Another Harvard Copycat

What's going on up in Cambridge? Is it something in the water? First Doris Kearns Goodwin, member of Harvard's Board of Overseers, gets caught borrowing from a book on the Kennedys. Then Alan Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter professor of law, is accused of excessive dependence on an earlier book about Israel. And now Charles J. Ogletree--the Jesse Climenko professor of law--has admitted on the Harvard University website that he, too, did a spot of plagiarism this year.

Only a spot, you understand, and "inadvertently," "under the pressure of meeting a deadline" for All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education (W.W. Norton: 2004). Along the way, three pages of Yale professor Jack M. Balkin's What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said (NYU Press: 2001) got stolen--or, rather, got "inserted in a draft section of the book by one of my assistants for the purpose of being reviewed, researched, and summarized by another research assistant." But that "second assistant then sent a revised draft to the publisher," forgetting to clean up the work of the previous assistant.

This is an explanation, I suppose, for how plagiarism can happen. But think about the worse thing the explanation reveals: Ogletree didn't plan to write All Deliberate Speed in the first place. His graduate assistants cobbled it together for him from other sources--and, as Ogletree puts it, "I was negligent in not overseeing more carefully the final product that carries my name."

That's a curious construction, but it

WHEN DID THIS BECOME the way that a Harvard faculty member produces a book? There are easy ironies in any story of professorial plagiarism, of course. In Writing with Sources, a guide for Harvard's composition students dug up by Slate magazine during the Goodwin scandal, Ogletree's time pressure is explicitly rejected as an excuse: "Most often . . . the plagiarist has started out with good intentions but hasn't left enough time to do the reading and thinking that the assignment requires, has become desperate, and just wants the whole thing done with."

So, too, this week's back-to-school issue of the Harvard Law School's official newsletter, the HLS Adviser, notes: "The Administrative Board wishes to call the attention of all students to (1) materials on plagiarism and collaboration appearing on p. 223 of this year's HLS Catalog, and (2) the information on discipline on p. 231 of the Catalog"--where the claim of inadvertence that Ogletree makes is declared an insufficient defense.

BUT IRONIC as this all may be--a nest of unpunished plagiarists solemnly warning their students about the penalties for plagiarism--I find the pseudo-production of All Deliberate Speed more disturbing. Ogletree's assistants pasted together material from other books, then swept through the assembled text rewriting, editing, paraphrasing, and summarizing as they went. They got caught because they missed a passage, but what's wrong isn't the part they missed. It's the whole procedure.