plagiarism

[Greg Nowell]

Actually there's so much of it around I don't know what
to say.  Martin Luther King plagiarized parts of his
Ph.D. dissertation.  I get several plagiarism cases a
year, teaching.  The Guatemalan book.  Two writers at
the Boston Globe, Mike Barnicle and a woman whose name
I don't know.  My ex-wife's father has a tenured job at
Emerson College in Boston and never even wrote a Ph.D.
thesis.  I had thought to flatter him by dropping by
Boston University to read it and then talk to him about
it.  Instead I found out that he had never written so
much as a Master's thesis.  Interestingly, he was a
reverend and graduated in the same class as Martin
Luther King.

It's hard to enforce, too.  If I get a paper I consider
possibly plagiarized, if I can't immediately find it on
the internet then I would have to go to the library and
root around (assuming I don't recognize it).

I had a Korean student who, in a course in
international relations, plagiarized a paper by J.A.
Hobson by me, that I had placed on the internet.

So some made-up elements in a book about Guatemala
don't surprise me.  I'm sure the right wingers
plagiarize I just don't know how often they get caught.

Then there's the terrific scandal that plagued the 1st
edition of Abraham's excellent book (which I've used in
classes) on the Weimar republic.  He apparently had
used as verbatim quotations in teh book material from
his archive notes that was in fact summaries.   He was
descended on by banshees and ended up going to law
skool, driven from the history profession.   I thought
that such a "crime" "did not rise to the level" of
impeachment but there you are.

--
Gregory P. Nowell
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science, Milne 100
State University of New York
135 Western Ave.
Albany, New York 12222

Fax 518-442-5298