Somebody should step up and defend Sen. John Walsh from charges that the plagiarized an Army War College paper, I suppose, but it won’t be me. The senator should resign.
The New York Times printed persuasive evidence last week that Walsh, who is facing Steve Daines for a U.S. Senate seat this fall, plagiarized large portions of a 14-page paper he wrote en route to a master’s degree. Walsh denies that he intentionally did anything wrong, a claim that becomes more dubious the closer one looks at it.
I ride into this debate on two high horses: In addition to my years as a newspaper hack, I also have taught composition to a few truckloads of bright young college students. In both academia and journalism, the crime of plagiarism is the occupational equivalent of a triple homicide.
Good reporters, some with national reputations, have lost their careers for lifting stories from unattributed sources. Gifted students, including some of my own, have wound up with failing grades for failing to write their own work.
This is, of course, the golden age for plagiarism. When I was in graduate school, plagiarism would have required writing out passages by hand at the library, then laboriously retyping them on the manual Olympia typewriter I still keep in a closet. It was easier just to make up something out of your own head.
Now students can steal papers with a couple of computer clicks. For some, the temptation is overpowering.
But this also is the golden age for detecting plagiarism. When I catch students at it, I usually do so by entering a suspect phrase into Google. Plagiarized stuff usually shows up in the first two or three links that Google returns.
Now I warn students, if you are going to steal other people’s work, at least don’t grab whatever shows up on the first page of Google. Don’t compound dishonesty with stupidity.
Student plagiarism generally falls into two categories: misdemeanors and felonies. Misdemeanors describe cases where student work is ineptly paraphrased or poorly sourced, but where there is no real intention to deceive. Felonies are cases when students just copy and paste whole blocks of text off the Internet and pretend it is their own. You don’t have to take a raft of college courses to know that isn’t right.
When supporters of Texas politician Tom “The Hammer” DeLay borrowed portions of Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer,” Seeger laughed it off. Although his politics and DeLay’s could not have been more different, Seeger recognized that folk songs are part of the public conversation, ripe for pilfering.
When Joe Biden was caught plagiarizing not only speeches but part of his autobiography from a British politician, he was laughed out of the 1988 presidential campaign. But he still has a pretty good job. Similarly, Sen. Rand Paul has survived plagiarism allegations with barely a whiff of scandal.
Nobody expects politicians to do all of their own thinking. They pay people to make up speeches and quotations for them every day.
But Walsh doesn’t have an excuse. He was no bright-eyed freshman and he wasn’t on the campaign trail when he plagiarized. Some of his plagiarized passages do sound like misdemeanors. For example, he closely paraphrased sources that he also footnoted. Felonious students don’t steal stuff, then credit the source they stole it from.
But Walsh also committed felonies in his paper: whole passages, including policy recommendations, lifted from other sources without attribution at all.
Excuses that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder don’t fly. He wrote that paper in 2007. Are we to believe that Walsh was so traumatized seven years ago that he couldn’t follow basic ethical rules, yet so fully recovered today that he can be entrusted with a job in which temptations to break ethical rules arise every day? Perhaps, but I want to see a doctor’s note.
And if he has recovered, has it never occurred to him that he needs to confess to the Army War College that, in an attack of nihilistic despair, he violated the college’s clear ethical rules and now wishes to make amends?
Some people argue that even academic plagiarism is no big deal. An Associated Press article quoted one veteran who said that anybody who says he didn’t cheat on college papers is lying.
Well, this veteran says he didn’t cheat on college papers. You calling me a liar?
Many students do cheat, of course, and lots of them get away with it. But that doesn’t mean we should elect them to Congress.
This isn’t easy to write, because Walsh has given encouraging signs in his brief tenure that he knows how to walk the narrow line between right and left that Sen. Max Baucus trod so successfully for so many years. Moreover, his resignation probably would guarantee the election of Daines, whose policies may be his worst felony.
But Walsh needs to go, right now, before it’s too late to be replaced on the ballot and even before the college has completed its review of charges against him. He needs to go not because he has behaved badly or even because he has handled this scandal so ineptly.
He needs to go because Montanans deserve a chance to vote for someone whose ethical standards would not shame a college freshman.
David Crisp has worked for newspapers since 1979. He has been editor and publisher of the Billings Outpost since 1997.
