Plagiarism

St. John's College in Annapolis, known for teaching liberal arts students to think creatively, has revoked a student's 1997 bachelor's degree for plagiarism in what college officials say is the only such incident in recent memory.The student also was expelled and her senior essay prize taken away, college officials said. One of three senior essay prize winners last year, the student copied substantial portions of a prize-winning senior essay that was written about 20 years ago on the same work of fiction.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Since the end of the apartheid era, visits by Queen Elizabeth, Pope John Paul II and Mick Jagger have signaled South Africa's return to the international arena.Now another name can be added to that list: Ronald McDonald.The hamburger clown made his debut last week at the opening of South Africa's first McDonald's restaurant, hours after the company won a court order barring a local competitor from using its trademarked golden arches, names and logo.The local company had opened outlets in Johannesburg and Durban under the name "MacDonald's" -- with the extra a. In addition to the subtly different name, it offered a burger called a Big Mac as well as something called a Little Mac.But a South African court ruled Friday that the local company could not use the symbols of McDonald's at least until another hearing Dec. 3.The United States had already placed South Africa on a "watch list" of countries for failing to protect intellectual property, since a lower court had ruled that the locals could "borrow" the hamburger trademarks.

Walter W. Stewart and Ned Feder have created a device whose birth students have dreaded for as long as there have been term papers: a plagiarism-sniffing machine.But Mr. Stewart, a chemist, and Dr. Feder, a physician and cell biologist, have discovered that sometimes the world doesn't put down its clubs after beating a path to the door of better mouse trap builders.After some big-name scientists and a prominent historian complained that their exposes were giving scholarship a bad name, the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, where Mr. Stewart and Dr. Feder were researchers, told them that their laboratory was being closed.

NEW YORK -- More name-calling controversy has erupte among scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls, deepening distrust and threatening to disrupt an international conference scheduled to begin tomorrow at the New York Academy of Sciences.A group of scrolls experts is asserting that the authors of a new book translating 50 of the ancient documents borrowed heavily and without acknowledgment from the research of others.They condemned that as the "unethical appropriation" of previous transcriptions and translations, and said the authors' claims of having done independent and original work were "laughable and manifestly dishonest."

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.

A panel of scholars at Boston University has decided that the doctorate earned there by the late Martin Luther King Jr. in 1956 should not be revoked even though his dissertation contains plagiarisms that were disclosed last year, shocking admirers of the slain civil rights leader.Instead, the Boston University committee, in a report released yesterday, recommended that a disciplinary letter noting the scholarly improprieties be attached to the official copy of King's theology dissertation in the school's library.

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."

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.

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.

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."