{"id":1105,"date":"2004-09-25T20:41:20","date_gmt":"2004-09-26T04:41:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/09\/25\/plagiarism-and-the-use-of-assistants\/"},"modified":"2004-09-25T20:41:20","modified_gmt":"2004-09-26T04:41:20","slug":"plagiarism-and-the-use-of-assistants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1105","title":{"rendered":"Plagiarism and the Use of Assistants"},"content":{"rendered":"

Various high-profile law professors at Harvard are having plagiarism troubles. Laurence Tribe – possibly the most influential lefty law prof in the world – is guilty of “plagiaphrasing” from another professor in a 1985 book, according to the current Weekly Standard<\/i>.<\/a><\/p>\n

Apparently, Tribe rewrote sentences from a book by a less famous scholar – so that ” noting that he would stand on his record as a Judge and Senator” becomes “said that he would stand on his record as a Senator and a federal appellate judge” in Tribe’s version, and so forth. He did this many, many times, throughout the book. I’ve done the same thing myself, in many academic papers. (Tribe also copied one sentence word-for-word). But Tribe didn’t credit <\/i>his source, apart from a mention in the “Mini-Guide to the Background Literature” printed at the end of the book.<\/p>\n

Is it plagiarism? If you agree with an expert the Weekly Standard <\/i>quoted that “constant paraphrasing without at least semi-regular attribution constitutes a form of plagiarism,” then it is. I’m not sure Tribe could actually be found guilty in a courtroom – but then again, is it too much to ask for that one of the world’s most promiinant and honored legal scholars be held to a higher standard than “probably not convictable?”<\/p>\n

(I should note – perhaps out of a sense of fairness, or perhaps just out of a desire to cover my own behind, depending on how charitably you think of me – that Tribe has not yet responded to the Standard’s <\/i>charges; perhaps this story will look different after Tribe tells his side. UPDATE: Nope, the story doesn’t look different; Tribe has apologized<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

This year’s more interesting Harvard-Law-Professor-Plagiarism case involves another liberal icon, Charles Ogletree. Velvel’s blog <\/a>covers the issue at length. Here the issue is both clearer and a great deal more muddy.<\/p>\n

First, what’s clear – Ogletree definitely plagiarized. The first 2 and a half pages of chapter 16 are taken directly from a book by Yale law professor (and notable blogger<\/a>) Jack Balkin.<\/p>\n

It’s also clear that Ogletree’s plagiarism was an accident (no one would plagiarize so obviously at such length from such a well-known author if they were trying to deceive). As Professor Ogletree explained in his public apology<\/a>:<\/p>\n

During the final stages of the preparation of my book, material from Professor Jack Balkin’s book, What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said<\/i> (NYU Press, 2001), was inserted in a draft section of the book by one of my assistants for the purpose of being reviewed, researched, and summarized by another research assistant with proper attribution to Professor Balkin. The material was inserted with attribution to Professor Balkin, although the extent of the quoted material was not entirely clear because a closing quotation mark was dropped. Unfortunately, the second assistant, under the pressure of meeting a deadline, inadvertently deleted this attribution and edited the text as though it had been written by me.[…] When I reviewed the revised draft I did not realize that this material was authored by Professor Balkin.<\/div>\n

Frankly, Ogletree’s accidental plagiarism – although it involved far more direct quoting – seems to me more acceptable than Tribe’s.<\/p>\n

But at the same time, Ogletree’s explanation points to a more serious and widespread corruption, which Dean Velvel discusses at length – how is it that an accomplished scholar can read through a book he’s currently writing and not <\/i>realize that the first two and a half pages of a chapter were another author’s words?<\/p>\n

Ogletree is a man sufficiently brilliant that he is a professor at the Harvard Law School. Yet he read a draft of his own book so sloppily, so carelessly, that even though the six paragraphs in question are two and one-half pages and 824 words long, and even though they introduce an obviously significant chapter which itself begins an entire section of his book, he did not realize that he himself had not written those paragraphs? A man of his acumen didn\u2019t realize that<\/i>? Boy, that must have been some sloppy reading! […]<\/p>\n

Ogletree doesn\u2019t <\/i>say “When I reviewed the revised draft, I did not realize that I <\/i>was not the author of this material.” Such a statement would of course imply that he was the author of the rest of the material in the book. But rather than say that, Ogletree said “When I reviewed the revised draft I did not realize that this material was authored by Professor Balkin<\/i>.” (Emphasis added.) Well, how in hell was Ogletree supposed to know that Balkin authored the material (unless Ogletree is claiming that he read Balkin\u2019s book and has a near photographic memory)? Ogletree\u2019s wording smacks of being too clever by half. It smacks of wanting to cover up the fact that he knew and expected that parts of his book were written by others — by assistants — and that the problem here was that he assumed the six paragraphs had been written by an assistant while being unaware that they had actually been written by someone wholly unconnected with him.<\/div>\n

This is, of course (and as Dean Velvel points out), an American norm.<\/p>\n

Everywhere <\/i>in this country underlings write the speeches, the briefs, the articles, the books, the p.r. statements for which bosses, superiors, people on top take the credit. Politicians, university presidents, corporate executives, partners in law firms — wherever you turn people on top take the credit for the work of others. There are a million reasons (read excuses) for this: The top guys are too busy to do the work themselves. Or their talents lie elsewhere. Or it\u2019s the job of the flack to do this work. Or the top guy told the flack what to say. Or Mister Big may have reviewed the work, may sometimes even have edited it, and agrees with everything he has put his name too. Or the flack was paid to write the big shot\u2019s book for her. Or this is just the way the world works and everybody is doing it.<\/p>\n

The justification — the excuses — don\u2019t matter. It\u2019s all a form of dishonesty: it all constitutes taking credit for work that was done by others.<\/p><\/div>\n

Of course, being a cartoonist, I read this and immediately thought of Garfield<\/i>, written and drawn entirely by assistants whose names rarely appear. Or of Doonesbury<\/i>, which is still written and penciled by its creator, but is inked by a rarely-credited collaborator. At least those two strips’ creators are honest enough to occasionally credit their collaborators in public – many other comic strips are written and drawn by cartoonists who never <\/i>get credit.<\/p>\n

Is it still plagiarism if it’s the way business is done?<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, due to work-for-hire copyright laws, DC comics can publish all the Superman stories they want. But if the creators (if they were still living) decided to publish a Superman story – now, that <\/i>would be plagiarism<\/a>. To me, work-for-hire creation is (at least in comics and music) primarily a way of making it legal for large corporations to plagiarize the ideas of anyone poor and desperate enough to sign a contract.<\/p>\n

Why do we accept that as being okay? Because it’s just the way business is done.<\/p>\n

(While I’m asking leading questions, is it ironic that a post about plagiarism consists mostly of words quoting from elsewhere? Ah, but blogs are different<\/i>, I tell myself.)<\/p>\n

Anyhow, I highly recommend reading Larry Velvel’s entire post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

UPDATE<\/b>: Tellingly, I forgot to credit my source for most of the links – an anonomous emailer using the handle “AuthorSkeptics,” who presumably has been cold-emailing a lot of bloggers about this. Also, Jeremy’s Weblog <\/a>has a post on the issue. The Boston Globe <\/i>has an article about Ogletree<\/a> featuring many scholars criticizing the write-by-committee approach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Various high-profile law professors at Harvard are having plagiarism troubles. Laurence Tribe – possibly the most influential lefty law prof in the world – is guilty of “plagiaphrasing” from another professor in a 1985 book, according to the current Weekly … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-popular-and-unpopular-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1105\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}