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.

==================================================================

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.

IF ANYONE WHO RECEIVES THIS E-MAIL WOULD FOR ANY REASON PREFER NOT TO RECEIVE UPDATES, please indicate that by return e-mail and you will immediately be taken off the list. If you request to be dropped from the list, that will be kept confidential. The identities of those being blind copied on the e-mails will continue to be kept confidential from everyone else on the list. If someone offers to post this and future e-mails on a website, future e-mails will simply direct the recipient to an updated version of this listing on that website.

OgletreeSkeptics@yahoo.com
[cc] (see http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/cc/cc.html;
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0)

PROFESSOR CHARLES OGLETREE

(The third story regarding plagiarism by a Harvard scholar to arise in the past two years involves Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree. The story broke on the law school's own website in early September. Here, unedited, is the summary of our news coverage of the Ogletree story e-mailed on September 16, 2004, for the benefit of those who are interested in this story who did not receive that e-mail.)

OGLETREE NEWS ARCHIVE
REVISION 4.1
16 SEPTEMBER 2004

For the most important coverage of the latest Harvard plagiarism scandal, involving Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree's plagiarism of Yale law professor Jack Balkin in a recent book, and the ghostwriting of that book by Ogletree's students, see (in chronological order):

September 3, Harvard Law School website:
http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2004/09/03_ogletree.php
(Ogletree statement announcing "corrections" of "errors" and "mistakes" that were made in his book, which were "avoidable and preventable")

September 9 "Boston Globe":
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2004/09/09/ogletree_admits_lifted_passages?mode=PF (Marcella Bombardieri and David Mehegan) (quoting former Harvard president Derek Bok, who was appointed by the law school dean to investigate, and who concluded that because Ogletree faced "a very tight deadline" on the book he "marshaled his assistants and parceled out the work" on the book)

September 9, "Copyfight" (weblog)
http://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/006100.html
(Donna Wentworth) ("If this were Capitol Hill, a PR professional might have advised Professor Ogletree to announce that ‘mistakes were made,’ so as to spread responsibility. I would say that ‘books were written’ – and that spreading responsibility in this instance is the only honest thing to do.")

September 9, "Legal Theory Blog" (weblog of law professor Lawrence Solum, Harvard Law School J.D. 1984; editor of Law Review)
http://lsolum.blogspot.com/archives/2004_09_01_lsolum_archive.html#109477977418398100
("In some ways the most distressing aspect of the story is the way that it seems to take for granted the practice of publishing research assistant’s work as one’s own without explicit sharing of authorship credit – a practice that is, in my mind, quite dubious.")

September 10 "Weekly Standard" (published online September 10; September 20 print issue):
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/604yzgzg.asp
(Joseph Bottum) ("Ogletree didn't plan to write All Deliberate Speed in the first place. His graduate assistants cobbled it together for him from other sources -- and, as Ogletree puts it, 'I was negligent in not overseeing more carefully the final product that carries my name.' That's a curious construction, but it seems correct, in the end. Surely we reserve the term 'authors' for people who write books -- not people who create 'final products that carry their name.' ... When did this become the way that a Harvard faculty member produces a book? … I find the pseudo-production of All Deliberate Speed [most] disturbing. Ogletree's assistants pasted together material from other books, then swept through the assembled text rewriting, editing, paraphrasing, and summarizing as they went. They got caught because they missed a passage, but what's wrong isn't the part they missed. It's the whole procedure. ... [B]y every explanation, Ogletree conceived much of the book as a kind of double plagiarism: He set out to put his name on work done by his assistants, who, he knew, were merely rephrasing work written by other people. That is not a book. It is, at the least, tenure-revoking ghostwriting. Why hasn't Harvard, which has known about this for months, done something about Charles Ogletree?")

September 10 "Velvel on National Affairs" (law school Dean Lawrence Velvel’s weblog)
http://velvelonnationalaffairs.blogspot.com/2004/09/ogletree-transgression.html:

"I read and enjoyed [Ogletree’s] book earlier this year, but am going to say here some very harsh things about Ogletree’s plagiarism and what it represents. ... [T]he entire incident further stimulates longstanding concern about, and may in fact reflect, forms of corrupt conduct that have become pervasive in America today. ... The incident implicates possible dishonest conduct (wholly aside from advertent or inadvertent plagiarism). It portrays lack of diligence and competence. And it illustrates that rewards accrue to the celebrified, not to the honest and competent. ...

"What [Ogletree’s] two assistants were doing sounds awfully much as if they were writing the book or at least some parts of it. Isn’t that what it means when someone inserts material, researches it, reviews it and edits it before sending it to the publisher, and then does send it to the publisher? ... So how much of this book did assistants insert, review, research, summarize and send to the publisher? How much, if any, of the rest of the book, in other words, was defacto written by someone other than Ogletree, although only Ogletree’s name appears as the author? ...

"Ogletree is a man sufficiently brilliant that he is a professor at the Harvard Law School. Yet he read a draft of his own book so sloppily, so carelessly, that even though the six paragraphs in question are two and one-half pages and 824 words long, and even though they introduce an obviously significant chapter which itself begins an entire section of his book, he did not realize that he himself had not written those paragraphs? A man of his acumen didn’t realize that? Boy, that must have been some sloppy reading! It must have been a reading that was neither diligent nor competent, two qualities vastly lacking in America today. ...

"But beyond the issues of diligence and competence implicated by Ogletree’s statements, additional questions are also raised by what is said to have happened. Ogletree says the mistake happened in "the final editing process." So let me get this straight: in the "final editing process" ..., assistants ... were finalizing and adding significant chunks of material? And not just any material, but material that introduced a chapter which itself was the initial part of a section of the book? This was being done by assistants? In the final editing process? Doesn’t all this raise the question of who the hell really wrote this book which, or at least wrote portions of this book which, in Ogletree’s words, "carries my name." Doesn’t it raise, that is, the very same issue of honesty discussed earlier?

"Moreover, doesn’t the same question of who really wrote portions of the book arise from what may be very clever wording in Ogletree’s web posting? Ogletree doesn’t say "When I reviewed the revised draft, I did not realize that I was not the author of this material." Such a statement would of course imply that he was the author of the rest of the material in the book. But rather than say that, Ogletree said "When I reviewed the revised draft I did not realize that this material was authored by Professor Balkin." ... Well, how in hell was Ogletree supposed to know that Balkin authored the material (unless Ogletree is claiming that he read Balkin’s book and has a near photographic memory)? Ogletree’s wording smacks of being too clever by half. It smacks of wanting to cover up the fact that he knew and expected that parts of his book were written by others -- by assistants -- and that the problem here was that he assumed the six paragraphs had been written by an assistant while being unaware that they had actually been written by someone wholly unconnected with him. I cannot say whether this logic is true in fact, but it is certainly plausible, and it further stokes the question of who did write portions of this book."

September 10 "Velvel on National Affairs" (law school Dean Lawrence Velvel’s weblog)
http://velvelonnationalaffairs.blogspot.com/2004/09/ogletree-transgression.html
(commentary on Dean Velvel’s post by Michael Parenti, Ph.D in political science, Yale University) ("There is another critique one might suggest about the Ogletree case: his explanation is totally lacking in credibility. ... What do the assistants have to say about this? Which assistants? Did they really just stick a long selection from Balkin onto the opening of this crucial chapter with only a citation and without proper indentation or quotation marks? And how did the citation get removed? Why would ‘the pressure of meeting a deadline’ (what crap, as if this were a live network show about to go on the air in 10 seconds) cause the second assistant to delete the Balkin citation? ... Why would deadline pressure make you start deleting your endnotes? It seems to me that until we hear from the assistants we cannot conclude for certain that (a) Ogletree has other people write his stuff for him, or (b) that Ogletree’s story is just a smokescreen, a way of distancing himself from the fact that he plagiarized Balkin. But I am inclined toward (b) because his explanation sounds like just so much dissembling.")

September 10, "In the Right Direction" (weblog of Keith Urbahn, sophomore at Yale)
http://keithurbahn.blogs.com/in_the_right/2004/09/harvards_shame.html
("Editing mistakes? Whether intentional or not, ‘lifting a passage’ is called plagiarism. Too bad the AP and The Boston Globe don’t have the guts to call it that.")

see also comment by "THB," at

http://keithurbahn.blogs.com/in_the_right/2004/09/harvards_shame.html#comments
("After the Cornel West incident, there is no way Larry Summers is going call a prominent African-American faculty member on the carpet. This is an opportune moment for another famous university to work the back channel and ‘lure’ Ogletree away. The bigger issue is how not only the teaching but the writing done at major universities is often the work of graduate students. Ogletree – and many other Harvard profs – will continue to garner seven-figure advances for putting their names on books written by others. The grad student who is responsible for not writing and proofreading Ogletree’s book carefully enough is dead professionally. I’ll bet Ogletree’s assistants are desparately trying to shift blame to each other right now.")

September 11, "Boston Globe": http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2004/09/11/concerns_raised_over_use_of_research_assistants
(David Mehegan) (interpreting the statement released by Ogletree (after attempts to reach him were unsuccessful) as stating "he had read over the Balkin text" contained in the draft of his own book "and hadn't realized it was not his own writing"; quoting Columbia University provost: "it is inconceivable to me that I would ever allow a research assistant to alter a manuscript")

September 12, "Airing of Grievances" (weblog)
http://aofg.blogspot.com/2004/09/humiliation-for-harvard-law-professor.html
("Jackie Chiles") ("Oops! Professor Charles Ogletree has released a statement apologizing for plagiarism in his recently released book ‘All Deliberate Speed.’ According to Ogletree, the ‘errors were avoidable and preventable, and I take full and complete responsibility for all of them.’ Despite taking such responsibility, in the very next paragraph he lays the blame pretty squarely on his two research assistants. Honorable stuff. In any event, a very unfortunate turn of events for The Tree. All that work to establish your good name and then just like that it’s significantly tarnished. ... When I first heard the news I thought, ‘Wow, sucks to be those research assistants, they really did this man a disservice.’ But then I passed the news onto Mama Chiles, a retired English Professor, and she said, ‘No excuses. Totally unacceptable. That’s what so many of these people do. Overwhelm their assistants and take all the credit for themselves. This time he got his just dues.’")

September 13, "Harvard Crimson":
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=503341
(Stephen M. Marks) (reporting "Ogletree told The Crimson that he had not read the passage of Balkin's book that appears in his own work"; reporting "Ogletree said he was closely involved in most of the drafting of the book"; quoting e-mail from Ogletree research assistant apparently threatening libel suit if there is "any speculation that anyone knew of the repetition of Professor Balkin's material beforehand").

September 13, "Harvard Crimson":
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=503313
(editorial, "What Academia is Hiding") ("For every Harvard student, the charge of plagiarism could prove fatal to one’s undergraduate career. From the outset, students are forewarned of the College’s daunting zero-tolerance discipline policy; that is, whether inadvertent or otherwise, according to the student handbook, plagiarism of any sort ‘will ordinarily result in disciplinary action, including but not limited to requirement to withdraw from the College.’ But it seems that this stringent policy – aimed to ensure sincere and scrupulous scholarship – does not extent to members of Harvard’s Faculty. ... Last week, Ogletree admitted that six paragraphs of his book – nearly two pages of text – had been lifted from the work of Yale Law School professor Jack M. Balkin, after the latter author was anonymously informed that Ogletree’s work should be investigated. ... Ogletree maintains that the text’s inclusion was an oversight due, in part, to strict deadlines and a strong reliance on research assistants. Neither defense is excusable. ... Ogletree’s transgression is a serious one – one that would likely result in expulsion for a Harvard undergraduate. That Ogletree will not face anything remotely this severe reveals the glaring disparity in Harvard’s plagiarism policies – and the different scholarly standards it holds for its students and Faculty. ... [Ogletree’s transgression] not only leaves a blemish on the renowned professor’s resume and reveals a ludicrous double standard, it is also indicative of an alarming trend currently threatening the legitimacy of the work of those in academia; that is, the extensive use of research assistants and students .... When the author himself does not recognize that a text of two pages is not his own, something is amiss. ... The bottom line remains that had a Harvard student committed such a grievous error, intentionally or not, the College would likely turn a deaf ear to any excuses – particularly any that involve an over-reliance on paid assistants to do their research and writing for them. If Harvard is not willing to hold its Faculty to the same high scholarly standards as it does its students, then perhaps it should rethink its undergraduate plagiarism policy and do away with the charade of irreproachable academic integrity.")

September 13, "The Volokh Conspiracy"
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_09_07.shtml#1095083397
("Juan Non-Volokh") ("Prof Ogletree 'did not realize it was not his material'? Does this mean he did not realize the words were not his own -— in which case his research assistants were taking liberties with his manuscript -— or did he simply not realize it was the work of someone other than his research assistants. If the latter, which I believe is the more likely reading of the above, then Ogletree did plan to publish the words of others under his own name. ... [I]s this the appropriate standard of scholarship for a tenured law professor? At Harvard? Perhaps I have an old fashioned perspective on these sorts of things, but I am disturbed by the idea of tenured professors at prestigious institutions using research assistants to draft portions of their scholarly work.").

September 14, "The Buck Stops Here" (Weblog of Stuart Buck, Harvard Law School J.D. 2000; editor of Law Review)
http://stuartbuck.blogspot.com/2004/09/harvard-law-plagiarism.html
("the problem that Bottum [author of the Weekly Standard article] identifies is real, quite apart from the plagiarism involved. … [F]or scholars, the act of producing their own scholarly work is one of the two main responsibilities of their jobs (the other being teaching). When a scholar at a university puts his name to a book or article, no one thinks (or ought to be justified in thinking), ‘Well, he's awfully busy, and he's probably just putting out words that someone else wrote; but at least he agrees with what other people have written for him.’")

September 14, "Velvel on National Affairs" (law school Dean Lawrence Velvel’s weblog)
http://velvelonnationalaffairs.blogspot.com/2004/09/re-ogletree-transgression.html
(commentary on Dean Velvel’s post by Professor Laurence H. Tribe, Harvard Law School, a friend and colleague of Ogletree) (declining 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 expressing 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.")

September 14, "Rasmusen’s Not-Politics Weblog" (weblog of Eric Rasmusen, Ph.D, economics professor, Indiana University)
http://www.rasmusen.org/x/archives/000200.html
("Via Volokh, The Weekly Standard tells us that Prof. Charles Ogletree of Harvard Law doesn’t even read what’s published under his own name, assembled by his research assistants. ... It looks like affirmative action strikes again, in this case aided perhaps by the bad influence of judges who rely on clerks. Or maybe Ogletree has spent time in government, where one of the rules for top bureaucrats is, ‘Never write anything you sign and never sign anything you write.’ Academia is not like that, so Harvard should bounce him down to Washington.")

September 14, "The Baseball Crank" (weblog)
http://baseballcrank.com/archives/003557.php
("Juan non-Volokh notes a slap on the wrist for plagiarism on the part of Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree; apparently his research assistants slapped a chunk of some work from Jack Balkin into a book Ogletree was doing on the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. Joseph Bottum of The Weekly Standard is appalled that having your research assistants cobble together other people’s ideas on the central area of your expertise is considered scholarship.")

September 14, "Point of Law" (weblog)
http://www.pointoflaw.com/archives/000503.php
(Walter Olson) ("Exploiting others’ labor, indeed. It turns out Harvard Law School’s Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., high oracle of the reparations litigation movement, grabs great chunks of other people’s writing and passes it off as his own.")

September 14, "The Corner on National Review Online" (weblog)
http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/04_09_12_corner-archive.asp#039798
(Roger Clegg, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division) ("HARVARD LAW SCHOOL’S JAYSON BLAIR? Eye-opening item in the current issue of the Weekly Standard about how Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree ‘inadvertently,’ ‘under pressure of a deadline,’ copied out of one book on Brown v. Board of Education into his own book on Brown. Except it’s really much worse than that: Ogletree wasn’t even writing the book he authored – he was having his assistants write it, or, rather, he was having them copy and then paraphrase the work of other authors.")

September 14, "The Volokh Conspiracy"
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_09_14.shtml#1095219095
(Fabio Rojas, Ph.D, University of Chicago, 2003) ("During grad school, I discovered ... that a lot of scholars are "Bureaucrats" .... This kind of scholar is more like an architect – he designs the overall project, but an army of helpers puts together the final project. ... [N]ow I realize a lot of famous names only produce their quantity because they rely to heavily on assistants. I was shocked to find out that a legal scholar whose work I respect writes a fairly small amount of his later work. He often hires brilliant grad/law students to do most of the leg work and then he assembles the products into his larger manuscripts. It's simply impossible to write a book every other year, fly around the world, teach classes, be a consultant and satisfy your university service requirements without a lot of help. Given that's a path to success, I'm not surprised that the work becomes sloppy very quickly. Scholars barely have time to closely monitor every product they produce. Not every highly productive scholar is that way, but more of them operate that way than we'd admit.")

For a somewhat provocative thought experiment offered by a college English professor who was struck by Ogletree's self-professed inability to recognize that the three pages he plagiarized from Jack Balkin were not his own writing, see: http://margaretsoltan.phenominet.com/archives/2004_09_01_archive.html#109490106956764192
(post of 9/11, 7:08 a.m.)

For a discussion of the systemic issues for universities raised by the Ogletree story, see "Plagiarism, a Misplaced Emphasis," by Brian Martin, Ph.D, published in the Journal of Information Ethics, Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 1994, pp. 36-47, and reprinted here:
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/94jie.html (pointing out the need to focus on "the vast amount of institutional plagiarism, including ghostwriting and attribution of authorship to bureaucratic elites," and the importance of "exposing and challenging the institutionalized varieties" of plagiarism)

For other coverage of the Ogletree story see

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/09/09/national1509EDT0655.DTL

http://www.guardiannewsngr.com/world/article01/110904

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA452487?display=Book+NewsNews&industry=Book+News&industryid=1990&verticalid=151

http://www.carol-cooper.org/blog/2004/09/harvard-professor-guilty-of-plagiarism.html

http://www.e-lawlibrary.net/elawlibrary/2004/09/index.html#a0002149424

The law school dean has not yet issued a statement on this matter, nor evidently granted any interviews. Thus there is not yet any explanation or defense from her of the handling of the investigation into Ogletree’s plagiarism, particularly regarding the five-month delay in announcing anything about it during which Ogletree was allowed to attend commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, and go on television, to actively promote his book, pretending it was solely his work. Compare the dean’s cooperation with press inquiries into seemingly less vital issues such as interior decorating, even as recently as September 16, thirteen days after news of Ogletree’s plagiarism finally broke:

http://www.hlrecord.org/news/2003/09/11/News/Renovations.Greet.Returning.Students-455185.shtml

http://www.hlrecord.org/news/2003/11/20/Opinion/Record.Editorial.Hark.Improvements.Are.Long.Overdue.Dean-564326.shtml

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=356542

http://www.hlrecord.org/news/2003/12/04/News/Hark-Renovations.Debated-572436.shtml

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=357078

http://www.hlrecord.org/news/2004/02/05/News/Great.Skate-599207.shtml

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=503293

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/09.16/03-kagan.html

The Ogletree plagiarism (both the lifting of the pages from Balkin’s book, and the more fundamental plagiarism of Ogletree taking credit for work written by law students) occurred even after extensive coverage of the past two Harvard plagiarism scandals, suggesting the reaction to those two scandals has been insufficient to deter Harvard scholars from engaging in scholarly misconduct that would force the withdrawal of a student.

OgletreeSkeptics@yahoo.com
[cc] (see http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/cc/cc.html;
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0)

PROFESSOR ALAN DERSHOWITZ

(This is the summary of the Dershowitz plagiarism story contained in our e-mail of September 16, 2004, slightly edited in response to helpful suggestions from a professor who commented on the e-mail.)

The second Harvard plagiarism story was broken in September 2003 and involves Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz. It concerns his 2003 book, "A Case For Israel" in which, according to one reviewer, Professor Dershowitz engages in an "orgy of plagiarism," committing "wholesale, unacknowledged looting" of research from an earlier book addressing the same subject. (http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn09262003.html)

Specifically, it has been reported that 22 of the 52 endnotes to the first two chapters of Professor Dershowitz’s book were lifted straight from a 1984 book by Joan Peters, "From Time Immemorial," without attribution. These 22 endnotes contain not just the citations from Peters’ footnotes, but also extensive quotations from the cited sources set forth in Peters’ footnotes.

Professor Dershowitz’s response to these reports was, at least initially, to say he had done nothing even remotely questionable. Among other things, he represented that while writing the book he had independent knowledge of the underlying sources based on his earlier research, and he stated it was hardly surprising he and Peters would cite some commonly consulted sources. In the radio interview in which he first confronted the charges, Professor Dershowitz stated that while he of course had read Peters’ book, which "anybody writing a book on the Middle East would" do, he had also read "independently probably 30 or 40 other books which use the same quotes, they’re very extensively used . . . ." http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4825.htm. Professor Dershowitz also accused his critics of being ideologically opposed to him and made various ad hominem attacks on them.

These ad hominem attacks apparently backfired, energizing Professor Dershowitz’s critics and leading them to investigate further. Ultimately Professor Dershowitz’s claim that he’d done nothing wrong, but had merely cited some commonly consulted sources which he’d found in 30 or 40 other books, sources which Peters had happened also to cite, was challenged with what his critics characterized as "smoking gun" evidence obtained from a reviewer of Professor Dershowitz’s book. This reviewer had kept the advance uncorrected proofs he’d been sent by the publisher, and the reviewer forwarded them to the scholar who had first noticed Professor Dershowitz’s plagiarism, Norman Finkelstein.

These advance uncorrected proofs contained Professor Dershowitz’s own handwritten note to a research assistant directing her to copy Peters’ footnotes into the manuscript of his own book. The note read: "Holly Beth: cite sources of pp. 160, 485, 486 [of Peters’ book], fns 141-45." Only after these advance uncorrected proofs were discovered to be in the hands of his critics did Professor Dershowitz then assert that the advance uncorrected proofs actually supported his claim of innocence, which raises the question why he did not produce them earlier. (See http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=5 (Dershowitz letter and Cockburn reply)) It would seem plausible to assume Professor Dershowitz would not have initially denied lifting Peters’ footnotes, and would not have stated he just happened to find the same commonly cited sources in 30 or 40 other books he’d read, if he had realized his publisher had sent to book reviewers advance uncorrected proofs containing what his critics characterize as "smoking gun" evidence in his own handwriting proving Dershowitz's initial statements false.

Further evidence that Professor Dershowitz lied in an effort to cover up his plagiarism, his critics argue, can be found in the fact that the footnotes in Peters’ book contain some mistakes in the quotations and citations, and use ellipses in the quotations, and the very same mistakes and ellipses appear in the endnotes of Professor Dershowitz’s book – proving, his critics argue, that they were simply copied verbatim from Peters’ book, and Professor Dershowitz didn’t even check the original sources to see whether the quotations and citations to them in Peters’ book were accurate. (See http://www.thecrimson.com/today/article349123.html)

For background concerning the Dershowitz plagiarism story, see:

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=1

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=4&ar=1

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=4

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=5

http://hnn.us/articles/1735.html

http://www.democracynow.org/static/dershowitzFin.shtml

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn09262003.html

http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/Finkelstein/HarvardCrimson_0.html

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=349044

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=349031

http://www.thecrimson.com/today/article349123.html

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=349122

http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/1162

http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/spinoza10022003

http://buffaloreport.com/articles/031012cockburn.dershowitz.html

http://hnn.us/readcomment.php?id=20220

http://www.hlrecord.org/news/2003/10/16/Opinion/Letters.To.The.Editor-530895.shtml



OgletreeSkeptics@yahoo.com
[cc] (see http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/cc/cc.html;
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0)

PROFESSOR DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN

(This is the summary of the Goodwin plagiarism story contained in our e-mail of September 16, 2004, lightly edited, and including a few more links which have been suggested since our e-mail.

One link in particular we have added is to an item which now takes on new significance because of the charges of scholarly misconduct recently made against Professor Laurence Tribe. The link is to Professor Tribe's defense of Professor Goodwin in a letter to the editor which appeared in the Harvard Crimson on March 18, 2002. See here: http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=180631. For criticisms of Professor Tribe's letter, see here: http://slate.msn.com/?id=2063299, and here: http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=180706 (to the best of our knowledge, Professor Tribe has never answered these criticisms). The Weekly Standard article on Professor Tribe (which we discuss above, here: http://authorskeptics.blogspot.com/2004/09/professor-laurence-tribe.html) relies heavily (especially in its next-to-last paragraph) on Professor Tribe's letter defending Professor Goodwin. See here:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/674eijco.asp.)

The first Harvard plagiarism story broke in January 2002. It involves Doris Kearns Goodwin, a former Harvard history professor and a member of its Board of Overseers until she was forced off the Board after the Harvard Crimson called for her resignation because of the plagiarism story. She also resigned her position on the board that awards the Pulitzer Prizes. The story was broken by the Weekly Standard.

Although initially limited in scope, after a number of months other investigations into Professor Goodwin’s work, including one conducted by the LA Times, confirmed the Weekly Standard’s findings and uncovered other instances of plagiarism in at least two of Professor Goodwin’s best-selling history books, written while she was a Harvard professor, including one for which she received a Pulitzer Prize.

Professor Goodwin’s explanation for the plagiarism involved faulty note taking habits, not just on her part, but on the part of four research assistants who help write her books. These faulty note taking habits made it difficult, she explained, for them to distinguish between notes containing their own analysis and notes summarizing analysis they find in books written by others.

For background on the Goodwin plagiarism story see:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/793ihurw.asp

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/817fdukv.asp

http://slate.msn.com/id/2061056

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,197614,00.html

http://slate.msn.com/id/2061281

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/jan-june02/history_1-28.html

http://www.skidmore.edu/classics/courses/2004fall/hi361f/goodwin-plagiarism.html

http://historynewsnetwork.org/articles/article.html?id=589

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/2002/02/27/edtwof2.htm

http://www.forbes.com/2002/02/27/0227goodwin.html

http://greaterboston.tv/features/btp_goodwin_030102.html

http://toogoodreports.com/column/general/shaw/20020304.htm

http://slate.msn.com/?id=2062793

http://www.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/books/03/05/goodwin.pulitzer

http://www.onlinecolumnist.com/030602.html

http://www.robertfulford.com/Plagiarism.html

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=180483

http://journalism.berkeley.edu/ngno/stories/000552.html

http://www.thelaf.com/news/2002/03/14/News/Last-Years.Commencement.Speaker.Admits.To.Plagiarism.By.Noah.Goldstein-217639.shtml (free registration required)

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=180636

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=180631

http://slate.msn.com/?id=2063299

http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&m=3140756

http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&m=3144892

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=180706

http://mobylives.com/Nobile_Goodwin.html

http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/dont_quote_me/multi-page/documents/02201537.htm

http://freedom.orlingrabbe.com/lfetimes/plagiarizer.htm

http://mobylives.com/Nobile_Pulitzer_speech.html

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_6_54/ai_84107380

http://slate.msn.com/id/2064187

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FWE/is_5_6/ai_85880887

http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/177/perlstein.shtml

http://hnn.us/articles/718.html

http://slate.msn.com/?id=2069001&device

http://hnn.us/articles/985.html

http://hnn.us/articles/590.html

http://slate.msn.com/id/2091197

http://www.anecdotage.com/index.php?aid=16186


OgletreeSkeptics@yahoo.com
[cc] (see http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/cc/cc.html;
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0)

Introduction. Read me first!

About two weeks ago, after the story about plagiarism by Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree broke, we began e-mailing various journalists, bloggers, and professors to encourage interest in the general problem of plagiarism by Harvard scholars, and particularly the double standard that is being applied by the Harvard administration, with scholars investigated and disciplined much more leniently than are students. Our intent is to stick as closely as possible to the existing reported facts, and summaries of news coverage, rather than to try to report new facts. We thereby hope to provide a useful resource for those interested in these issues, and particularly for those interested in improving how these issues are addressed at Harvard and other universities.

To cut down on the e-mail load, we have finally learned how to operate a blog. In the next several posts we set forth various materials from our e-mails sent out during the past two weeks.

Until today, we were sending out our e-mails using the e-mail address OgletreeSkeptics@yahoo.com. As you will see from our most recent e-mail of September 25 (posted above, as the last of this introductory series, see here: http://authorskeptics.blogspot.com/2004/09/professor-laurence-tribe.html), a thoughtful post from a Harvard Law School student led us to change our name to depersonalize it, and remove any suggestion we are focusing more on Professor Ogletree than on the general problem of how scholarly misconduct by Harvard scholars is handled. We are now using the e-mail address AuthorSkeptics@hotmail.com, are using "AuthorSkeptics" as our name, and are using "HARVARD PLAGIARISM ARCHIVE" as the name of our blog, as its main purpose is to archive summaries of coverage of the Harvard plagiarism stories.

We welcome any and all comments and suggestions for improvements. If you e-mail us, unless you specify otherwise, we will assume we may reprint anything you say, but without using your name. We will not identify you by name unless you specifically authorize us to do so. You are welcome to contact us via anonymous e-mail if you wish.

We encourage any tips anyone may wish to offer regarding possible scholarly misconduct by professors at Harvard or elsewhere. Although we do not have the capacity to investigate such tips ourselves, we will do our best to forward tips to reputable journalists who may have an interest in such stories.

AuthorSkeptics@hotmail.com

[cc] (see http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/cc/cc.html; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0)