What plagiarism looks like

[Image from What Plagiarism Looks Like.]

Some enterprising readers (faculty? student-journalists?) have gone through the dissertations of Carl Boening and William Meehan, highlighting every passage in Meehan's that can be found, word for word, in Boening's. Neither the University of Alabama (which granted Boening and Meehan their doctorates) nor Jacksonville State University, where Meehan is president, has chosen to take up the obvious questions about plagiarism that Meehan's dissertation presents. As another recent story suggests, plagiarism seems to be governed by a sliding scale, with consequences lessening as the wrongdoer's status rises.

With Meehan's dissertation, things are even worse than the highlighting would suggest: what's yellow is what's word for word. There are further instances of plagiarism in Meehan's work that involve less than word-for-word correspondence.

You can find both dissertations and an index, syncing them page by page, at What Plagiarism Looks Like. That site is the source of the image above.

[The documents are also now at Scribd: Boening dissertation, Meehan dissertation, index.]

[December 5, 2009. A new development: Court stops plagiarism claim against JSU president.]

Related posts
Boening, Meehan, plagiarism
Plagiarism in the academy

Plagiarism in the news

Dora D. Clarke-Pine examined 120 psychology dissertations in search of plagiarism. Checking for word-for-word sequences of ten or more words without proper attribution, she found plagiarism in four of every five dissertations. Checking for word-for-word sequences of five or more words, she found plagiarism in all 120. Read more:

The Seemingly Persistent Rise of Plagiarism (New York Times)

My intuition is that plagiarism is not generally the result of ignorance about what constitutes plagiarism. Think of the widespread habit of rolling through stop signs: everyone knows you’re supposed to stop, but doing otherwise is easy and almost always without consequences.

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All plagiarism posts (via Pinboard)

Plagiarism policy plagiarized?

There's a Little Rascals short, Hook and Ladder (1932), in which the kids spot a fire in the firehouse. "Fire in the firehouse!" they shout.

If Southern Illinois University had a firehouse, it would be burning today. The committee developing a university-wide plagiarism policy appears to have plagiarized Indiana University's plagiarism policy.

Here's the relevant passage from Indiana:

Plagiarism is defined as presenting someone else's work, including the work of other students, as one's own. Any ideas or materials taken from another source for either written or oral use must be fully acknowledged, unless the information is common knowledge. What is considered "common knowledge" may differ from course to course.

a. A student must not adopt or reproduce ideas, opinions, theories, formulas, graphics, or pictures of another person without acknowledgment.

b. A student must give credit to the originality of others and acknowledge indebtedness whenever:

(1) directly quoting another person's actual words, whether oral or written;

(2) using another person's ideas, opinions, or theories;

(3) paraphrasing the words, ideas, opinions, or theories of others, whether oral or written;

(4) borrowing facts, statistics, or illustrative material; or

(5) offering materials assembled or collected by others in the form of projects or collections without acknowledgment.

And now behold the following passage from Southern's draft policy, offered without attribution:

Plagiarism is presenting another existing work, original ideas, or creative expressions as one's own without proper attribution. Any ideas or materials taken from another source, including one's own work, must be fully acknowledged unless the information is common knowledge. What is considered "common knowledge" may differ from subject to subject. To avoid plagiarizing, one must not adopt or reproduce material from existing work without acknowledging the original source. Existing work includes but is not limited to ideas, opinions, theories, formulas, graphics, and pictures. Examples of plagiarism, subject to interpretation, include but are not limited to directly quoting another's actual words, whether oral or written; using another's ideas, opinions, or theories; paraphrasing the words, ideas, opinions, or theories of others, whether oral or written; borrowing facts, statistics, or illustrative material; and offering materials assembled or collected by others in the form of projects or collections without acknowledgment.

Says Arthur M. "Lain" Adkins, chair of the SIU committee that created the draft policy, "It could be a coincidence."

Says SIU administrator David West, "We think this is a non-story. It hasn't become official yet. If there's a problem with the draft, we will correct it."

As a college prof, I'm familiar with student use of coincidence and draft defenses. They don't work. Words and phrases and sentences don't organize themselves into parallel series as a matter of coincidence. And when work is submitted for critical evaluation, it becomes something more than a draft. Saying that one hasn't yet added the necessary citation defies any measure of what's plausible. SIU's draft policy has been publicly available for download, as its creators sought comment from the university community. USA Today reports that SIU's trustees will be voting later this spring.

Read more:

SIU accused of copying plagiarism policy, with links to relevant documents as PDFs (The Daily Egyptian)
Southern Illinois' plagiarism policy appears plagiarized (USA Today)

A related post
"Local Norms" and "'organic' attribution"

It’s plagiarism

The New York Times headline is so tactful: “Melania Trump’s Speech Bears Striking Similarities to Michelle Obama’s in 2008.” Striking similarities, yes. It’s plagiarism. The Trump campaign denies it, saying that Ms. Trump’s speech was a matter of “common words and values.” Common words, one after another after another.

Barring sabotage by a disgruntled speechwriter, I can think of three possible defenses:

Ms. Trump (or her speechwriter) had been so moved by Ms. Obama’s speech that whole sentences somehow stuck in memory, to be reproduced as if original.

Because she was giving a speech, Ms. Trump was quoting and paraphrasing without quotation marks or endnotes.

Ms. Trump (or her speechwriter) doesn’t understand persnickety academic or journalistic protocols when working with sources.

Please understand: I have heard some extraordinarily far-fetched defenses of plagiarism. “I read the Cliffs Notes, but I didn’t buy them!” “I was taught to memorize whole pages from this intro text on literary theory!” The three defenses I have imagined here seem to me wholly implausible.

A possible explanation (not defense) of this plagiarism: it’s the Dunning-Kruger effect at work. Many plagiarists lack the competence to understand how easy it is for a discerning audience to detect their plagiarism.

The Times quotes a statement from a Trump spokesman:

“In writing her beautiful speech, Melania’s team of writers took notes on her life’s inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking.”

“Included fragments”: well, that’s plagiarism.

Related reading
All OCA plagiarism posts (Pinboard)

Another college president plagiarizing?

Trouble to the north:

Critics of a southern Minnesota college president have published what they say is evidence that she plagiarized parts of her dissertation for her doctoral degree.

Annette Parker has led South Central College in Faribault and North Mankato since July 2013. She received a doctorate in educational leadership from Western Kentucky University in December 2012.

The evidence, assembled by a former South Central instructor, an instructor’s spouse, and anonymous contributors, appears in a blog post, and it looks pretty damning.

Plagiarism in high places in a minor theme in Orange Crate Art. The presidents of Jacksonville State University, Malone University, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and Tennessee Temple University have appeared in earlier posts.

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March 2, 2015: A second Minnesota college president has been accused of plagiarism.

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April 8, 2015: The Star Tribune reports that Western Kentucky University has concluded that Annette Parker “‘did not intentionally commit plagiarism, and that a full investigation is not warranted.’” I’m reminded of what I wrote in a 2009 post: “plagiarism seems to be governed by a sliding scale, with consequences lessening as the wrongdoer's status rises.”


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May 11, 2015: The second president, Minnesota State College-Southeast Technical’s Dorothy Duran, has been cleared, kinda sort of. A University of Texas at Austin investigation has concluded that Duran’s “behavior does not rise to scientific misconduct”: Second Minnesota college president cleared of plagiarism allegations (Minnesota Star Tribune). That quotation comes from Duran. What else the investigation had to say about her work has not been made public.

Related reading
All OCA plagiarism posts (Pinboard)

Anticipatory plagiarism

[Nancy, November 12, 2021.]

It’s “a famous quote” that circulates online and off, attributed to the sociologist Robert K. Merton:

Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born.

A source? There never is one. In Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (1998), for instance, Anne Fadiman quotes this sentence, attributes it to Merton, and adds

I am unable to provide a citation because my source is a yellow Post-it handed to me by my brother in Captiva, Florida, in November 1996.

Merton comes close to the words “anticipatory plagiarism” in On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript (1965), which looks into the history of the aphorism “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Here’s Merton:

Newton then makes a profoundly sociological observation about the behavior of men in general and by implication, the behavior of men of science in particular, that, until this moment, I had thought I was the first to have made. That anticipatory plagiarist, Newton, follows the sentences I have just quoted from his letter with this penetrating observation

— and so on. Notice that there’s nothing here of a definition. Merton is making a quick joke: he had a thought, but Newton had it first, dammit.

And Winston Churchill had “anticipatory plagiarism” first, or at least before Merton. Here’s Churchill, May 19, 1927, with a remark collected in The Definitive Wit of Winston Churchill (2009) and elsewhere. Churchill was then Chancellor of the Exchequer, addressing the House of Commons:

Mr Lowe seems to have been walking over my footsteps before I had trodden them, because he said, trying to explain what had occurred to the satisfaction of a very strict House in those days: “And so each year will take money from its successor, and this process may go till the end of time, although how it will be settled when the world comes to an end I am at a loss to know.” It was unconscious anticipatory plagiarism.

The weird thing: I recently mentioned anticipatory plagiarism in an e-mail to a friend, tried to recall the source, looked it up, and found Robert K. Merton. But had I remembered a 2013 Orange Crate Art post about cupcakes and handwriting, I would have had it right. And if I had not read Nancy this morning, I would not have thought to write this post.

[Lowe: Robert Lowe.]

Plagiarism in the academy

Fairweather concluded that faculty and administration must deal with the enormous emphasis placed on research and the rewards tied to it before achieving a re-emphasis on teaching.

Fairweather concluded that faculty and administrators must deal with the enormous emphasis placed on research and rewards tied to it before achieving a reemphasis on teaching.

The Associated Press reports that another college president has been accused of plagiarism in a dissertation. William Meehan, president of Alabama's Jacksonville State University, earlier ran into difficulties when newspaper columns published under his name turned out to have been plagiarized by the ghostwriter who assembled the columns.

Neither Jacksonville State University nor the University of Alabama (which granted Meehan his Ed.D.) is preparing to look into the dissertation. Or at least not yet.

The quoted passages above, from dissertations by Carl Boening and Meehan, appear in the AP article. Both dissertations were submitted to the University of Alabama, three years apart.

"[A]chieving a re-emphasis": it's remarkable that anyone would plagiarize that ungainly phrase.

Update: JSU Public Relations Director Patty Hobbs has issued a press release that includes this passage:

These claims have been investigated not only by the university, but by third parties and the university is completely satisfied that there is no substance to the allegations. President Meehan has been clear from the beginning that he used Mr. Boening’s dissertation as a spring board for his own, and Meehan’s dissertation duly credits his predecessor’s work.

This explanation is less than persuasive. The AP article cited above notes that Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today examined the dissertations and "concluded that 'extensive portions' of Meehan's dissertation were plagiarism of Boening's work." In other words, the third-party investigation supports, not discredits, the allegation of plagiarism.

"Spring board" is an interesting metaphor. But one can acknowledge a source while plagiarizing from it. If I say that I'm indebted to your work while borrowing its words and ideas without attribution, I've plagiarized your work.

Related posts
"Local Norms" and "'organic' attribution"
"Plagiarism free"

William Meehan update

The Alabama Supreme Court has ruled that charges of plagiarism against Jacksonville State University president William Meehan have no place in a lawsuit over ownership of a plant collection. [Sic.]

Read all about it:

Court stops plagiarism claim against JSU president (Gadsden Times)

Related posts
Plagiarism in the academy
Boening, Meehan, plagiarism
What plagiarism looks like

Ways to anger professors

Useful advice for students, from Lynn F. Jacobs and Jeremy S. Hyman:

Nine Ways to Get on Your Professor's Bad Side (U.S. News & World Report)

The only item I'd take exception to is no. 9: "Plagiarize in super obvious ways." True, blatant plagiarism won't endear a student to a professor. But crafty, sly plagiarism is much, much worse, in part because its discovery may call for a significant investment of professorial time. Blatant plagiarism in contrast is merely pathetic, as its perpetrator assumes the professor to be a co-conspirator in cluelessness, someone who won't recognize the details of diction and syntax that so often make plagiarism instantly clear. Jacobs and Hyman's no. 5 — "Seem really stupid" — already covers blatant plagiarism.

A better no. 9: Be honest.

A related post
How to e-mail a professor

Another college president plagiarizing

Gary W. Streit, president of Malone University in Canton, Ohio, has resigned. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that “concerns surfaced” about Streit’s use of “unatttributed materials in some of his speeches.” Among Streit’s sources: a Wikipedia article on Janus and “a portion of Enotes.com’s summary of the Robert Frost poem ‘Birches.’”

You might try listening to this January 2010 address and doing a Google search or two as it plays. The first bit that I typed in — even your grandmother has a digital camera — led to an article on Streit’s copying and pasting. That article led me to the AP article that furnished much else in Streit’s text. A search for Mordecai became distressed that all his people would be killed brought up this account of the biblical story of Esther.

The Chronicle notes that because Streit has resigned, there will be no investigation of plagiarism.

Malone U. President Steps Down Amid Plagiarism Accusations (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Other presidential plagiarism posts
Boening, Meehan, plagiarism
“Local Norms” and “‘organic’ attribution”
What plagiarism looks like

Crosswords, copied

From FiveThirtyEight: “A group of eagle-eyed puzzlers, using digital tools, has uncovered a pattern of copying in the professional crossword-puzzle world that has led to accusations of plagiarism and false identity.”

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March 8: From FiveThirtyEight: “The longtime editor of two major crossword puzzle series is temporarily stepping away from his editorial role, the puzzles’ publishers announced Monday, three days after FiveThirtyEight published an investigation into accusations of plagiarism against him.”

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April 29: From FiveThirtyEight: “Universal Uclick, a syndicator of puzzles to newspapers and other publications, says it has confirmed some of the allegations of plagiarism that have been leveled against the editor of its popular Universal Crossword puzzle.” The plagiarizing editor, Timothy Parker, will be returning to his position.

As I wrote in 2009 about a scandal in academia: “plagiarism seems to be governed by a sliding scale, with consequences lessening as the wrongdoer’s status rises.”

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May 9: FiveThirtyEight reports Parker’s puzzles will no longer appear in USA Today or other Gannett Company newspapers.

Tasty signature

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

Tastykake Cupkakes in Illinois? I had to buy a box. And thus I saw the similarity between the kake’s scrawl/scroll and the much derided signature of United States Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. And then, having taken some photographs and schemed a post, I discovered that back in January, the Internets had noticed the similarity between a Hostess product and Lew’s signature.

Richard Posner, in The Little Book of Plagiarism (2007):

[O]ld ideas are constantly being rediscovered by people unaware that the ideas had been discovered already. . . . A rediscoverer or independent discoverer is not a copier, hence not a plagiarist.

One could even argue that it is the earlier discovery of the similarity that counts as plagiarism — an instance of what Winston Churchill called anticipatory plagiarism.


[Jack Lew’s signature.]

Related reading
All plagiarism posts (Pinboard)
Fauxstess cupcakes

“Rewording”

A surprising number of college students are devoted to what they call “rewording”: the practice of taking a passage from someone else’s writing and, uh, rewording it, without attribution. More surprising is that many such students see nothing wrong with this practice. More surprising still is that some of their professors see nothing wrong with it either and even encourage it. I suspect that the Dunning-Kruger effect is at work here: such professors must lack the competence to understand that what they’re encouraging is in fact plagiarism.

There are many authoritative explanations in print of paraphrase, plagiarism, and the inappropriateness of rewording without attribution. Here’s an excerpt from a helpful online explanation, from the Writing Center at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill:

What About Paraphrasing?

Paraphrasing means taking another person’s ideas and putting those ideas in your own words. Paraphrasing does NOT mean changing a word or two in someone else’s sentence, changing the sentence structure while maintaining the original words, or changing a few words to synonyms. If you are tempted to rearrange a sentence in any of these ways, you are writing too close to the original. That’s plagiarizing, not paraphrasing.

Paraphrasing is a fine way to use another person’s ideas to support your argument as long as you attribute the material to the author and cite the source in the text at the end of the sentence. In order to make sure you are paraphrasing in the first place, take notes from your reading with the book closed. Doing so will make it easier to put the ideas in your own words. When you are unsure if you are writing too close to the original, check with your instructor BEFORE you turn in the paper for a grade. So, just to be clear—do you need to cite when you paraphrase? Yes, you do!

Plagiarism (The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

When I talk with students about these matters, I always point out that no matter what they’ve been told, “rewording” without attribution is plagiarism, though perhaps in a hapless and unsophisticated form. Imagine getting an F for a paper or a course without even realizing that you’re engaging in academic misconduct. That’s the Dunning-Kruger effect with a vengeance. Yipes.

Related posts
“Local Norms” and “‘organic’ attribution” (writing without quotation marks)
Old and unimproved (“How to e-mail a professor,” “reworded”)

[My knowledge of “rewording” comes from many conversations over many years with students who have studied in many different institutions. My syllabi and other course materials make clear that “rewording” is a no-no.]

Anti-plagiarism legislation plagiarizes

In Argentina: Gerónimo Vargas Aignasse’s proposed legislation to outlaw plagiarism borrows three paragraphs from the “Plagio” article in the Spanish-language Wikipedia — without attribution. Read all about it:

Argentinian Politician’s Proposal For New Anti-Plagiarism Law Plagiarizes Wikipedia (Techdirt)

I do like the “tres a ocho años” part (prison!).

A related post
Plagiarism policy plagiarized (At Southern Illinois University)

Claudine Gay has resigned

Claudine Gay has resigned the presidency of Harvard University. The New York Times has extensive coverage.

When the charges of plagiarism against Gay became news, I recalled my theory of plagiarism: “plagiarism seems to be governed by a sliding scale, with consequences lessening as the wrongdoer’s status rises.” I thought she’d make it through. But no.

It doesn’t matter who brought the charges (in this case, people whose politics are abhorrent to me). Plagiarism — or research misconduct, or whatever one wants to call it — is a serious matter. Many an undergraduate has been penalized for far less than what appears in Gay’s scholarship.

I recall telling an undergrad who had lifted a single unattributed sentence from a news article, “You can't just take someone else’s words and put them in as your own.” I was cautioning that student: Please, don’t do this. Not good! Someone should have said something like that to Gay.

Boening, Meehan, plagiarism

Plagiarism in the news: the Tuscaloosa News has available for download the University of Alabama dissertations of Carl Boening and William Meehan. Meehan's abstract includes this acknowledgement:

Using a case study and content analysis design, this study replicated at a regional comprehensive institution a study of sabbatical leave patterns that had first been conducted at The University of Alabama in 1996 by Carl Boening.

The phrasing — "a study . . . that had first been conducted" — is odd. It suggests not that Meehan is doing the same kind of thing but that he and Boening are doing the same thing, with Boening having gone first.

A glance at the almost identical tables of contents of the two dissertations makes clear that Meehan is indeed replicating. A couple of samples from Chapters Five:

Boening:

The current chapter was designed to provide a summary of the study and to explore the conclusions and recommendations for further study and practice that may be drawn from the analysis of the data. The chapter is divided into five sections: Summary of the Study, Conclusions, Recommendations for Further Study, Recommendations for Practice, and Chapter Summary.

Meehan:

The current chapter was designed to provide a summary of the study and to offer conclusions and recommendations for further study. The chapter is divided into five sections: Summary of the Study, Conclusions, Discussion, Recommendations, and Chapter Summary.

Boening:

Six research questions were presented in the study for analysis:

Research Question 1:

What were the sabbatical approval patterns, by discipline, at the University of Alabama . . . ?

Research Question 2:

What was the typical requested length of sabbatical period?

Meehan:

Seven research questions were presented in the study for analysis:

Research Question 1: What were the sabbatical leave patterns, by discipline, at Jacksonville State University . . . ?

Research Question 2: What was the typical requested length of sabbatical period?

And so on.

And so on.

These samples make clear that Meehan is not doing the same kind of thing; he is borrowing without attribution the content of Boening's dissertation, with Jacksonville State's sabbatical data replacing data from the University of Alabama.

Is it possible to plagiarize even after acknowledging a source? Yes. Is it possible to plagiarize bland, everyday prose? Yes. Is it possible that a committee saw nothing wrong with replicating a dissertation, even down to its sentences? Yes, in which case Meehan's dissertation, like that of Southern Illinois president Glenn Poshard, raises questions about the standards of scholarship in education programs. But by any standard of academic integrity, William Meehan's dissertation involves plagiarism.

More:

Yes, its [sic] plagiarism (Tuscaloosa News)
Carl Boening dissertation (PDF download, 3.8 MB)
William Meehan dissertation (PDF download, 3.5 MB)

Snopes and plagiarism

David Mikkelson, co-founder of Snopes, turns out to be a serial plagiarist.

Mikkelson’s acknowledgement of “multiple serious copyright violations of content that Snopes didn’t have rights to use” is a tad disingenuous. Using text without permission might be a copyright violation. Putting your own name on that text is plagiarism. Putting your name on a slightly altered version of that text: that, too, is plagiarism.

If you’re “rewording,” as students say, you’re plagiarizing.

Related posts
“Rewording” : Rogeting

[I always mistype plagiarism as plagiairism. I am nothing if not consistent.]

Facades

Thinking about Brett Kavanaugh and the accusations against him makes me think of my encounters with two plagiarizing students. What can I say? My experiences as a teacher color everything I see.

In the cases I have in mind, plagiarism was blatant — word for word or nearly so — and extensive. In each case, the student denied having plagiarized. One asked for a hearing before a judicial board of faculty and students and then withdrew the request, claiming to no longer have the energy to fight “these baseless accusations.” The other went through with a hearing, bringing along pages of notes (never previously mentioned) that supposedly served as the basis for the plagiarized paper. The notes themselves were carefully plagiarized from the source the student used, with slight differences from the student’s submitted essay. (A lot of work went into constructing those notes.) “I did not do this,” the student said, again and again. The board thought otherwise. They could see otherwise. The episode was painful for everyone, and it almost — almost — made me wish that I could read my students’ work with the careless eye that never notices the small details that signal plagiarism.

Each of these plagiarists appeared to be a model collegian — well-liked, mannerly, a maker of good grades. Neither could acknowledge having plagiarized without calling into question that public self, or facade. So too, I think, with Brett Kavanaugh. If he did what he is accused of doing, he cannot acknowledge it without seeing a facade fall to pieces. I wonder if his 1982 diary is something of the equivalent of my student’s notes.

[About the calendar: I’m suggesting not that it was created after the fact but that it’s a dubious kind of evidence. What hard-partying high-school student would record the times and locations of parties on a calendar? And about those good grades: might plagiarism or other forms of academic misconduct have played a part? As a colleague always pointed out, a student plagiarizing in a college class is unlikely to be plagiarizing for the first time.]

Charles Hartman on plagiarism

Charles Hartman writes about being plagiarized: “Defining plagiarism is trickier than you might think, but most of the time we distinguish it from other kinds of copying (allusion, quotation) fairly easily: it’s plagiarism if the copyist hopes no one will notice.”

William H. Chace on plagiarism in college

“The arguments protecting or even championing plagiarism fall before the palpable evidence of originality, modest and grand, ephemeral and enduring, as it has existed in writing everywhere”: William H. Chace, writing about plagiarism in college. Read it all:

A Question of Honor (The American Scholar)