"Jason Arday obituary: youngest ever black Cambridge professor/Sociology of education academic who made history before his career unravelled after accusations of plagiarism dies aged 41."

An obituary in the London Times.

Arday, who claimed to have been diagnosed with global developmental delay and autism spectrum disorder, was apparently unable to talk until the age of 11, and unable to read or write until he was 18. Despite this remarkable setback, by his early thirties he had begun writing and publishing academic papers, and he won his first academic post soon after....

We talked about Arday a few days ago, here. He was accused of plagiarism and various lies that made him a laughingstock. Now, apparently, he has killed himself. Though he is responsible for his deceit, I feel the greatest blame lies with the University that advanced him beyond anything that made sense. 

"Setting aside the plagiarism and fabrication allegations, I’m struck by just how … bad Arday’s work is."

"It makes me cringe to watch video of Professor Hilary Cremin, head of Cambridge’s faculty of education, fawning over him: 'We’re so lucky to have you. You’re the best in the world in terms of the research you do.' I’m gobsmacked that she didn’t think it might be worth trying to read the book he’d claimed to have written before offering him a plum academic job."

Writes Sonia Sodha, in "Jason Arday is the product of academia’s soft bigotry/Universities risk undermining genuine equality of opportunity when they reward identity over merit and sideline proper scrutiny" (London Times). 

And here's a London Times review of that book: "Jason Arday’s memoir is mawkish, self-aggrandising and hard to believe/The embattled former Cambridge professor’s autobiography, Great and Unfortunate Things, feels precision-tooled to flatter the biases of the sappiest white liberals."

Excerpt from the review: "As young Arday failed to hit his milestones, doctors declared him 'deficient' and said he was 'no better than a vegetable.' Arday was, by his own account, a profoundly intellectually disabled child. He claims that he could 'register sounds, but I couldn’t shape them into meaning.' He also says that smearing his faeces on the wall was one of his few sensory releases.... 'Most of my memories of my early childhood are of generalised images, sounds, sensations, feelings, rather than specific events, perhaps because language helps us to form memories, and I didn’t have access to that until I was older.'"

"'Many, many of the other artists who saw it really hated it,' Mr. Pettibone told Art in America magazine in 2011."

"'They were pounding the tables with anger, screaming, "This is not art!" I told them, "This may be the worst art you’ve ever seen, but it’s art. It’s not sports!"' Warhol’s appropriation of the soup can — and Lichtenstein’s use of existing comic-book imagery — inspired Mr. Pettibone’s career. 'He said, "I was told in school to be original, but you guys aren’t inventing anything,"' said Barbara Bertozzi Castelli, who runs the Castelli gallery in Manhattan.... 'He said, "I’m going to copy you."'"

From "Richard Pettibone, Master of the Artistic Miniature, Dies at 86/He painted tiny reproductions of works by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Duchamp and many others, raising questions about originality and creativity" (NYT).

You can see reproductions of Pettibone's works at the Castelli website, here. Sample:

I'm using the "plagiarism" tag, because it's my established tag on the subject of copying someone else's work, not out of any desire to accuse Pettibone of doing anything wrong. As with Pettibone and Andy's soup cans, when it comes to tags, I prefer another one of the same thing. Creating something new is to be avoided.

It is still possible to astonish.

I understand how an op-ed columnist can try that rhetorical subterfuge, but an editor should have insisted on acknowledgment.

— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) January 5, 2024

"If You Use a Ghostwriter, You Need to Check for Plagiarism."

Writes Jonathan Bailey, in Plagiarism Today.

Using a reputable plagiarism detection service, check the work yourself. Such checks take only minutes to perform and usually cost between $25 and $100 depending on the specific service and length of the book...

Or hire a professional, such as Bailey himself, who warns you that he's expensive.

Bailey describes an instance of a celebrity doctor who'd written many books and got into plagiarism trouble. The publisher moved the blame onto an assistant who was not listed as a co-author. This person took "complete responsibility for any errors."

There's a lot of ghostwriting out there — including A.I. — but when will it improve your reputation to say the ghostwriter did it?

Unraveling the pillars.

I'm trying to read "Claudine Gay: What Just Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me," written — it says here in the NYT — by Claudine Gay.

It would be beneath me to make the obvious joke — questioning whether the woman caught plagiarizing wrote the column that appears under her name — but I'm reading this prose and wondering who writes like this:

Claudine Gay resigns.

The NYT reports.

The latest accusations were circulated through an unsigned complaint published Monday in The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online journal that has led a campaign against Dr. Gay over the past few weeks. The new complaint added additional accusations of plagiarism to about 40 that had already been circulated in the same way, apparently by the same accuser....

"It has always been inconvenient that Harvard’s first Black president has only published 11 academic articles in her career and..."

"... not one book (other than one with three co-editors). Some of her predecessors, like Lawrence Bacow, Drew Gilpin Faust and Lawrence Summers, have had vastly more voluminous academic records. The discrepancy gives the appearance that Dr. Gay was not chosen because of her academic or scholarly qualifications, which Harvard is thought to prize, but rather because of her race...."

Writes John McWhorter, in "Why Claudine Gay Should Go" (NYT).

"She was defended by Alexander Graham Bell, and by Mark Twain... with a thumping hurrah for plagiarism, and..."

"... disgust for the egotism of 'these solemn donkeys breaking a little child’s heart with their ignorant damned rubbish! . . . A gang of dull and hoary pirates piously setting themselves the task of disciplining and purifying a kitten that they think they’ve caught filching a chop!'"

I'm reading Cynthia Ozick's "How Helen Keller Learned to Write/With the help of her teacher, Annie Sullivan, Keller forged a path from deaf-blind darkness to unimaginable artistry"  — from June 8, 2003 in The New Yorker.

I'm reading that because — and I can't remember why — I got to thinking how hard it is to believe that Helen Keller could have acquired the language skills needed to write the works attributed to her. (You, who are not blind, can see the entire text of her "Story of My Life" at Project Gutenberg.)

Ozick writes:

"An author’s online essay on why she used plagiarized material in a novel pulled earlier this year has itself been removed after editors found she had again lifted material."

The Guardian reports on Jumi Bello’s essay, "I Plagiarized Parts of My Debut Novel."

In her essay, Bello writes about her determination to finish her novel, about a young Black woman who becomes pregnant. She remembers wanting to add “literary descriptions” of pregnancy, which she had not experienced, and seeking outside material. 

“I tell myself I’m just borrowing and changing the language. I tell myself I will rewrite these parts later during the editorial phase. I will make this story mine again,” she wrote. “I would have told myself anything at that point. I would go to sleep at 8am because of keyed-up nerves and wake up at midnight. I stay up all night, writing through the days. I just want to get through it, to a place where I can sleep again. Looking back on this moment, I ignored my instincts. I ignored the voice inside that said quietly, this is wrong wrong wrong."

Plagiarizing your writing about plagiarism — very meta.

"But look, I was trying to write a seamless narrative, and to keep breaking it up with 'according to' qualifiers would have been extremely clunky. But in retrospect, I wish I’d done that."

Jill Abramson, caught and waffling.

Interviewed at Vox.

Sean Illing —Would you call any of this plagiarism?

Jill Abramson — No, I wouldn’t. This was completely unintentional. I mean, I have 70 pages of footnotes and I tried to credit everyone’s work as best I can. What we’re talking about here are sets of facts that I borrowed; obviously, the language is too close in some cases, but I’m not lifting original ideas. Again, I wish I had got the citation right, but it’s not an intentional theft or taking someone’s original ideas — it’s just the facts. But I’m owning it and I’m disappointed in myself for these mistakes.

Sean Illing — I grant that plagiarism is a fluid concept and it’s not always clear where the lines are.... [T]hose facts had to be collected and corroborated by the people you borrow from, so in that sense, you are stealing their labor, no?

Jill Abramson — I’m not going to get into a semantic argument about whether this fits some definition or not. I really think I’ve talked about this in full, and really would love to move on.

Must I always be the thief?

It looks like Bob Dylan lifted lines from SparkNotes for his ramblings about "Moby Dick" in his Nobel Prize Lecture.

As [writer Ben] Greenman first pointed out on his website, Dylan seemingly invented a moment in Moby-Dick when a "Quaker pacifist priest" tells Captain Ahab's third mate, Flask, "Some men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness." While Greenman was unable to find the relevant quote in several editions of Moby-Dick, Pitzer discovered that SparkNotes described the preacher as "someone whose trials have led him toward God rather than bitterness."

In all, [Andrea Pitzer on Slate] said she found at least 20 sentences in Dylan's lecture that resembled the SparkNotes entry on Moby-Dick. Representatives for Dylan, the Nobel Prize committee and SparkNotes did not immediately reply to a request for comment....

Dylan: "Tashtego says that he died and was reborn. His extra days are a gift. He wasn't saved by Christ, though, he says he was saved by a fellow man and a non-Christian at that. He parodies the resurrection."

SparkNotes: "Tashtego … has died and been reborn, and any extra days of his life are a gift. His rebirth also parodies religious images of resurrection. Tashtego is 'delivered' from death not by Christ but by a fellow man – a non-Christian at that."...

As Pitzer points out, Dylan's Nobel lecture does not mark the first time he's been accused of plagiarism. He's long borrowed lyrics from other sources, with his 2001 album Love and Theft drawing criticism for lyrics seemingly culled from Junichi Saga's book Confessions of a Yakuza and Henry Timrod's Civil War poetry. Even Dylan's paintings from his 2011 exhibit, "The Asia Series," came under fire for their similarities to well-known photographs taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Léon Busy.

In a 2012 interview with Rolling Stone, Dylan responded to the accusations of plagiarism pertaining to Love and Theft. "I'm working within my art form," he said. "It's that simple. I work within the rules and limitations of it. There are authoritarian figures that can explain that kind of art form better to you than I can. It's called songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it."

Pitzer: "Theft in the name of art is an ancient tradition, and Dylan has been a magpie since the 1960s. He has also frequently been open about his borrowings."

I was thinking about that old song: "Tears of rage, tears of grief/Must I always be the thief?" The answer, apparently, is yes!

Marine Le Pen uses that "absurd?!" argument I recommended.

I'm not saying Marine Le Pen's people read my blog. I'm just saying that I offered the argument:

I thought of this — absurd?! — argument in her favor: She purposely plagiarized because it would (and did) cause her antagonists to repeat words that have a meaning that influences people to vote for her.

Hmm. Let's say her speechwriters just screwed up. What do you think of using my absurd theory as rhetoric to cover up what was only embarrassing mistake? Now, caught, she could say: Of course, I used Fillon's words. He is absolutely right, but you cannot vote for Fillon now. You can only vote for me or Macron. I honor what Fillon said. I could not think of more perfect words. And now my opponents — who are also Fillon's opponents, believe me — are criticizing me for using those words, but listen to those words! They are the correct words! France is a set of values and principles transmitted from generation to generation, as passwords. It is a voice, an extraordinary, singular voice that speaks to all the peoples of the universe....

And she used it:

And Le Pen added to the intrigue later Tuesday, claiming in a television interview that the plagiarised passages had been deliberately used, likely in an effort to curry favour with Fillon supporters.

"We have in part the same vision of France as voters for Francois Fillon, of its greatness, the role that it must play in the world," Le Pen, a 48-year-old former lawyer, said.

"If we hadn't have done it, you wouldn't have spoken about it," she said of the apparent ploy. "We know you so well, we know how it works."

Notice that she used both aspects of the argument I suggested: 1. That it honors Fillon and connects her to him, and 2. That it was intended and worked as a device to get the media to carry the message.

IN THE COMMENTS: antiphone said:

It's analogous to sampling in music.She appropriated parts of his work to create a new piece. When you hear the speeches side by side it's clear that it was meant to be recognized. check it out here:

I absolutely agree with you. The cadence and phrasing are so similar that it takes the place of larding in "As Francois Fillon said." It reminded me of that theater piece with a male actor playing Hillary Clinton and a female playing Trump reenacting one of the debates. Look at how in rehearsal, the actors did their lines with the video of the original playing:



The 2 voices match in the same way in the Fillon/Le Pen side-by-side video.

"French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has been accused of plagiarising defeated rival François Fillon in a speech she delivered on Monday."

BBC reports:

Several sections of her speech [on Monday] in Villepinte, north of Paris, appear to repeat almost word-for-word comments Mr Fillon made in an address on 15 April...

• Mr Fillon's speech: "Then there is the Rhine frontier, the most open, the most dangerous, also the most promising - a Germanic world we have been so often in conflict with and with which we will yet co-operate in so many ways" Ms Le Pen's speech: "Then there is the Rhine frontier, the most open, also the most promising - a Germanic world we will yet co-operate with in so many ways, as long as we regain the relationship of allies and not of subjects"

• Both speeches refer to "waiting lists for the Alliance Française in Shanghai, Tokyo, or Mexico, for the French secondary school in Rabat or Rome"

• Both speeches quote World War One PM Georges Clemenceau, saying: "Once a soldier of God, and now a soldier of Liberty, France will always be the soldier of the ideal"

• Mr Fillon's speech: "France, as I have said, is a history, it is a geography, but it is also a set of values ​​and principles transmitted from generation to generation, as passwords. It is finally a singular voice addressed to all the peoples of the universe" Ms Le Pen's speech: "France is also a set of values and principles transmitted from generation to generation, as passwords. And then it is a voice, an extraordinary, singular voice that speaks to all the peoples of the universe"

I wonder if there is some earlier source that both cribbed from. You'd think she'd be more careful. I thought of this — absurd?! — argument in her favor: She purposely plagiarized because it would (and did) cause her antagonists to repeat words that have a meaning that influences people to vote for her.

Hmm. Let's say her speechwriters just screwed up. What do you think of using my absurd theory as rhetoric to cover up what was only embarrassing mistake? Now, caught, she could say: Of course, I used Fillon's words. He is absolutely right, but you cannot vote for Fillon now. You can only vote for me or Macron. I honor what Fillon said. I could not think of more perfect words. And now my opponents — who are also Fillon's opponents, believe me — are criticizing me for using those words, but listen to those words! They are the correct words! France is a set of values and principles transmitted from generation to generation, as passwords. It is a voice, an extraordinary, singular voice that speaks to all the peoples of the universe....

The plagiarism charge against Gorsuch.

Read the details here (at Politico).

The words in question are stating the facts of a legal case — medical details. I have a feeling lawyers, law professors, and judges take shortcuts lifting this sort of detail from legal cases and briefs all the time. We're not seeing Gorsuch lifting any distinctive ideas from the author and not giving her credit. It's material about, for example, what "esophageal atresia with tracheosophageal fistula" means, and Gorsuch, like the other author, cited a 1982 Indiana court ruling — which we can't look at now because it's sealed — a pediatrics textbook titled “Rudolph’s Pediatrics,” and an article that appeared in the Bloomington Sunday Herald in 1983.

Should I have put the words after "cited" in quotes? I copied and pasted "A 1982 Indiana court ruling that was later sealed, a well-known pediatrics textbook, 'Rudolph’s Pediatrics,' and a 1983 article in the Bloomington Sunday Herald." And I changed the words a little.

If Althouse hadn't called attention to what she did, would you consider it plagiarism?

Yes. She totally used it and just made some feeble effort to change it to avoid giving credit.

Not plagiarism, but that's a shoddy way to write that deserves criticism.

Okay since the link shows where she got the info and we can see she didn't do independent research.

It's fine. Passing along facts like this is a convenience we should feel free to take advantage of even without the link to the source.

 

pollcode.com free polls

If you voted on that, now vote on this:

Was your vote influenced by your preference about whether Gorsuch should be confirmed?

No. I'm for Gorsuch and I took a negative position about what he did.

No. I'm against Gorsuch and I took a positive position about what he did.

No. My view only happened to match up with what I hope happens to Gorsuch.

No. My position shouldn't be characterized as "negative" or "positive." It was a neutral interpretation of the meaning of words, a dignified, thoughtful judgment that should not be impugned.

Yes. You got me, Althouse. I confess!

 

pollcode.com free polls

"Even the chance position of a bird perched on a lamppost has been reproduced, the man who took the photograph was astonished to discover."

Bob's copying again.

What's worse — that Bob painted from somebody else's photograph or that Bob called it America when it was actually England?

How can this be called stalking or trolling?

One Instagramming woman — with 700,000 followers — has photographed  herself in beautiful places around the world and another woman went to the same places and photographed herself in similar clothes in the same places:

Diana only has about 3,600 Instagram followers — and has since deleted all her posts and made her account private — but Bullen provided side-by-side screengrabs of several of the most egregious copies. It quickly becomes apparent that this is the Single White Female remake for the Instagram era.

Not only are the outfits similar, but Diana has also taken the time and spent the money required fly all over the world — from the Greek islands to the Sahara Desert — to troll her more famous counterpart, which is some real dedication to her cause, whatever that cause may be....

Isn't the point of travel writing and photography to persuade the reader to travel to the same places and see these sights for yourself? Travelers often stand in front of the same beautiful views and take very similar photographs. It seems as though Bullen's gripe is that her persuasion through photographs has been very effective.

Bullen wrote that she and Diana had been in contact, explaining, “I believe her word, she is NOT a stalker and this labelling needs to stop, so does the hate messages.” Bullen also claimed that she did not create this story as a publicity stunt and said that Diana was “copying and stealing someone’s art to a ridiculously creepy level.” 

Well, it sure works as a publicity stunt. Thanks for putting that idea in my head. And I would not otherwise have noticed Bullen's website, but it sure is pretty.

I'm not buying the stalking/trolling argument. At some point, you might have copyright infringement, but I'm not opining on where that point is except to say that the travel industry would be screwed if the first person to frame a shot of a scenic place could bar everyone else from taking the same shot.

Harvard classics professor who teaches a course on Bob Dylan gets vindication from Bob Dylan's winning the Nobel Prize.

The NYT has an article on Richard F. Thomas, "who has been gently teased by colleagues for teaching a freshman seminar about Bob Dylan."

Mr. Thomas uses the course, simply called “Bob Dylan,” to put the artist in context of not just popular culture of the last half-century, but the tradition of classical poets like Virgil and Homer....

There’s a stanza that goes: “I’m gonna spare the defeated — I’m gonna speak to the crowd/… I’m goin’ to teach peace to the conquered/I’m gonna tame the proud.” That’s pretty much a direct quote of lines spoken in the “Aeneid” by the ghost of Aeneas’s father, Anchises, who he sees in the underworld, and who basically says to him: “Other people will make sculpture. Your art, your job as a Roman, is to ‘spare defeated peoples, tame the proud.’”...

[H]e’s like Virgil or Ovid: someone who came late enough in the tradition and has enough tradition behind him — T. S. Eliot wrote about this — that he can control it and also be part of it, recreating and refreshing it.I don’t see any difference between a poet like Catullus or Virgil and Bob Dylan. I think they are doing the same things. It has to do with control of language, connecting of lyrics and melodies. That’s what makes it timeless....

I like that Thomas has never met Bob Dylan and doesn't see much need or even value to talking to him: "Whatever I asked him, he wouldn’t tell me. Dylan is very careful at controlling what he gets asked."

I agree. We were talking about something like that yesterday, and I was saying I didn't have any kind of feeling of wanting to know Bob Dylan personally. The Bob Dylan that matters to me comes through the art. That's the direct experience. No reason to want to go around that to get somewhere else when you're already here.

Well, I really like Professor Thomas and his Virgil-and-Ovid comparisons. I'm not going to criticize him. But seeing this article made me think the Nobel Prize is going to motivate and justify a lot of other teachers to build courses around Bob Dylan, to speak about him in lofty tones, and to impose him on the young. I'm picturing a lot of aging, self-indulgent professors devising their Bob Dylan courses....

You’ve been with the professors/And they’ve all liked your looks/With great lawyers you have/Discussed lepers and crooks/You’ve been through all of/F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books...

... and thinking that's not what Bob Dylan means.

ADDED: Here's Thomas's article "The Classical Dylan." Excerpt:

Like Dylan, Virgil was accused of plagiarism. There is an anecdote in Suetonius’ Life of Virgil 46 on the poet’s response to the critics’ charge of plagiarizing Homer: “Why don’t they try the same thefts? They’ll find out it’s easier to snatch Hercules’ club from him than a single line from Homer.” Dylan successfully stole three from Virgil, embracing T. S. Eliot’s maxim “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” Poems that are layered with intertexts reveal depths of meaning through our recognition of those texts as we import other contexts that work together with new images, metaphors, and other poetic or musical effects. That is true of Virgil, Dante, Milton, and as we saw, it was true of “Lonesome Day Blues” and much else on Love and Theft. This way of writing indeed seems to be particularly a feature of the mature Dylan, starting with Time Out Of Mind. In his December 5th, 2004, 60 Minutes interview he says of “It’s Alright, Ma,” “I don’t know how I got to write those songs.” When asked if he can still write like that he replies that he cannot: “I did it once, and I can do other things now. But, I can’t do that.”

How Michelle Obama's words got into Melania Trump's speech.

If we are to believe the letter written by the Trump Organization in-house staff writer — Meredith McIver — who offered to resign over the damaging incident, Michelle's words came from Melania Trump, who admires Michelle Obama and read lines from the 2008 speech to McIver as a way to express what she was looking for. McIver took notes that included some of the verbatim phrases and then fashioned the speech without checking to make sure there was no overlap.

Donald Trump rejected McIver's resignation and — according to McIver — told her that "people make innocent mistakes and that we learn and grow from these experiences." So rather than take advantage of McIver as a sacrificial lamb, Trump saw an opportunity to demonstrate his magnanimity and forgiving spirit.

I don't know how much of that is true, but to me the most interesting part is that Melania "has always liked" Michelle Obama. Isn't that nice?! Michelle really did do a nice job with that speech back in 2008! This screw-up got us all looking back on something that we ought to acknowledge as good. We should have models for our speeches. Who should we emulate? You don't start with nothing. You show something of yourself by whom you chose to copy, but of course, you don't copy verbatim without acknowledging your source.

Now, I'm imagining Melania giving a speech that begins: When they asked me to give a speech at this convention and to millions of people watching this convention on TV, I wondered how could I do it? What could I say? And then I remembered: Michelle! What a beautiful speech Michelle Obama gave back in 2008! I never dreamed that 8 years later, I would be in her position. I'd have been terrified. I am terrified! But what gave me the nerve to step up and talk to you tonight was that image of Michelle Obama that impressed me so much, because she spoke from the heart — about her values, her values that she learned from her parents, and about her love for her husband and for her country. I want to say that too. Her country is my country, and I want to say, like her, that I believe that you need to work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say you’re going to do, and that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don’t know them, and even if you don’t agree with them....

Well, some speechwriter is going to get the old "You're fired."

Melania Trump’s speech uses lines from Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech.



ADDED: On the positive side, no one will ever say "Your word is your bond" again. You're going to need another bond. Or screw the bond. No one cares about your bond anymore.

AND: Maybe there's some other speech that Michelle's speech was based on. I googled word is bond and got to some fascinating Urban Dictionary background and beyond.

MORE: Why was I wondering about some other speech? It's just so stupid to copy Michelle's speech that I theorized that Melania's speechwriter found some obscure speech to use and it just happened to be the same one Michelle's speechwriter used. These speeches are so generic, but good Lord, change the words. Swap in synonyms. What are they paying you for?