Harvard Plagiarism Archive: New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell on plagiarism

Harvard Plagiarism Archive

"[T]he problem of writers . . . passing off the work of others as their own . . . [is] a phenomenon of some significance."
PROFESSOR LAURENCE TRIBE, e-mail to Dean Lawrence Velvel, 9/13/2004

"'I . . . delegated too much responsibility to others . . .,' [Prof. Charles Ogletree] said. 'I was negligent
in not overseeing more carefully the final product that carries my name.' * * * Ogletree told The Crimson that
he had not read the passage of Balkin’s book that appears in his own work. An assistant inserted the material
into a manuscript . . . . But Ogletree said he was closely involved in most of the drafting of the book . . . ."
STEVEN MARKS, "Ogletree Faces Discipline for Copying Text," The Harvard Crimson, 9/13/2004

"'Ronald Klain . . . then only a first-year student at Harvard law . . . spent most of his time with
Tribe working on Tribe's [1985] book God Save This Honorable Court,'" the Legal Times added in 1993.
* * * 'Many of Klain's friends and former colleagues say that he wrote large sections of the book . . . .'"
JOSEPH BOTTUM, "The Big Mahatma," The Weekly Standard, 10/4/2004

"[A]fter several plagiarism scandals broke over distinguished faculty members at Harvard's law school, including
Laurence Tribe,a group of students there set up a blog, Harvard Plagiarism Archive, to follow the University's
handling of the problem. They believe that the University, President Summers, and Dean Elena Kagan
essentially white-washed the scandal and are demanding further action.
PROF. RALPH LUKER, History News Network's "Cliopatria" blog,4/26/2005

“The Tribe and Ogletree matters have catalyzed bitter complaints from Harvard students that the university
employs a double standard. . . . The students have every right to be incensed over this gross double standard.
They in fact ought to raise hell peacefully about it: a constant barrage of letters, emails, statements . . . .”
DEAN LAWRENCE VELVEL, "Velvel on National Affairs" blog, 4/28/2005

"If you want to keep track of this story, I recommend the new Harvard Plagiarism Archive. . . . [I]t's pretty thorough."
TIMOTHY NOAH, Slate's "Chatterbox" blog,9/28/2004

"[Y]ou have done a wonderful service to all by operating the AuthorSkeptics website . . . a fine public service."
DEAN LAWRENCE VELVEL, author of "Velvel on National Affairs," e-mail to AuthorSkeptics, 4/19/2005

Sunday, November 28, 2004

New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell on plagiarism

Earlier this month the New Yorker published an interesting article on plagiarisim by Malcolm Gladwell, called "Something Borrowed," asking: "Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life?" See here.

The article mentions, though not much more than in passing, both the Goodwin plagiarism case and the Tribe plagiarism case. The mention of Dr. Goodwin is in the context of noting the increasingly serious attention which is being given to plagiarism offenses:

in the worlds of academia and publishing, plagiarism has gone from being bad literary manners to something much closer to a crime. When, two years ago, Doris Kearns Goodwin was found to have lifted passages from several other historians, she was asked to resign from the board of the Pulitzer Prize committee. And why not? If she had robbed a bank, she would have been fired the next day.

The article mentions Professor Tribe in the context of arguing that the rules defining what is "plagiarism" in the academic world have become too stringent:

The ethical rules that govern when it’s acceptable for one writer to copy another are even more extreme than the most extreme position of the intellectual-property crowd: when it comes to literature, we have somehow decided that copying is never acceptable. Not long ago, the Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe was accused of lifting material from the historian Henry Abraham for his 1985 book, “God Save This Honorable Court.” What did the charge amount to? In an exposé that appeared in the conservative publication The Weekly Standard, Joseph Bottum produced a number of examples of close paraphrasing, but his smoking gun was this one borrowed sentence: “Taft publicly pronounced Pitney to be a ‘weak member’ of the Court to whom he could not assign cases.” That’s it. Nineteen words.

In our view, Mr. Gladwell is incorrect in his factual premise. Joseph Bottum's article in the Weekly Standard established -- no one has even tried to defend Professor Tribe on the specifics -- that much of Tribe's book was copied from Professor Abraham's book. Far more than the nineteen words copied verbatim, the real "smoking gun" is the evidence marshalled by Mr. Bottum of various artful efforts to reword Professor Abraham's material so as to disguise the copying involved. See here. The Tribe plagiarism case is hardly, in our view, an example of anti-plagiarism norms run amuck.

Still, the New Yorker and Mr. Gladwell deserve credit for addressing the current debate concerning plagiarism, and for at least commenting on the Goodwin and Tribe plagiarism cases, which many major publications have declined to do, perhaps due in part to ideological and/or personal favoritism toward Dr. Goodwin and Professor Tribe.

For some blogger commentary on Mr. Gladwell's article, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here

For more on Mr. Gladwell's very interesting publications, see here.

Harvard Plagiarism Archive