.
. . and other excuses.
<>
Monica Crowley, the foreign policy adviser tapped for a White House job under President-elect Donald Trump, will relinquish the post, a transition official told Reuters on Monday.
Crowley had been chosen to serve as senior director of strategic communications at the National Security Council. Her appointment had been shadowed by reports of plagiarism in news outlets including CNN and Politico.
“After much reflection I have decided to remain in New York to pursue other opportunities and will not be taking a position in the incoming administration,” she said in a statement quoted by the Washington Times.
“I greatly appreciate being asked to be part of President-elect Trump’s team and I will continue to enthusiastically support him and his agenda for American renewal."
A CNN review found this month that Crowley plagiarized thousands of words of her 2000 dissertation for her Columbia University Ph.D.
In addition, Politico reported that it found more than a dozen examples of plagiarism in Crowley's Ph.D. Dissertation.*
*
Dr.
(ha, ha, ha!) Crowley's claim that she has decided to remain in New
York “to pursue other opportunities” is a neat revision of the
classic declaration by disgraced politicians that they are resigning
to spend more time with their families. Actually, her action makes
great sense to me; who would trade the opportunity to remain at the
home of the Met, the Met, and the Mets for some Washingtonian
grilling on the provenance of her paragraphs?
I
must confess, though, that I am rather disappointed that Dr. (ha, ha,
ha!) Crowley did not own up to the plagiarism and offer some risible
excuse that we all could kick around for a while. As much as I hate
plagiarism, I love the excuses the perpetrators come up with.
Doris
Kearns Goodwin's explanation for her own plagiaristic misdeeds is too
long and complicated to quote here, involving as it does attics,
boxes, folders, etc.** But her defense actually allows us to level
another accusation against her. “Fourteen years ago,” she writes,
not long after the publication of my book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, I received a communication from author Lynne McTaggart pointing out that material from her book on Kathleen Kennedy had not been properly attributed. I realized that she was right. Though my footnotes repeatedly cited Ms. McTaggart's work, I failed to provide quotation marks for phrases that I had taken verbatim, having assumed that these phrases, drawn from my notes, were my words, not hers.
What
Doris Kearns Goodwin is telling us is that she can't tell her own writing
from another writer's. “I have no style of my own,” she is really confessing. That's one hell of an admittance for a writer. Now, I cannot read my own handwriting, but I know goddamn
well when I see the words printed out, I can tell what's mine and what
isn't. I have a memory (I hope not a false one) of seeing a film clip
of Salvador Dali walking along an art gallery wall with a big paint
brush in his hand decisively making black crosses on canvasses that
he recognized as fake Dalis. Whether the scene actually happened or not, it should serve as an example to all creative artists: recognize your own work, and deal with the unfamiliar as necessary.
Kearns
Goodwin opened her defense in the article cited below by stating, “I
am a historian. with the exception of being a wife and mother, it is
who I am.”***
Well,
I for one would hope that she recognizes her flesh-and-blood
offspring better than her literary ones.
***
(And a tip of the hat to Kathleen Farrell, who emailed me: "Wouldn't you like to know who was on her committee and missed this?")
***There's obviously an error in the original, either in punctuation or capitalization. I've copied-and-pasted directly from the Time website.
*
Also:
Consider
these excerpts from two articles worth reading.
One plagiarism is careless. Two is a pattern. Four, five, or more is pathology.…
No matter what they steal, they fall back on the same excuses, as Thomas Mallon shows in his wonderful plagiarism book Stolen Words. Before the computer age, they blamed their confusing "notebooks," where they allegedly mixed up their own notes with passages recorded elsewhere. These days, plagiarists claim they mistake electronic files of notes with their own writing.
Plagiarists steal for reasons both profound and mundane. In a few cases, plagiarism flows from some deep psychological wellspring: [Jacob] Epstein, the son of eminent literary parents, stole so much and from such an obvious source that he was clearly "committing literary suicide," writes Mallon. Some writers plagiarize because they are rushing a project through and probably don't think they'll get caught. Some are just exceptionally careless.
David Plotz,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/assessment/2002/01/the_plagiarist.1.html
*
[Fareed] Zakaria strongly denied that any assistant or intern wrote his work, and said that his mistake came from mixing up different notes from different sources. That account does not quite explain how the plagiarized paragraph was so closely aligned with its original source, nor how it was unattributed to the writer, Jill Lepore.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/20/fareed-zakaria-plagiarism-scandal-tough-week_n_1810139.html
No comments:
Post a Comment