Plagiarizing Professor Punished

For reasons, I don't fully understand, law students every year seem aghast when I explain what can happen to them if they are caught plagiarizing in law school. I talk to them about law students who have been expelled, law students who have been denied admission to the bar, law students who have lost jobs. And this is just the stuff that I can find in reported judicial opinions. Certainly, the general rule of thumb in litigation is true of law student plagiarism cases: what we see in court reporters is a fraction of a fraction of the disputes that actually get litigated, and those disputes are a fraction of the disputes that are handled without court intervention.

But what's even more appalling is when a professor is busted for plagiarism. I mean, really? It can't be that he didn't know what plagiarism was. He's an English professor, for crying out loud. I bet he's counseled hundreds of students over the years about the dangers of plagiarism. I bet he's referred students to some sort of disciplinary body. He was ultimately suspended without pay for 5 years, a punishment that prompted him to retire. I thought the punishment was awfully light for someone not experiencing multiple personality disorder or something similar.

I also thought the treatment in Inside Higher Ed was pretty generous. For example, look at this excerpt:

One of the authors from whom Twitchell borrowed was Roy Rivenburg, a former Los Angeles Times reporter and freelance writer. In his book Shopping for God, Twitchell lifted a passage from a 1995 piece Rivenburg had written on the marketing of Christian-related products. Rivenburg’s passage noted:

“Indeed, with the exception of furniture and major appliances, it is possible to outfit an entire home in Christian products — bird feeders to body lotions, luggage to lamps.

Twitchell’s passage was very similar:

“Indeed, with the exception of furniture and major appliances, it is possible to outfit your entire self and home in Christian products — bird feeders to body lotions, luggage to lamps.”

No! No, it was not "very similar"! It was virtually identical. He contributed three words and no original ideas to the original quote.

Being an Xer, I don't really have a deep sense that many things are absolutely moral or immoral. A friend once described my sense of moral relativism as "stunning." But plagiarism is stealing. And fraud. To paraphrase the old Certs commercial, "It's two, two, two [crimes] in one." And see how easy that was? Some quotation marks, a web link, a pair of brackets, and no one gets hurt.