Four Academic Plagiarists You've Never Heard Of: How Many More Are Out There?

Chronicle of Higher Education ^ | December 17, 2004 | Thomas Bartlett and Scott Smallwood

[billorites]

Second author is in possession of a most infelicitous name.

[snarks_when_bored]

(laugh) You posted this thread for that joke, huh?

[snarks_when_bored]

On a more serious note, wait until the current generation of high-school and college students hits academia.

Maybe Microsoft will add a Plagiarism Check module to Word to augment its Spell Check.

[vetvetdoug]

These liberal elites complaining about plagiarism are full of it. As long as MLK is a deity, the liberal establishment will give him a pass for a doctorate dissertation that was mostly plagiarized. If MLK had been a white, he would have been hoisted upon a petard.

[jmcclain19]

Despite the compelling evidence, some of her colleagues told her to forget the matter. Pursuing it could damage another scholar's career and would no doubt be a long, exhausting process. First rule of Plagiarism Club, is we don't talk about Plagiarism Club.

[billorites]

"Maybe Microsoft will add a Plagiarism Check module to Word to augment its Spell Check."

Both my wife and I teach. The colleges subscribe to a commercial service called Turnitin.com. Students are required to hand in papers in Word or similar format. They then go into the database and are compared to each other.

Equally effective is googling student papers. If some borderline student all of a sudden starts to write like Christopher Hitchens searching on a choice phrase or two from the suspicious paper often turns up the exact item on line.

It's like shooting fish in a barrel.

[AD from SpringBay]

Why is this surprising? Colleges are like any other industry filled with all types of people, scheming to claw their way to the top. The only difference is, Profs get tenure and never have to worry about making a profit. Their carrot is publication. Why is it surprising to find dishonesty among a group of people who, more often than not, shun that ol' fashioned Judeo-Christian ethic thingy, where theories of meaning and deconstruction are lauded as "high thought"?

[Fog Nozzle]

Lobachevsky

For many years now, Mr. Danny Kaye, who has been my particular idol since childbirth, has been doing a routine about the great Russian director Stanislavsky and the secret of success in the acting profession. And I thought it would be interesting to stea... to adapt this idea to the field of mathematics. I always like to make explicit the fact that before I went off not too long ago to fight in the trenches, I was a mathematician by profession. I don't like people to get the idea that I have to do this for a living. I mean, it isn't as though I had to do this, you know, I could be making, oh, 3000 dollars a year just teaching.
Be that as it may, some of you may have had occasion to run into mathematicians and to wonder therefore how they got that way, and here, in partial explanation perhaps, is the story of the great Russian mathematician Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky.

Who made me the genius I am today,
The mathematician that others all quote,
Who's the professor that made me that way?
The greatest that ever got chalk on his coat.

One man deserves the credit,
One man deserves the blame,
And Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name.
Hi!
Nicolai Ivanovich Lobach-

I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics:
Plagiarize!

Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
Only be sure always to call it please 'research'.

And ever since I meet this man
My life is not the same,
And Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name.
Hi!
Nicolai Ivanovich Lobach-

I am never forget the day I am given first original paper
to write. It was on analytic and algebraic topology of
locally Euclidean parameterization of infinitely differentiable
Riemannian manifold.
Bozhe moi!
This I know from nothing.
But I think of great Lobachevsky and get idea - ahah!

I have a friend in Minsk,
Who has a friend in Pinsk,
Whose friend in Omsk
Has friend in Tomsk
With friend in Akmolinsk.
His friend in Alexandrovsk
Has friend in Petropavlovsk,
Whose friend somehow
Is solving now
The problem in Dnepropetrovsk.

And when his work is done -
Ha ha! - begins the fun.
From Dnepropetrovsk
To Petropavlovsk,
By way of Iliysk,
And Novorossiysk,
To Alexandrovsk to Akmolinsk
To Tomsk to Omsk
To Pinsk to Minsk
To me the news will run,
Yes, to me the news will run!

And then I write
By morning, night,
And afternoon,
And pretty soon
My name in Dnepropetrovsk is cursed,
When he finds out I publish first!

And who made me a big success
And brought me wealth and fame?
Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name.
Hi!
Nicolai Ivanovich Lobach -

I am never forget the day my first book is published.
Every chapter I stole from somewhere else.
Index I copy from old Vladivostok telephone directory.
This book was sensational!
Pravda - well, Pravda - Pravda said: (Russian double-talk)
It stinks.
But Izvestia! Izvestia said: (Russian double-talk)
It stinks.
Metro-Goldwyn-Moskva buys movie rights for six million rubles,
Changing title to 'The Eternal Triangle',
With Brigitte Bardot playing part of hypotenuse.

And who deserves the credit?
And who deserves the blame?
Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name.
Hi!

http://wiw.org/%7edrz/tom.lehrer/revisited.html#lobachevsky

[mountaineer]

The central purpose of both papers -- to examine where famous country-music performers were born -- is the same.

That's some seriously scholarly stuff, especially from a geography professor. Does the phrase "dumbing down of America" ring a bell?

[nicollo]

Plagiarism don't pay? Try this one, from my alma-mater, a brain-dead, leftist camp that used to be one of the best country-club schools in the world:

Hamilton College president, who resigned over plagiarism, highest paid in nation: Severance Pay: $827,000

I'd almost say this is unbelievable, but it's not. It's exactly the kind of thing institution would do when it has no idea of what it is supposed to be. Btw, this guy Tobin is a class-A a$$. The stories I could tell.

[Alouette]

If one scholar plagiarizes another, but everybody keeps quiet, did it really happen?

In 1998, someone sent me an article from the (now defunct) magazine Columbiad about Jewish Civil War chaplains, knowing that I am an avid Civil War buff.

Imagine my surprise when I read the article and found that in contained, word-for-word, several pages of another article that I wrote in 1992 for The Jewish Observer magazine.

Silly me, wanting to get credit for my own original work and not realizing that this is SOP in academia, I initiated proceedings to reclaim my intellectual property. As a result, the magazine published an apology and I received a cash settlement from the perp, a graduate student at the Hebrew Union College.

The perp whined that "nobody taught us anything about 'fair use' and 'copyright laws'" and then claimed "the computer ate my footnotes."

I gave the cash to the charity of my choice.

[snarks_when_bored]

That's good to hear (unless you're the desperate student who's sweating out the night before a 20-page essay is due).

How do you prevent students from using text-messaging cellphones during exams?

[billorites]

"the computer ate my footnotes."

Never had that problem with WordStar.

[Our man in washington]

Let me add my own completely original thoughts to the discussion:

Colleges are like any other industry filled with all types of people, scheming to claw their way to the top. The only difference is, Profs get tenure and never have to worry about making a profit. Their carrot is publication. Why is it surprising to find dishonesty among a group of people who, more often than not, shun that ol' fashioned Judeo-Christian ethic thingy, where theories of meaning and deconstruction are lauded as "high thought"?

Yup, that is really what I think.

(Sorry, I'm having a tough day.)

[Bryan]

WordStar. Man, that takes me back about 20 years,

[AD from SpringBay]

That's ok. I'll call this "accidental" plagiarism. Next time be sure and use proper MLA citation.

[AD from SpringBay]

How do you prevent students from using text-messaging cellphones during exams?

Don't allow cell phones during exams & watch 'em like a hawk.

[TexasGreg]

I've had this kind of thing happen to me ... here on the internet. I've written many articles, preached many sermons, and taken many photographs; I've uploaded these writings, these audio sermons, and these photos to my website on the internet. It's amazing how much of my stuff I find floating around the internet, on other people's websites. I sometimes find photos being displayed by others when they link to the photo on my site, rather than just downloading it and uploading it again. The Government of Trinidad and Tobago did it to me, swiping some photos I took while in Trinidad back in 2002.

Many of my articles have been swiped, too. Either in part or in whole, it's amazing how much people are willing to pilfer and claim as their own.

[GGpaX4DumpedTea]

"...WordStar..."?

Wow, does that date you!

[LS]

Actually, we already have it: it's called "www.turnitin.com," and many professors use it. Students submit papers directly to "turnitin," which checks against all known student papers already submitted plus hundreds of on-line documents, books, and articles that are likely subjects for plagiarism. Last semester, out of close to 200 papers submitted, on a 1-5 scale (with 4-5 being trouble signs and a yellow being "take a look") I only had TWO papers "yellow," and none red or orange.

As a history professor, I have no tolerance for idea theft. But there are two mitigating circumstances that non-specialists should know about---one that I don't approve of and one that I think is a legitimate issue.

First, I document the HELL out of everything, to the point of having 3-4 footnotes per paragraph. However, modern publishing, looking to cut costs, strongly pushes you to use a "cluster" end note in which all sources are clustered in order of appearance. Moreover, they urge you (for cost reasons) to paraphrase whenever possible. Now, having just finished "A Patriot's History of the United States" (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1595230017/qid=1092168718/sr=1-5/ref=sr_1_5/103-2648718-1098216?v=glance&s=books), I can tell you that we looked at more than a dozen U.S. history texts, and found, to our horror, that after we took things out of quotation marks, in many cases we had expressed the gist of the quoted material in exactly the same way that at least one other had. While these cases obviously do not apply I do think one can totally by accident "plagiarize" lines (though not entire passages) from other historians and be totally innocent.

The other factor at work is that increasingly history is becoming so narrowly focused on "race, class, gender" that it becomes harder for younger scholars to do "new" takes on "worthy" subjects, because George Washington, the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, the stand at Little Round Top are no longer "worthy" subjects for "young scholars"---unless they can find race, class, or gender somewhere in those topics. So, people increasingly write about the same things, and, not surprisingly, say the same things.