11.11.02 @ 12:01AM
Scarcely a week seems to go by nowadays without a disclosure of plagiarism, fakery by writers or résumé inflation by someone in a position of trust and influence.
A few months ago the editors of this website were stunned to
discover that a promising young writer had cribbed a large chunk of
one of his articles for the site from the work of three other
writers. He could offer nothing in mitigation, for what can be
offered when it becomes clear that one's written words were
stolen?
Scarcely a week seems to go by nowadays without a disclosure of
plagiarism, fakery by writers or résumé inflation by
someone in a position of trust and influence. Is it a product of
the moral relativism of the times? After all, Clinton & Co.
during their White House years polished moral relativism to
perfection We'll have to leave that question to historians to
answer -- if we can find an objective one.
Readers of the late popular historian Stephen Ambrose were
shocked last January when it was revealed that several passages in
Ambrose's The Wild Blue had been lifted from a book by a
University of Pennsylvania professor. Ambrose apologized,
explaining that proper credit was given in foot or end notes. That,
alas, is not good enough. To quote another's words without putting
them in quotation marks is plagiarism.
In recent years, Ambrose had been writing at lightning speed,
presumably keeping research assistants busy digging up material for
his books. When his plagiarism was discovered it was widely assumed
he was driven by the demands of the marketplace for yet another
popular book which could be turned into a television series or a
movie. Yet it was later shown that Ambrose had borrowed material
from other writers for at least four of his earlier books, as far
back as 1975's Crazy Horse and Custer. Haste is no excuse.
Ambrose knew what he was doing.
In the wake of the Ambrose revelations Doris Kearns Goodwin,
frequently a guest on PBS's "NewsHour," had "borrowed" passages
from others for the original edition of The Fitzgeralds and the
Kennedys. She claimed she had done so inadvertently and had
corrected the problem in later editions. Nevertheless, she resigned
from the Pulitzer Prize board and has kept a very low profile ever
since.
The chairman of the classics department at the State University
of New York in Albany resigned his post when he was confronted with
the accusation that he had plagiarized 50-plus pages of Latin
translations from other writers.
If you use someone else's words and palm them off as your own,
you are lying. Lying of another sort was the downfall recently of
Michael Bellesiles, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta. His
October 2000 book, Arming America: The Origins of a National
Gun Culture, received many favorable reviews and was acclaimed
by gun control advocates as putting to rest the notion that a large
number of colonial and Revolutionary War Americans owned
firearms.
Scholars soon raised questions about Bellesiles' research. Emory
University appointed a committee of scholars from Princeton,
Harvard and the University of Chicago to investigate. They
concluded that Bellesiles's book included "exaggeration of data"
and was "unprofessional and misleading."
Bellesiles claimed to have studied more than 10,000 probate
records to come to the conclusion that only a small percentage of
people of that era owned guns. Alas for those seeking to check
these records, most had been lost in a flood, according to
Bellesiles. Of those that could be found many had been used
erroneously by Bellesiles to support his thesis. Fraudulent
research, to serve a particular cause, is, like plagiarism, lying.
Like Bellesiles, many writers of history show bias in their work
(Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s tireless promotion of liberal themes and
denigration of conservatives comes to mind), but few are accused by
their peers of "evidence of falsification," as Bellesiles was. The
upshot: Bellesiles resigned from Emory.
Fakery of another kind is the doctored résumé, a
form of lying found with distressing frequency in the business
world. In the last month three chief executive officers were
discovered to have been at it. One Bryan J. Mitchell, chairman and
CEO of MCG Capital Corp., was stripped of his chairmanship and a
$350,000 bonus by the company's board after it was discovered he
had not graduated from Syracuse University as he had been claiming
for 15 years. A routine inquiry from a journalist uncovered the
lie.
At Bausch & Lomb, the optical company, Ronald L. Zarrella,
the chief executive, lost a $1.1 million bonus for falsely claiming
he had graduated from business school. Before that, Kenneth E.
Lonchar resigned as the head of Veritas Software Corp. after he had
falsely claimed to have earned an MBA from Stanford.
In all three cases the on-the-job performance of the executives
was not in question. If, however, a CEO lies on his
résumé the company's reputation for reliability and
veracity is called into question. Like plagiarism, the lie cannot
be erased, for the world can never be sure it will not be
repeated.
What about the young writer at our website? He was terminated at
once -- and permanently.
topics:
Television, Business, Books
