Plagiarism

THOUSANDS of followers of Professor Irwin Corey, world's foremost authority, are accusing me of plagiarism for referring in a recent column to Dr. Harold Liverworth as "world's foremost authority."The title "world's foremost authority" was bestowed upon himself years ago by Professor Corey, these people note. My appropriating it without so much as a nod to Professor RussellBakerCorey and bestowing it on Dr. Liverworth leaves them stunned.The plagiarism is rank, they say, though not without a nod to Shakespeare.

Washington--The first great scandal of the new political season is upon us, and the guilty candidate may never recover.I refer not to a congressional investigator's report that Republican Dick Thornburgh, now running for the Senate in Pennsylvania, refused for years as attorney general to follow up leads about the BCCI mess.That multinational banking outrage is trivial beside what Democrat Jerry Brown did within minutes of starting his third try for president. He has committed the sin that drove another Democrat out of contention in 1988 -- a sin so dreadful it is denounced from the pulpits of the land: plagiarism.

WASHINGTON - Last week, school officials in Piper, Kan., adopted an official policy on plagiarism - with punishments ranging from redoing an assignment to expulsion. Unfortunately, all that comes too late to help Christine Pelton. She used to be a teacher. Taught biology at Piper High, to be exact. Then, last fall, she assigned her students to collect 20 leaves and write a report on them. The kids knew from the classroom syllabus - a document they and their parents both signed - that cheating would not be tolerated.

NEW YORK - A new book by a Naval Academy faculty member about the invention of the atomic bomb was withdrawn from bookstores yesterday by its publisher after four historians complained that it contained at least 30 passages that are similar, or in some cases identical, to phrases and passages in their own works. Michael Pietsch of Little, Brown and Co. publishers said he was ordering that copies of Pandora's Keepers: Nine Men and the Atomic Bomb by Brian VanDeMark be recalled because "after consultation with the author ... we felt this was the appropriate action."

Chicago. THE WALL STREET Journal has revealed a crisis that has tortured the editors of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project for three years, eating up their research time and funding in an apparently vain attempt to extenuate what is clearly a scandal -- evidence that while a doctoral student at Boston University, King committed plagiarism.By the testimony of the very editors Mrs. King chose for publishing her husband's papers, King borrowed in heavy and unattributed ways from other scholars and students while writing his dissertation.

THIS TIME I gotcha," writes Edward B. Sandler about my assertion that William Jennings Bryan was "the only three-time loser in presidential electoral history."

BOSTON -- At his commencement speech in May, the dean of Boston University's School of Communication delivered a sharply worded attack on the decline of morality in American culture to an audience of more than 1,000 fledgling journalists and their families. But in his speech the dean repeated, virtually word for word, portions of an article by a PBS film critic.A videotape of the speech, on sale by Boston University, shows that the dean, J. Joachim Maitre, copied the underlying theme and about 15 paragraphs from an article by Michael Medved, of the Public Broadcasting System's program "Sneak Previews."

AT THE BEGINNING, the subject was so touchy that thescholars were asked not to even use the word. For over a year, those working with Martin Luther King Jr.'s, papers called it, cynically and sadly, ''the P-word.''Now the revelation that King appropriated the words of others throughout his graduate career is common knowledge. Great passages of his Ph.D. thesis weren't his.Again, a P-word: Last time it was promiscuity. Today it is plagiarism.Once, Martin Luther King Jr. talked about a time when his children would live in a ''nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

When two department colleagues of mine were hit by a rash of cheating incidents near the end of the spring semester this year, my reaction was one of surprise and sympathy, but with a measure of smugness mixed in, I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit. As the lone journalism professor in a 10-member English department, I had persuaded myself that the safeguards I had set up were sufficient to prevent plagiarism and other forms of cheating on writing assignments. Boy, was I wrong. Before relating my own horror story, I should point out that the six instances of plagiarism that sent my two friends reeling in mid-April were all committed by first-year students who had pilfered the essays they handed in from the Internet.

Sen. Paul Sarbanes' chances of become president of the United States dimmed considerably this week.What's that? You weren't aware Sarbanes had chances of becoming president?You thought he was just Maryland's Stealth Senator, the guy you never seem to see or hear from until -- boom! -- he flashes on the TV screen some night?Well, you are wrong. Paul Sarbanes is a contender.After the Mike Dukakis debacle in 1988, Democratic Party leaders sent a questionnaire to every Democratic officeholder in America in an attempt to find new presidential candidates for 1992.