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Wednesday, March 09, 2005

PUNGENT PLAGIARISM


Here’s a plagiarism story with a fine ironic bouquet: An applicant for a college's presidency had someone else write his essay about his leadership skills:


‘Des Moines Area Community College’s board claims when Dr. Gilbert applied for the position of president, he plagiarized an essay about his leadership abilities. The board says Gilbert admitted he plagiarized. …While he admits paying a thousand dollars for a professional resume service, he says he never admitted to plagiarism. Channel 13 talked with him Monday night on the phone, and he says, "To say I have admitted to plagiarism is not accurate. I also did not misrepresent, fabricate or falsify any information on my application.”’


How much of a leader can you be if you can’t write your leadership essay? Or does it show leadership that you’re cynical enough about being a college president to delegate to a paid agent a series of generic cliches about leadership?

This sort of plagiarism story harks back [see UD, 6/3/04] to the one where (if UD may quote an earlier post):


' The chairman of the Orange County school board, Keith Cook, plagiarized the high school graduation speech he recently gave at the University of North Carolina's Smith Center... .

An alert parent, for whom Cook's speech stirred vague memories, hit the internet after the ceremony and found that the same speech had been given a few years earlier by Donna Shalala, former secretary of health and human services.

Responses from Mr. Cook and his allies on the school board only deepened the dismay on the part of UNC officials: confronted with the plagiarism, Mr. Cook first said he had written the speech; he then said that he had downloaded the speech from a site he'd found by typing "graduation speeches" into Google. In any case, said Cook, he thought it was okay to take the speech as his own, because it looked like "a generic speech."

A fellow school board member said: "I'm sure he didn't mean any harm. He had his reasons, and he's the only one who knows why he chose that particular speech." '




These two incidents share the plagiarizing of a piece of writing whose content intends to highlight values like personal integrity, the ability to be your own person, the importance of finding your own voice and showing your own initiative. Both pieces of writing intend to demonstrate, among other things, that you are the sort of person who would never plagiarize.

Because of its strangely self-consuming character, UD finds this among the most intriguing plagiarism-genres.