Plagiarism

In the span of several months in early 2002, two of the country's most famous historians were exposed as plagiarizers. Both Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin, it was revealed, had borrowed liberally from lesser-known writers without proper attribution. At the time, I followed the controversies just closely enough to know that the misdeeds seemed to fall into a gray area. Both writers claimed their failures had been ones of sloppiness, not outright thievery; they had mixed up their notes and simply forgotten to add some quote marks and footnotes.

A panel of former newspaper editors investigating the newsroom practices of USA Today reported yesterday that a deeply ingrained culture of fear as well as negligent editing and poor communication led the newspaper to ignore signs that its star foreign correspondent fabricated and plagiarized stories for more than a decade. Executive editor Brian Gallagher, the No. 2 editor, said in an e-mail interview yesterday that he would leave his job after aiding the transition to a new editor. By late afternoon, after meeting with publisher Craig Moon, Hal Ritter, the managing editor who oversaw Jack Kelley, also had resigned.

Paul Chwelos teaches information systems at the University of California, Irvine, so he knows better than most the power of the Internet. And not just the way it is affecting businesses, but also the way it affects his graduate students. "It certainly gives them the ability to do better research, but it makes it easier to cheat," he said. "I think it's naive to think the Internet has given such access to information and that it doesn't increase cheating as well." So this month Chwelos joined a growing number of professors who are using the Internet to fight back.

Howell Raines resigned as executive editor of The New York Times yesterday along with his chief deputy, casualties of a young reporter's betrayal that led to the loss of confidence in the top editors' ability to lead the nation's most prestigious newspaper. Former Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld was tapped to head the Times on a temporary basis. Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd announced their resignations just past 10:30 a.m. yesterday in successive remarks to newsroom staffers on the third floor of the Times' Midtown Manhattan headquarters.

NEW YORK -- Suppose you were rambling around the Internet and stumbled across a Web site devoted to the works of Euripides, the ancient Greek dramatist. Maybe you'd think this was the obscure hangout of professors exchanging ideas about things written on scrolls.Well, you would be wrong. You would find typical yet tightly wound college students, burdened with homework, pressed for time, cheating their hearts out with ingenuous amorality. You'd find scholars such as Jeremy, whose last name is being withheld to spare him a scowl from his instructor, in deep research.

The Little Book of Plagiarism By Richard A. Posner Pantheon / 116 pages / $10.95 At 116 pages - and small pages at that - Richard A. Posner's The Little Book of Plagiarism is aptly titled. It's a brief but provocative and illuminating meditation on the current craze for searching out, denouncing and punishing authors who appear to have borrowed the work of others and passed it off as their own. Ever the controversialist, Posner is willing to entertain the idea that plagiarism is hardly the high crime that moralists in the news media and the academy advertise it as, and he makes a good case for the notion that copying is (and always has been)

Yesterday, writing at Poynter.org , Roy Peter Clark suggested that our current attitudes about plagiarism have conflated relatively minor or innocuous literary borrowings with serious thefts. One of the points he identified was the clamor about self-plagiarism. After quoting him, I'd like to add some observations. Actually, he begins by quoting Judge Richard A. Posner 's Little Book of Plagiarism : "Posner hits the target on this one: 'The temptation to lump distinct practices in with plagiarism should be resisted for the sake of clarity; "self-plagiarism," for example, should be recognized as a distinct practice and rarely an objectionable one.' All successful writers 're-purpose' their work for profit and influence, but they should always be forthright with potential publishers on whether the work is brand new or recycled.

THE NEW YORK Times and the Washington Post seem to be trying to outdo each other in efforts to give plagiarism a bad name. I have this from the Media column of the Post's Style section. The Times must have published it somewhere too, but after coming across it in the Post I became too shaky to check the Times closely for fear I'd read that the plagiarism police were on my trail too.According to the Post -- an admirable paper, let me credit it fully and gratefully! -- the Times has disciplined one veteran reporter while the Post, not to be outdone in the rectitude department, has gone all the way and fired one.Both offenders, says the Post -- my source for this column, and a splendid one too -- both offenders had sent their home offices stories that included several paragraphs lifted almost verbatim from articles written by other reporters in other newspapers.

TO MILLIONS of admirers around the world, the disclosures about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his doctoral dissertation cast a shadow on his memory; a shadow should not, however, be confused with a cloud.Scholarship rests on truth and trust, which is why scholars are right to denounce plagiarism mercilessly; that's why it is so dismaying to learn that King's doctoral thesis contained an extraordinary amount of material borrowed or copied, unattributed, from the work of others.But however just it may be to denounce his scholarship, that should not be confused with his leadership.

BOSTON -- Conjuring up something of an ethical house o mirrors in the world of journalism, the New York Times published an "Editors' Note" Thursday acknowledging that material in a recent article on plagiarism had been borrowed with insufficient attribution from the Boston Globe.An article published in the Times July 3 concerning plagiarism charges against H. Joachim Maitre, dean of the College of Communication at Boston University, should have noted "that the quotations it cited from Mr. Maitre's speech were taken from the Globe article," said the note, which ran on Page 3.In addition, according to the note, "The Times article included a ,, passage of five paragraphs that closely resembled five paragraphs in the Globe article.