Our 9/16/04 e-mail overviewing our news summary of Harvard plagiarism stories since 2002

(We included this introduction and explanatory note at the top of our September 16 e-mail, in which we summarized the coverage to date of the Ogletree story, and of the older Dershowitz and Goodwin stories. See the posts immediately below for that information.)

OGLETREE NEWS ARCHIVE
REVISION 4.1
16 SEPTEMBER 2004

MAJOR DEVELOPMENT IN STORY: PROFESSOR TRIBE CALLS GHOSTWRITING ISSUE SIGNIFICANT

Summaries of the coverage to date of the Ogletree plagiarism story are set forth (as updated since the last revision) below. First, a major new development worth highlighting. One of the most extensive Internet discussions of the Ogletree plagiarism story is hosted on the website of law school Dean Lawrence Velvel, who is commenting, and posting the comments of others, about what he calls "The Ogletree Transgression." For his most extensive posting, see here: http://velvelonnationalaffairs.blogspot.com/2004/09/ogletree-transgression.html.

Commenting on Dean Velvel’s discussion, in an e-mail Professor Laurence Tribe, the renowned Harvard Law School professor, and a colleague and friend of Ogletree’s, declined to defend Ogletree on the specifics of his plagiarism of Balkin and his use of ghostwriters, stating: "I don’t see it as my place either to offer excuses for my colleagues’ and friends’ missteps or to pile on them when the world is already heaping calumny upon them." Also, Professor Tribe expressed his agreement with Dean Velvel’s assessment of the importance of the systemic issues for academia raised by the ghostwriting issue, stating: "As to the larger problem you describe – the problem of writers ... passing off work of others as their own – I think you’re focusing on a phenomenon of some significance." See: http://velvelonnationalaffairs.blogspot.com/2004/09/re-ogletree-transgression.html

With even Professor Tribe, a colleague and friend of Ogletree, refusing to defend Ogletree on the specifics of the charges that are swirling against him in the media, and agreeing with Dean Velvel that the charge Ogletree used ghostwriters raises an issue significant for academia as a whole, the Harvard administration should force an independent, outside investigation of this issue. (Beyond Professor Tribe and Dean Velvel, the Volokh Conspiracy blog and the Weekly Standard magazine have also highlighted this issue). Harvard should not pretend this matter has already been considered and dismissed by the Clark/Bok internal "investigation" which found that Ogletree was merely an "accidental plagiarist" and which totally ignored the much more troubling issues raised by Ogletree’s use of ghostwriters to create a "product" bearing his name, while pretending he’d written the entire book himself.

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EXPLANATORY NOTE:

Below is an updated listing of coverage of the Ogletree plagiarism story, and the related Goodwin and Dershowitz plagiarism stories. Revised versions of this listing will be circulated from time to time to supply a convenient means of following all three developing stories. Thanks to all those who suggested additional links, or edits to the summaries of the links, and even deletions, to enhance the accuracy, fairness, and decorum of these posts. Particular thanks to the person (who does not wish to be identified) who drafted succinct summaries of the stories regarding the Goodwin and Dershowitz scandals (see below). Additional suggestions or comments are most welcome. As indicated at the end, anyone is free to further distribute, or expand upon, this material under the counter-copyright/creative commons concept. Perhaps someone would be willing to post some or all of this e-mail on a website, to cut down the e-mail load and allow easier access to it by others. We wish to remain anonymous and, in any event, do not have a website.

As the links below illustrate, print journalists and bloggers seem to be converging on a consensus that Ogletree is guilty not just of carelessness, but of deliberate plagiarism with very serious implications for the scholarly standards applied to professors at elite institutions. (If anyone knows of anyone who has defended Ogletree in print, for example, in a letter to the editor, please forward the link as we want this summary of news coverage to be fair and complete.)

The statement by Ogletree posted on the Harvard Law School Website (http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2004/09/03_ogletree.php) focuses on the (apparently/purportedly) negligent lifting of a few pages from Balkin’s book by Ogletree’s student research assistants. The consensus seems to be that the real focus should be on what that statement reveals about how Ogletree produced his book, which Ogletree terms a "product," a product which he and President Bok have admitted (see September 13 Harvard Crimson, and September 9 Boston Globe stories, respectively) was manufactured (that is, written) largely by Ogletree’s students. It would be one thing if Ogletree had explicitly acknowledged in the preface of his book that his students had written much of it. This he did not do. Ogletree’s statement appears deliberately deceptive (as Dean Velvel has put it, "too clever by half") in its attempt to obscure the deeper level of plagiarism involved in Ogletree’s decision to have parts of his book secretly ghostwritten by others, and then not reveal it, but instead pretend he’d written the entire book himself.

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