Ed Kemmick
If it’s any consolation to Sen. John Walsh, I didn’t get my degree, either.
Walsh was stripped of his master’s degree from the U.S. Army War College on Friday because he plagiarized portions of his final paper in 2007. At least he still has his bachelor’s degree, presumably.
I was not guilty of plagiarism. In fact, I have sometimes wondered whether I was the only person to have finished his senior paper for the School of Journalism at the University of Montana without having gone on to earn a degree.
I had friends who completed all their coursework but struggled to finish the paper. One friend turned his paper in a decade after it was due and finally obtained a degree. My problem—or what I like to blame my own laziness on—was an exploding mountain.
For my senior paper, which I’m sure I have around here somewhere, I charted the reaction, in the pages of three or four American magazines, to the rise of Italian fascism in the 1920s and ’30s. We were supposed to have chosen a subject in the fall of our senior year, turned in an outline early in the winter, presented a rough draft by mid-winter and completed the paper by the first week in May.
I don’t know why I was allowed to ignore the deadlines, but as I recall I chose my subject about 15 days before the paper was due and then spent a sleepless week doing research, such as it was. I then spent another sleepless week banging out the paper on an Underwood manual typewriter.
I went through about a pint of Wite-Out (look it up, young persons), a couple of tins of Bugler rolling tobacco and enough coffee to fill a wading pool. As I slogged toward the 30-page minimum, I may have fudged on the width of the margins and I may have been a bit wordy in some of the footnotes, but plagiarism never occurred to me as an option.
But this was journalism school and I took a great deal of pride in my writing. I wasn’t about to import anyone else’s words into my paper. Anyway, I finished the paper on time and it received a better grade than I would have given it.
So far so good. The road to graduation looked smooth and clear. But this was 1980, and on May 16 my oldest child was born. Two days later Mount St. Helens in Washington erupted, vomiting up immense clouds of volcanic ash.
These bars couldn’t sell alcohol, but you could bring your own. Consequently I spent most of the week at the Heidlehaus with a good friend, shooting pool and drinking the Rainier we brought into the bar. It seemed like a dream come true.
There was the little matter of having an infant at home, but my wife’s family lived in Missoula, and from what I could gather all the womenfolk thought I was rather in the way. It was a bad start, admittedly, but I was very young, and I got much better at the parenting business as time went on.
OK, no more excuses about that. The point is, by the time the UM campus was opened again, it was finals week. I should have taken my finals and received my diploma, but I was headstrong and heedless in those days.
Here was how I looked at the matter: I was now a father, a man in the eyes of the law and of society, and I had already been offered a job by the Montana Standard, which wanted me to work in its Anaconda bureau.
For the past week I had been reveling in a strange world of freedom where there was no school and where the bars let you bring your own beer in. And when I went home, there was this divine child and her lovely mother waiting for me, plus the female in-laws, who were gradually warming to the idea that I was not entirely superfluous.
So I said to hell with it. I wasn’t going to take any finals and I didn’t need a degree because I already had a job. I don’t even remember feeling any pangs of remorse. It helped that a person could afford to go to school in those days without going deeply in debt.
I left UM without owing anyone a dime and I never looked back. Thirty-four years later I still feel no regrets. I suppose it would be nice to have a diploma on the wall, but I do have a business license from the city of Billings. That will have to do.
