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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Friday, September 14, 2007

A Plagiarist Right Under My Pillow!

Or, well, a few steps from my office, a trip down the elevator, and a hike past a few buildings. And UD didn't even notice. This is a spectacular one.

"And here's his bio (now deleted) at the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University, where he had been a senior fellow."


Yes, UD's own GW has been quick to delete M. Debat, and that's just what they needed to do. Get his name off the university's web pages pronto. Good.

What'd he do? He made up - or lifted - tons of interviews with prominent people:


'Jason Blair is a plagiarism piker next to Alexis Debat.

Debat, a former ABC News consultant, published a series of interviews with leading political figures in Politique Internationale, a well-respected French journal that has been around for nearly 30 years.

Trouble is, the interviews never happened.

Yesterday, Sen. Barack Obama's office flagged Debat's June interview with the Democratic presidential candidate as a fake. Today, the list got a lot longer: Former
President Bill Clinton, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

"This guy is just sick," Patrick Wajsman, the editor of the magazine, told ABC News. He said he's removing all of Debat's articles from the magazine's Web site.

Debat, a a terrorism consultant with ABC for five years, resigned yesterday as a senior fellow on counterterrorism issues at the Nixon Center think tank. He told ABC News his only mistake was to allow his name to be put on interviews done by others.

ABC News says it is reviewing all stories in which Debat was involved. He resigned in June after ABC News officials challenged his academic credentials.

Here's how he was described at the end of an article about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that appeared in In The National Interest:

Dr. Alexis Debat, former advisor to the French minister of Defense on Transatlantic Affairs, is a visiting professor at Middlebury College, Director of the Scientific Committee for the Institut Montaigne (Paris) and a Senior Consultant to ABC News in New York. Dr. Debat is at work on the largest manuscript ever written on the history of the Central Intelligence Agency, to be published next year in Europe and the United States.'


OK - I know this is a mess. I'm going to post it anyway. I've got to teach right now. I'll fix it when I get back to my office.

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UPDATE: I've fixed the margins and all. I had just thrown it on the page any old way on my way to class.

Debat is not just about fakery and plagiarism - it's diploma mill stuff: "Last June, he was discreetly fired by ABC News, because he couldn't authenticate his PhD." How much longer than that did GW keep him on? UD wonders whether there were any suspicions here on campus.


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More detail here.

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le grand debat