Stolen data. Falsified rsums. Verbatim passages copied without quotation marks from someone else's work.
Institutions of higher education provide students with strict policies on the consequences the above behaviors will earn. As the wave of plagiarism and related indiscretions among professional academics in recent years has shown, however, plagiarism among scholars presents colleges, universities and beyond with somewhat of a quandary.
These cases also raise the question: to what standards should professional academics and scholars be held?
The most recent and well-known case is that of Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling historian. Goodwin has been accused of plagiarism for failing to attribute passages to the authors she took them from and for leaving out quotation marks from passages she copied word for word in her 1983 bestseller "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys."
Although the public accusations against Goodwin have appeared only recently, the controversy has been brewing for some time. Lynne McTaggert told The Boston Globe that she discovered 173 places where material from a book she wrote in 1983, "Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times," had been lifted by Goodwin. McTaggert threatened a copyright infringement suit; Goodwin's publisher, Simon & Schuster, negotiated a financial settlement with McTaggert.
As part of the settlement, Goodwin finally credited McTaggert by adding footnotes to subsequent editions of her book and identifying McTaggert's book as "a primary source for information on Kathleen Kennedy, both in my research and my writing."
Not until the press unearthed the settlement, however, did Goodwin decide to add quotation marks to the material she copied verbatim.
Goodwin claims her mistakes do not constitute plagiarism. Rather, she failed to identify passages copied verbatim in her longhand notes. Yet even after she owned up to the appropriated phrases from McTaggert, it was discovered that Goodwin had failed to cite many other works in her book as well.
Whether Goodwin's missteps constitute carelessness or theft, some of her colleagues feel her negligence is inexcusable. Several universities have rescinded requested speaking engagements, many scholars have criticized Goodwin's research methods -- especially her reliance on research assistants to do primary research -- and "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" has struck her from their guest list.
A member of the Pulitzer Board, Goodwin removed herself from this year's deliberations.
In an editorial last month, The Harvard Crimson staff called for Goodwin to resign her position on Harvard's Board of Overseers. Harvard, however, chose to remain silent on the issue, neither asking Goodwin to step down from her position nor commenting on her actions.
As Goodwin and other high profile academics have found themselves the focus of cheating accusations, academia has been forced to examine why such plagiarism occurs.
As far as the world of print goes, Connecticut College president Claire L. Gaudiani, whose own work was plagiarized by another college president, identified several trends that she feels have contributed to the rise in "unintentional" plagiarism scandals like Goodwin's.
Overall, she said she feels a "general sloppiness" has entered into academia in recent years. "I think we're all under all of this pressure to produce a lot of volume in a short time span," she explained.
Moreover, as Goodwin and others have claimed in their defense, publishers do not encourage authors to use heavy annotation in their books.
Some scholars use "ghost writers" or research assistants to keep up with the demand. These sorts of helpers may have less than perfect training, Gaudiani pointed out.
Still, Gaudiani stressed that ultimate responsibility lies with the scholar herself. The ease at which these mistakes can occur and be uncovered "just means that independent judgement ... is all the more important," she said.
The Goodwin brouhaha followed close behind a similar case involving a best seller and his best-selling product -- this time, historian Stephen Ambrose and his recent book, "The Wild Blue." This past winter, Ambrose admitted that while he footnoted passages taken from another historian's book, he failed to put quotation marks around the words and phrases that deserved them.
As independent authors, neither Goodwin nor Ambrose, who retired from teaching at the University of New Orleans over 10 years ago, face much more than public humiliation at this point, though book sales could suffer. Scholars who hold academic positions, however, have jobs as well as reputations to worry about.
A survey of recent cases of professional plagiarism finds responses ranging from head shaking to termination of employment. Last July Texas A&M University announced that Mary A. Zey had been fired for "flagrant and serious scientific misconduct" after an investigation revealed she had falsified and plagiarized data of two of her colleagues, John L. Boies and Harland N. Prechel. She was suspended with pay as her appeal was pending, and then later reinstated when a faculty committee ruled the charges were unsubstantiated.
In another incident, dean of the Boston University's College of Communications H. Joachim Maitre gave a speech at commencement that wasn't his. Maitre claimed he merely forgot to reference the original author. There were calls for his removal and separation from the university, recalled professor Scott Palmer of BU's Department of International Relations, of which Maitre is the chair.
"But he kept his tenured position," Palmer said.
Mount Holyoke suspended history professor Joseph Ellis--a Pulitzer Prize-winner himself--for a year without pay after he admitted to lying to students and reporters about his military participation in Vietnam. He was also forced to relinquish his endowed chair. But the administration also publicly accepted Ellis' apology and announced its intention to welcome him back in to the community.
University and college presidents have proved particularly resilient to fallout from questionable citation practices. Two years ago, a Duke University student discovered that a paper the president of Wesley College, Scott D. Miller, listed among his published works was almost entirely taken from a speech written by Connecticut College's Gaudiani.
In a telephone interview with The Dartmouth, Gaudiani said Miller wrote her a letter of apology, claiming an assistant who wrote the piece failed to annotate the source. Gaudiani said she did not seek legal recourse in the matter. "Generosity," she said, was the best tactic in cases where a speech has not been properly accredited.
Miller, who is still president of Wesley, a small college in Delaware affiliated with the Methodist church, did not return phone calls left at his office.
In 1995, BU's current president, Jon Westling, made up a fictitious student, whom he dubbed "Samantha Somnolent" who had exaggerated learning disabilities. Westling cited Samantha in numerous speeches to protest the extremes to which universities are forced to accommodate students. In his speeches, however, he represented Samantha as a real BU student, who had lied about her problems with auditory processing to Westling himself.
He even referred to her, with no indication of her fictitious nature, in a letter responding to a parent's criticism of Westling's overhaul of BU's policy and services for learning-disabled students, once the most celebrated in the country.
The truth of Samantha only came out two years later, in 1997, when students filed a class action suit against BU. During testimony, Westling was forced to admit Samantha was a "fictional person that allowed me to get into the broader topic I wanted to cover."
A federal judge publicly criticized Westling's falsehoods as she handed down a decision that BU's policy change was in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
In the final analysis, it appears that for professional academics the hard and fast rules of what is and is not "plagiarism" have grown murkier.
Connecticut College's Gaudiani, for one, differentiated between incidents in which a speaker failed to attribute his material and more serious infractions in which an individual actually wrote something as if it were his own.
