Shots in the Dark

Wait! There’s more. Now the Crimson admits that one of its own writers has also committed plagiarism.

Columnist Victoria Ilyinsky apparently ripped off Slate when she wrote about the hideous abuse of the word “literally.” As in, “I was so uninspired and lazy that I, like, literally plagiarized someone else’s work, okay?”

To its credit, the Crimson cancelled Ilyinsky’s column.

Sara Schweitzer reports on the matter in today’s Globe. She does not appear to have ripped anyone off in her story. But, hey, you never know!

I was up in Cambridge the past couple of days, doing some reporting for a piece on Derek Bok. (If you have thoughts on President Bok that you’d like to share, feel free to contact me.) The campus looked terrific, and Harvard Square is always fun. (But can’t you get a liquor store there?)

Some impressions:

1) My God, you people must be sick of Kerry Healey and Duval Patrick—what a dreary race.

2) Did you know that the Charles Hotel costs $500 a night? What does Cambridge think it is, Manhattan?

3) I’m all for the idea of Jack Welch and Joe O’Donnell buying the Globe. Because, right now, it sucks. USA Today has more content than the Globe. And the Arts/Living section—argh. The writing is just so, so wrong.

4) Boston.com is a terrible website. I saw an ad urging people to make it their home page. Why on earth would anyone do that?

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?

I’m in Boston today, so posts will be erratic….

I’ve refrained from commenting on the pathetic story of Aleksey Vayner till now because, I suppose, it’s just so dispiriting; I want to throw up my hands and say, well, one more con man in the Stephen Glass mode.

But this Times article about Vayner does raise some interesting issues, particularly with regard to whether the Yale undergraduate should be disciplined by the college for setting up what appears to be a fraudulent charity.

A Yale spokeswoman declines to comment, which is unfortunate.

Here’s why: Our nation’s finest universities are supposed to be role models. They hold themselves out as places of virtue, if only because they suggest that their graduates are fit to lead the nation and the world.

So when an undergraduate commits fraud, as Kaavya Viswanathan did at Harvard—whether legally a crime or not—this is not just an internal matter for Yale or Harvard. It affects the university’s reputation and the legitimacy of higher education in American society generally.

That’s why it’s important for Harvard to make public statements about Viswanathan or Andrei Shleifer, and why Yale shouldn’t just offer a “no comment” about this student, who is obviously a fraud through and through.

Instead, there’s a “cover your ass” mentality that feels like spin, public relations, and just basically bullshit.

Here’s that “Stay the Course” video

Note the “ministry of truth” chyron added to Mehlman’s appearance…..

We laugh, we cry….

The New York Times runs a piece today on how the Bush administration has abandoned the phrase “stay the course” when it comes to speaking about Iraq.

Interesting.

But then, I already knew that. Because yesterday I watched a YouTube video of Jon Stewart on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, in which Stewart showed Bush using the phrase “stay the course” again and again, and then showed footage of RNC chair Ken Mehlman on Meet the Press saying something like, “It’s not ‘stay the course,’ it’s ‘win by adapting.'”

The nature of propaganda, Stewart pointed out, is that it has no internal logic; nothing that came before matters.

Also interesting.

But the real point is, Jon Stewart had it before the Times did, and Andrew Sullivan had it before the Times did, and hundreds of thousands of people who watched the show or the YouTube video had it before the Times did.

Kinda makes you feel sorry for newspapers, doesn’t it?

Yale just announced a gift of $60 million from Edward Bass to go to the sciences….

Once in a while, Michael Kinsley reminds you of what a great columnist can do: Puncture all the words of propaganda and hyperbole and partisanship generated by folks in Washington, and create insight.

Here he is on why we all secretly love the Foley scandal—no matter how much we insist otherwise:

Perhaps it would be a better world if everybody were as disgusted by the Foley episode as almost everybody claims to be. But the truth is that most people are enjoying this story and can’t get enough of it. If you gave them the secret power to wish the whole thing away, they’d say, “Are you nuts? This is terrific!” Poor Dennis Hastert is suspected, probably falsely, of being willing to sacrifice a child for the good of his party, and now the other party reaps the benefit. Do you think that if the devil told Nancy Pelosi she could undo the scandal, save these 17-year-olds from the trauma of e-mail from a sicko congressman, and give up her hopes of being speaker, that she would find such an offer tempting? I don’t. And I don’t think Nancy Pelosi is callous or cruel. If she thought it through, she might conclude that the good that can come from a Democratic Congress exceeds the evil that a few randy e-mails may have done to a few teenage pages. Meanwhile, most Americans, I strongly suspect, would happily sacrifice a few more pages just to keep the story going for entertainment purposes.

“I think the regulatory process, regulatory issues, are very complicated. The markets are changing very rapidly. What we used to say we needed at the Treasury was a regulatory system as modern as the markets.”

—Larry Summers, the D.E. Shaw Group, on CNBC Friday