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<\/a>Somebody should step up and defend Sen. John Walsh from charges that the plagiarized an Army War College paper, I suppose, but it won\u2019t be me. The senator should resign.<\/p>\n<\/a>Somebody should step up and defend Sen. John Walsh from charges that the plagiarized an Army War College paper, I suppose, but it won\u2019t be me. The senator should resign.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s degree. Walsh denies that he intentionally did anything wrong, a claim that becomes more dubious the closer one looks at it.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Now students can steal papers with a couple of computer clicks. For some, the temptation is overpowering.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Now I warn students, if you are going to steal other people\u2019s work, at least don\u2019t grab whatever shows up on the first page of Google. Don\u2019t compound dishonesty with stupidity.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t have to take a raft of college courses to know that isn\u2019t right.<\/p>\n
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<\/a><\/div><\/div>Arguably, in some fields, plagiarism itself is a misdemeanor, such as folk music and politics. Bob Dylan notoriously borrowed ideas, tunes and even lyrics from hundreds of uncredited sources. But whatever he did still came out sounding like Dylan.<\/p>\n