scholars, publicly expressed sympathy for Ogletree and raised questions on a legal affairs Web site about the "larger problem" of "writers, political office seekers, judges and other high government officials passing off the work of others as their own," The Weekly Standard reported that Tribe's 1985 book about the selection of Supreme Court justices, "God Save This Honorable Court," had "perhaps an 'uncomfortable reliance"' on a book by an emeritus professor at the University of Virginia, Henry Abraham. . The Weekly Standard's article was prompted by a tip from a law professor who wished to remain anonymous, according to Joseph Bottum, The Standard's books and arts editor, who wrote the article. Bottum said he found identical 19-word sentences in both books, and more than a couple of dozen instances of similar wording. . Tribe, who had been named recently by Harvard's president, Lawrence Summers, as one of 17 university professors, the highest academic ranking, immediately issued a public apology. His "well-meaning effort to write a book accessible to a lay audience through the omission of any footnotes or endnotes - in contrast to the practice I have always followed in my scholarly writing - came at an unacceptable cost: my failure to attribute some of the material The Weekly Standard identified." . His book, however, did credit Abraham's book, "Justices and Presidents," as the "leading political history of Court appointments." . Tribe declined to comment on the matter. His office released a letter that it said Tribe sent to Abraham 20 years ago, along with a copy of Tribe's manuscript; Tribe wrote that he had drawn on Abraham's book, in part, and asked for his reactions. . At the behest of Kagan of the law school, Derek Bok, the former Harvard president, and Robert Clark, the former dean of the law school, examined Ogletree's book. Kagan said publicly that she concurred with their finding: Ogletree's error was "a serious scholarly transgression." Ogletree said he had been disciplined, but neither he nor Harvard officials would be specific. . "Academic integrity is crucial to everything we do at Harvard Law School," said Kagan, who declined to talk about either case. . Tribe's book, which argued that the Senate should exert more influence over the selection of Supreme Court justices, is widely seen as having helped Democrats defeat the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork. . While some scholars see lapses like Tribe's as an erosion of academic standards, others view the Standard's article on Tribe as an ideological attack. . "It's payback time," said Stephen Gillers, a professor of legal ethics at New York University Law School." . |