Charles Ogletree has been busted for plagiarism again, as the Crimson reports that…

…more than two years after Harvard law professor Charles J. Ogletree Jr. acknowledged that his book had lifted two pages from a Yale scholar, The Crimson has found new evidence that Ogletree’s book also contains an additional paragraph that is very similar to a 1996 work by a University of California-San Diego civil rights expert.

The Crimson then cites several examples.

What is striking about the examples is how banal they are—there’s nothing distinctive or compelling about the language, it’s almost entirely expository.

For example: Roy, on page 130, and Ogletree, on page 103, use the same 12 words to compare Du Bois and black educator Booker T. Washington: “both men were deeply committed to making life better for African Americans.” (Ogletree hyphenates “African-Americans.”)

I think the Crimson is giving Ogletree too much credit there: the hyphen was probably added by a copy editor.

The first time around, as I recall, Ogletree suggested that the plagiarism had been introduced by various researchers.

I have a picture in my head: a lonely, overworked law student, poring over reference books, probably tired, cynical about the fact that he or she is writing a book for a famous professor to put his name on and earn large speaking fees as a result…

…who, one night around midnight, just decides, Fuck it, no one’ll notice….and I want to go to sleep.

Or, even more delicious, decides: So what if they do? Not my book, not my problem….

What’s really going on here, in my opinion? The standard operating practice among celebrity academics of having graduate students substantially write their books for them…

You folks know of anyone else who does this?