Plagiarism in high places

Two articles from Business Insider — 1, 2 — document plagiarism in the MIT dissertation of Neri Oxman, identified as “Bill Ackman’s celebrity academic wife.” Ackman is of course the Harvard alumnus who pushed for Claudine Gay’s resignation as Harvard’s president. Oxman’s sources include Wikipedia artices.

Here’s one example:

Wikipedia: “By spacing the warp more closely, it can completely cover the weft that binds it, giving a warpfaced textile.”

Oxman: “By spacing the warp more closely, it can completely cover the weft that binds it, giving a warp faced textile.”

Notice that as she plagiazed, Oxman left the dangling particple uncorrected. And she clumsily miscorrected warpfaced by splitting it into two unhyphenated words. Gotta wonder sometimes who bothers to read the dissertations and theses they’re signing off on.

For her part Oxman has acknowledged mistakes and will ask MIT to make “any necessary corrections.” And Acknan says that “Part of what makes [Oxman] human is that she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate.”

Related reading
All OCA plagiarism posts (Pinboard)

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.

iA Writer is not AI

From an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “ChatGPT Has Changed Teaching. Our Readers Tell Us How,” quoting an instructor’s revised syllabus:

“Since writing, analytical, and critical-thinking skills are part of the learning outcomes of this course, all writing assignments should be prepared by the student,” it reads, in part. “Developing strong competencies in this area will prepare you for the competitive work force. Therefore, AI-generated submissions (using ChatGPT, IA Writer, Midjourney, DALL-E, etc.) are not permitted and will be treated as plagiarism.”

Yikes: iA Writer is not an app for AI-generated prose. It is a writing app for humans who use macOS, iOS, iPadOS, Windows, and Android. The app should not be confused with AI-Writer, an online app for AI-generated prose.

The latest versions of IA Writer for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS offer an option to to mark copy-and-pasted AI-generated text so as to distinguish it from the writer’s own words. But that’s an option meant to keep a writer from passing off AI-generated text as their own.

I’m a happy user of iA Writer, and I’d hate to think of any professor mistakenly warning a student off it.

Related posts
iA Writer : iA Writer keyboard commands

[I don’t know anything about AI-Writer.]

I’m sorry too, ChatGPT

Elaine and I have been toying with ChatGPT. And it appears that the rules of engagement are tightening. A couple of days ago Elaine was a celebrated pianist who had performed with orchestras around the world. Hot damn! And I was a writer who had won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. $100,000! But this morning,

I’m sorry, but I don’t have any information about [our names here]. As a large language model trained by OpenAI, my knowledge is limited to what I was trained on, and I don’t have the ability to browse the internet or access any additional information. I apologize if I cannot be of more help.

I don’t believe that ChatGPT means the end of high-school English. But it will certainly make life more difficult for uncrafty teachers. Something crafty students should understand is that teachers can enter the same prompts their students have entered. Plagiarism by way of ChatGPT will likely be hilariously detectable (I hope).

Supreme inconsistency

Gonna be very weird if Supreme Court ends a constitutional right to obtain an abortion next week, saying it should be left to the States to decide, right after it just imposed a constitutional right to concealed carry of firearms, saying it cannot be left to the States to decide

— Neal Katyal (@neal_katyal) June 23, 2022

Cross my heart — this is exactly the point I made about three hours ago as Elaine and I were pulling into a Walgreen’s parking lot.

[I call anticipatory plagiarism.]

“Striking similarities” between commencement speeches

At Duke University, a commencement speech that bears “striking similarities” to one delivered at Harvard University eight years ago.

One way to ensure that your commencement speech will not bear striking similarities to someone else’s commencement speech: don’t carefully “reword” (as they say) passages from that other speech.

The awkward question to ask: How likely is it that this commencement speech marks the first time the speechmaker has taken someone else’s words and ideas, made slight alterations, and presented the result as her own work?

*

May 13: Here’s a side-by-side video comparison.

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.]

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.]

Twelve movies

[Or nine movies and three Netflix series. One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers.]

The L-Shaped Room (dir. Bryan Forbes, 1962). Leslie Caron as Jane Fosset, a young Frenchwoman, unmarried and pregnant and living in a London boarding house. Jane’s dilemma — to have the child or not — is at the center of things. But the film is also a portrait of Jane among the boarding house residents — a struggling writer (Tom Bell), a jazz trumpeter (Brock Peters), an aging music-hall performer (Cicely Courtneidge), and a prostitute in the basement rooms (Patricia Phoenix). A great understated story of life amid bedbugs and thin walls. ★★★★

[A friend who had last seen this film in 1965 asked if it was available from the Criterion Channel or Kanopy — no, but I found it on YouTube. Also by Bryan Forbes: Seance on a Wet Afternoon, which I also recommend.]

*

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (dir. Marielle Heller, 2019). A story, I’d say, of a spiritual master and an unlikely, unwilling disciple, based on the friendship that grew between Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) and an angry, cynical journalist (Matthew Rhys) who came to do an interview. One of the best things about the film in its use of the elements of a Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood episode to tell the story. Another is, of course, Tom Hanks: even if he can’t get Daniel Tiger’s voice right, he is uncanny in his ability to suggest Fred Rogers’s way of being in the world. Watch for the moment when Hanks, seen from behind, walks across the television studio: it’s like seeing Mister Rogers again. ★★★★

*

Fragile Trust: Plagiarism, Power, and Jayson Blair at “The New York Times” (dir. Samantha Grant, 2013). Watching this documentary (which I’d watched in 2014 and forgotten about) is what comes of browsing the the F shelves in the library. Blair was an accomplished fabulist and plagiarist at the Times, where the uncovering of his many deceptions led not to a grade of F but to his resignation and the resignations of Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd. Like so many plagiarists, Blair seems a cipher, unwracked by guilt, amused to be asked the obvious question of why he did what he did: “This one again!” The director never pushes hard enough to produce cracks in the facade, but that may be because the facade is, indeed, so obviously a facade. ★★★

*

I Wake Up Screaming (dir. H. Bruce Humberstone, 1941). Forget Betty Grable; forget Victor Mature. This is Laird Cregar’s finest hour, as psycho-cop Ed Cornell. As a shadow in an interrogation room, as a starkly-lit profile outside a cafeteria window, Cornell is an ultra-creepy figure, even more so when he utters tough-guy lines with soft-spoken elegance: “I'll follow you into your grave.” In 2020 this film looks like a cautionary tale about social media and sudden fame. ★★★★

*

Wicked Woman (dir. Russell Rouse, 1953). I found to this movie on YouTube after seeing Percy Helton in a Zippy strip. It’s Helton’s finest hour, and one of the seamiest movies I’ve seen — a masterpiece of seaminess that makes, say, The Postman Always Rings Twice feel wholesome by comparison. Beverly Michaels is wicked Billie Nash, living in a crummy rooming house, working at a bar, and making a play for Matt the bartender (Richard Egan) as his wife Dora (Evelyn Scott) drinks her life away in a corner. Meanwhile, little old rooming-house neighbor Charlie (Helton) makes an ever-more threatening play for Billie. ★★★★

*

Bombshell (dir. Jay Roach, 2019). The lives of women at Fox News. Front and center: Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron), Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman), and a (fictional) young evangelical, Kayla Pospisil (Margot Robbie). John Lithgow is a monstrous Roger Ailes, humiliating women in his office. The most powerful scene in the movie has Ailes doing just that, directing Pospisil to lift her skirt ever higher: “It’s a visual medium, Kayla.” ★★★★

*

The Ballad of Fred Hersch (dir. Charlotte Lagarde and Carrie Lozano, 2016). Fred Hersch is an extraordinary pianist, a jazz pianist, to be sure, but his repertoire extends to improvisations on folk songs, Billy Joel, and Joni Mitchell. Hersch’s music is both intensely heartfelt and intensely cerebral, mixing romanticism and abstraction and requiring an audience’s full attention (when he plays at the Village Vanguard, listen to how intently the audience is listening). This documentary, now free at Vimeo, is part performance, part biography, the story of an openly gay, HIV-positive musician who’s survived harrowing health challenges. Listen closely — in this age of the coronavirus, you can do so via Hersch’s daily live-streamed performances. ★★★★

*

Netflix days

Unorthodox (dir. Maria Schrader, 2020). A loose adaptation of Deborah Feldman’s memoir of fleeing a Brooklyn Hasidic community for a life in the larger world. Shira Haas plays Esther Shapiro, a young wife who tries to live up to her community’s norms before leaving Brooklyn for Berlin, where she falls in with a cheerful, cosmopolitan group of music students. But Esther doesn’t know that her husband Yakov (Amit Rahav) and his thuggish cousin Moische (Jeff Wilbusch) have set out to find her and bring her back. “So much damage done in Brooklyn in the name of God.” ★★★★

Tiger King (dir. Rebecca Chaiklin and Eric Goode, 2020). A bizarro world of feuds and criminality among devotees of big cats, each of whom, depending upon whom you believe, a.) exploits or b.) cares for tigers and other species (including the human) in private parks. All I can say is that Joe Exotic, Jeff Lowe, Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, Carole and Howard Baskin, and their associates are quite a group of unsavory personalities. (Which raises the question: is there such a thing as a “savory” personality?) My favorite line mixes the mad and the mundane: “I already knew he was batshit-crazy from our conversations at Wal-Mart.” ★★★★

Wild Wild Country (dir. Chapman Way and Maclain Way, 2018). A bizarro world of spiritual seekers, Rolls-Royces, Learjets, and semi-automatic weapons. At its center: Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, a spiritual leader who went to Oregon with his followers to live on a massive ranch, develop businesses thereon, and wrest political power from the local community by any means necessary. Interviews with followers are scary testimony to the power of belief to sustain itself, by any means necessary. One of the locals: “These people are crazy.” ★★★★

*

Blind Alley (dir. Charles Vidor, 1939). A story that made me think of Key Largo and Spellbound: Ralph Bellamy plays a professor/psychiatrist whose weekend retreat is taken over by an escaped convict (Chester Morris) and his henchmen. As the night wears on, the man of reason helps the man of unreason understand the dream that has tormented him for years. More brutal than the 1948 remake The Dark Past (dir. Rudolph Maté). As always, I take perverse pleasure in movie versions of academic life: here it’s a lakefront getaway, servants, no papers to grade. ★★★★

*

Angels Over Broadway (dir. Ben Hecht, 1940). It gets labeled as film noir, but it feels to me more like a fable or fairytale, or perhaps film noir directed by Ernst Lubitsch. A embezzling clerk, Charles Engle (John Qualen), falls in with a con artist (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), a showgirl (Rita Hayworth), and a failing playwright (Thomas Mitchell) who’s determined to rewrite the embezzler’s life and give it a happy ending. Snappy dialogue and strong atmosphere help offset a disjointed plot. Hayworth has the best line: “We’re all nickels and dimes, you, me, and Engle.” ★★★

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All OCA film posts (Pinboard)

Source sans attribution, attribution sans source

Our household has been hit with an improbable double whammy.

The first whammy: some years ago, my university’s student newspaper published a column about how to e-mail professors. The column was the work of a former student and borrowed without attribution from my post How to e-mail a professor. The column began with links to my post and to a couple of other items online. The column went on to present what purported to be the writer’s own considered advice, with three passages following, very closely, the phrasing of three passages in my post, with no indication of a source. The student writer thought I’d be happy to see his effort. Yikes.

I explained to the student and to the newspaper’s advisors in the journalism department why this column was a problem. I cited the responses of colleagues and friends who had read the student’s column. I quoted statements about plagiarism and paraphrase and attribution from the websites of prestigious college-journalism programs. As Schlitzie would say, “Y’see? Y’see?” I was told in response that one can’t copyright ideas. There’s no arguing with Messrs. Dunning and Kruger.

The second whammy: last week, the university’s student newspaper has published a review of Elaine’s recent recital. One problem: the writer included comments from imaginary audience members. A second problem: the writer included comments purported to be from Elaine (identified as a former English professor), about the difficulty of being a woman in “the music industry.” (The music industry! Lordy.) A third problem: the writer did not attend the recital. Why try to build a résumé with such inane fabulation? It’s beyond me.

To its credit, the paper has removed the review from its website. The paper gets just one or two points partial credit for issuing (in print only) an oddly worded correction. The correction does not acknowledge that the audience members were imaginary, that Elaine never spoke to the writer, and that the writer did not attend the recital. The correction says instead that the names of the audience members quoted cannot be verified and that Elaine says that she did not say the words attributed to her. Thus the paper leaves the truth of the article in the eye of the beholder.

The first whammy was a matter of source sans attribution. The second, attribution sans source. Each absurd. Together, absurder.

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.]

Dylan, Homer, and Cliff

Andrea Pitzer wonders: does Bob Dylan’s Nobel lecture borrow from the SparkNotes for Moby-Dick? The phrasings themselves — for instance, “encounters other whaling vessels” — are not always especially distinctive. It’s their number and their sequence (in twenty of the seventy-eight sentences that Dylan devotes to Melville’s novel) that are reason for suspicion. To my eye, it’s plagiarism, of an especially pathetic sort. Dylan is plagiarizing a plot summary.

I began to wonder about Dylan’s Nobel commentary on the Odyssey. His summary of the poem’s action is loose and inaccurate, and I see nothing there to suggest a source. But look at this passage from the CliffsNotes for Book 11:

More controversial is Achilles’ appearance because it contradicts the heroic ideal of death with honor, resulting in some form of glorious immortality. Here, Achilles' attitude is that death is death; he would rather be a living slave to a tenant farmer than king of the dead. His only solace is to hear that his son fares well in life.

And look again at Dylan’s one extended comment on the poem, which cheered me when I read it earlier this month:

When Odysseus in The Odyssey visits the famed warrior Achilles in the underworld — Achilles, who traded a long life full of peace and contentment for a short one full of honor and glory — tells Odysseus it was all a mistake. “I just died, that’s all.” There was no honor. No immortality. And that if he could, he would choose to go back and be a lowly slave to a tenant farmer on Earth rather than be what he is — a king in the land of the dead — that whatever his struggles of life were, they were preferable to being here in this dead place.

Cliff: “he would rather be a living slave to a tenant farmer than king of the dead.”

Dylan: “he would choose to go back and be a lowly slave to a tenant farmer on Earth rather than be what he is — a king in the land of the dead.”

I thought that “tenant farmer” must have come from Robert Fagles’s translation. But no, CliffsNotes are the unmistakable source for that phrase, “king,” and “of the dead.” Dammit, it’s plagiarism.

You read it here first.

On hope

What James Comey says Donald Trump said: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

Andrew Storm on bosses’ hopes:

In a 1995 case, KNTV, Inc., the company president had a private meeting with a reporter where the president told the reporter, “I hope you won’t continue to be an agitator or antagonize the people in the newsroom.” The [National Labor Relations Board] found that the statement was coercive in large part because it was made by the company’s highest ranking official and it was made in a meeting that the reporter was required to attend alone. Sound familiar?

In other words, the expert agency that regularly adjudicates disputes about whether particular statements by an employer rise to the level of coercion has held that when the president of an organization expresses his “hopes” in a private conversation with a worker, those comments will likely have a “chilling effect” on the employee.

As Mark Liberman observes, it’s common sense to recognize that Trump’s “I hope you can let this go” was meant to be heard as a directive.

My academic example: Imagine a chair or dean, after a meeting has ended, asking for a private word with a faculty member who suspects plagiarism in the work of some favored student: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Biff go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” There’s no question that in such a setting, “I hope” is a directive, one that you disregard at your own risk.

See also Anthony Lane on Trump and Comey and hope.

Words and bonds and borrowings

Michelle Obama in 2008:

“Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you’re going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don’t know them, and even if you don’t agree with them.”

“Your word is your bond”: why aren’t those words a matter of plagiarism? Because they’re meant to be recognized as a borrowing. Dictum meum pactum , “My word is my bond,” is the motto of the London Stock Exchange. The philosopher J. L. Austin adapted that motto in his How to Do Things with Words (1962):

For one who says “promising is not merely a matter of uttering words! It is an inward and spiritual act!” is apt to appear as a solid moralist standing out against a generation of superficial theorizers: we see him as he sees himself, surveying the invisible depths of ethical space, with all the distinction of a specialist in the sui generis . Yet he provides Hippolytus with a let-out, the bigamist with an excuse for his “I do” and the welsher with a defense for his “I bet.” Accuracy and morality alike are on the side of the plain saying that our word is our bond.

The poet Geoffrey HIll borrowed Austin’s words in a 1983 essay, “Our Word Is Our Bond.” More recently, Austin’s words showed up in Marianne Constable’s punning book title Our Word Is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts (2014).

Austin, HIll, and Constable all intend that their borrowings be recognized: that’s the whole point. There’s a world of difference between a borrowing meant to be recognized — an allusion, and the unacknowledged use of words passed off as one’s own.

I used to think about allusion all the time. This page gives some idea.

A related post
Abby and Austin

[In Constable’s title, speech acts is not a plural noun: acts is a verb. Clever.]

Lend me your ears passages

From Wikipedia, items in an odd and funny series: “Meredith McIver is a staff writer for The Trump Organization, author, former ballerina, and registered Democrat.” And now she has taken responsibility for the appearance of words from a Michelle Obama speech in Melania Trump’s Monday night speech. From Ms. McIver’s statement:

In working with Melania on her recent First Lady speech, we discussed many people who inspired her and messages she wanted to share with the American people. A person she has always liked is Michelle Obama. Over the phone, she read me some passages from Mrs. Obama’s speech as examples. I wrote them down and later included some of the phrasing in the draft that ultimately became the final speech. I did not check Mrs. Obama’s speeches. This was my mistake and I feel terrible for the chaos I have caused Melania and the Trumps as well as to Mrs. Obama. No harm was meant.

This explanation leaves an important question unanswered: did Ms. Trump make clear that she was reading passages from Ms. Obama’s speech? That these passages were from Ms. Obama’s speech doesn’t mean that Ms. McIver knew that at the time . Either way, it’s plagiarism, but it’s not clear to me who really bears greater responsibility for passing off Ms. Obama’s words as Ms. Trump’s own.

“In working with Melania . . . , we discussed,” “First Lady speech,” “the chaos I have caused Melania and the Trumps as well as to Mrs. Obama”: I think Ms. McIver could use some help with her own writing. Here is the text of her statement.

A related post
It’s plagiarism

[It feels odd to me to write “Ms. Obama” and “Ms. Trump.” But since the surnames alone suggest Barack and Donald, I have done so. To me, Ms. Obama is “Michelle.” I met her, back in 2004, here in downstate Illinois. Too bad she won’t run for Senate.]

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)

Recently updated

Crosswords, copied A plagiarism scandal, now with (minimal) consequences.

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.

Cartoon plagiarism

The cartoonist Jeff Parker, a recent victim of plagiarism by one “William Charles”: “How bad are you at editing that you couldn’t notice your ‘cartoonist’ has been wildly swinging from one style to another, like Tarzan on Red Bull?” “Cartoon plagiarism and the case of the unknown Maryland cartoonist” (The Washington Post ).

The strangely mild attitude of Montgomery Sentinel editor Brian Karem toward his pseudonymous serial plagiarist (“that’s two strikes against him”) is appalling. I’d say that the plagiarist has already struck out — and that he should be thrown off the team.

Another college president plagiarizing?

News from 13News: “The incoming president of Virginia Wesleyan College has a history of plagiarism, according to a book and published media reports.”

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

Related reading
All OCA plagiarism posts (Pinboard)