What Would Happen if an Alligator Fought a Chainsaw? Apparently the alligator would win.....

Which makes one think that, along with coyotes in the New York subways as a means of rodent control, alligators might be one solution for urban sprawl.....

  ¶ 12:07 PM 2 comments   

  More Thoughts on KV This from a smart piece by Ann Hulbert in Slate (which, almost as an afterthought, obliterates the notion that KV wrote How Opal Mehta...):


[After the bogus publication process] Viswanathan might almost be forgiven for having forgotten that originality was even the goal she was striving for. Not that she would think twice, either, when Little, Brown's publisher touted the "freshness of the voice" in a special publicity letter about her book. ....It's tempting to wonder whether Viswanathan, if she could find her own voice, might foist some of the blame for her borrowings onto her endlessly enabling elders. But that is, of course, the last thing a much-mentored superkid, intent on success, has been reared to do.

Also in Slate, Joshua Foer shows that KV can not have a photographic memory because, to put it bluntly, there is no such thing.

"If Viswanathan really wants to stick to her story," Foer writes, "I know a few scientists who'd probably like to meet her."  ¶ 9:17 AM 0 comments   

  The Republicans Throw Money at Us Don't you just love the GOP plan to give every taxpayer a $100 gas "rebate"? Having given the oil companies vastly expensive and totally unneeded tax breaks, the Republicans are now turning on a dime (as it were) and throwing money at the public.

This is a boneheaded idea in so many ways.

First, as policy it makes no sense. The federal government can't just give money to people every time a commodity goes up in price. (So much for the free market!) The knowledge that the government will subsidize prices actually encourages producers to raise them. (Same thing with the asinine policy of giving tax breaks to people who buy hybrid cars.)

Second, it does nothing to address the causes of the problem.

Third, it's fiscally irresponsible.

Fourth—and this may be most depressing—it sends a terrible message to the country. There is no talk from Republicans of why citizens should use less energy, cut back on gas-guzzling SUVs, take public transportation when possible, and realize that every citizen is a participant in energy policy. There is nothing having to do with shared sacrifice. No one is saying, "Use less gas"—just, "Here, here's some spending money." The Republicans want to make us like dogs sniffing around the dinner table, hoping that some scraps will get tossed in our direction. This is not the way to make our country stronger.

And, of course, all this essentially constitutes a bribe in the months before the midterm elections.

I wonder if it will work?  ¶ 9:00 AM 2 comments   

  At Duke, It's Getting Hot in Here Essence magazine reports that the alleged rape victim at Duke has cried rape before, a decade ago, when the 17- or 18-year-old claimed that she had been raped by several men, one of whom she knew. Police declined to pursue the case, according to relatives, "out of fear for her safety." (Huh?) One likely reason: the alleged rape had allegedly occurred three years before.

Sports Illustrated gets the police report: According to the Creedmoor police report in August 1996, when the woman was 18, she told officers she was raped and beaten by three men "for a continual time" in 1993, when she was 14. She told police she was attacked at an "unspecified location" on a street in Creedmoor, a town 15 miles northeast of Durham.

The magazine also reports that the woman was hospitalized for about a week a year ago and treated for a "nervous breakdown."

The family is also trying to get the young woman to meet with civil-rights attorney Willie Gary, recommended by Jesse Jackson, but she will not. (Check out Gary's website—"Growing up in a poor migrant family, Gary beat the odds to become a multi-millionaire nationally renown [sic] attorney.... Gary keeps rising out of the shack he and his ten sisters and brothers shared." Sheesh. This next to the picture of him and his two Rolls-Royces.)

(By the way, let me give a shout-out to the Harvard Crimson here—the Duke Chronicle, which doesn't even have this story yet, makes me appreciate the job you guys do.)

Sports Illustrated also points out that the woman pleaded guilty to several misdemeanors in 2002.

What does all this mean? Got me. (Lawyers, would a judge allow this material to be entered into evidence?)

If I were a prosecutor, though, I wouldn't be feeling too confident about putting this woman on the stand.  ¶ 8:36 AM 2 comments   

  How Opal Mehta Got Recalled Little, Brown has decided to pull How Opal Mehta... from bookstores....apparently 45 passages of plagiarism was just too much. Now the publisher says it will allow Kaavya Viswanathan (KV from here on in) to revise the book, and they will re-release it.

Don't bet the ranch on that.

Maybe it's from reading these reviews on Amazon—where, as of this writing, Opal Mehta is ranked #29, which would likely make it a bestseller—or maybe it's because I still feel that the truth hasn't come out, but I have started to feel sorry for Kaavya Viswanathan. She must be going through hell.

It's not that I let her off the hook. A photographic memory? Please. She had a photographic memory of 45 passages? It's laughable. I don't think she even read Megan McCafferty; that was the work of the good folks at Alloy Entertainment. (Remember, this is the young woman who claimed that her preferred reading was Henry James and P.G. Wodehouse.)

And as readers of this blog know, I have somewhat strong feelings about plagiarism.

But I do feel that KV got caught up in something many young people (and adults, for that matter) would have been seduced by: the publishing machine. Her fancy-pants college advisor sends her to a literary agency, which snaps her up. A wan sample of her work is circulated to publishers, who on the strength of—what? certainly not her writing, it's entirely pedestrian—snap her up. (I'd be very curious to know if a photograph was included with the sample pages circulated to publishers.) When KV, at the beginning of her freshman year at Harvard, finds that writing is hard, she's told not to worry about it, the "packagers" at Alloy Entertainment can help. And they do. Somehow, a manuscript is produced.

At every step of the way, an adult is telling her that this is business as usual, standard operating procedure. And when that happens, it's easy to lose your moral compass. (If, to be sure, she ever had one.)

Yes, KV made mistakes. (And from Harvard's point of view, this kind of episode really ought to prompt some campus soul-searching about why people go to Harvard, what they do to get in, and whether the university has lost its soul. To that effect, check out these thoughts from Crimson editors on the deep inner meaning of the scandal, particularly Lauren Schuker's short essay.)

Yes, KV was a complicit pawn, but she was still a pawn. The ultimate responsibility here lies with the adults...who, of course, will not bear the brunt of the bad publicity.

Someday, I'd like to hear KV tell what really happened along the route to publication of this book. Wouldn't it be nice if Michael Pietsch—who, the Crimson points out, is also a Harvard grad—stepped up to the plate and said, "It's a common practice with young adult literature to enlist the help of ghostwriters, and in this case, one of those ghostwriters committed plagiarism. We apologize for violating the trust between a publisher and our readers."

Never happen, but it would be nice.

Meantime, KV, as someone who has himself lived through literary scandal—we both got harassed by Katie Couric—I can tell you, this will pass. The best way to survive it is to prove everyone wrong, and write a good book next time. Along the way, you have to discover the real joys of writing, the satisfaction that comes from doing it the hard way—i.e., sans ghostwriters— and the growth that comes with knowing that you did it something extremely difficult by yourself.

I wish you luck.  ¶ 8:01 AM 3 comments   

  At Duke, Stories of a Broomstick The father of the accuser in the Duke rape case is claiming that his daughter was sodomized with a broomstick, according to the Charlotte Observer.

Taking to the airwaves, the man told Rita Cosby of MSNBC that he hadn't learned of the allegation until recently—"she told me afterwards because she didn't want me to know that part."

The Observer writes, In papers filed with the court, police who searched the Buchanan Boulevard house where the party occurred made no mention of seizing a broomstick. And a broomstick was not among the items that police said they wanted to seize when they applied for the search warrant.

Couple of thoughts.

This could be one explanation for the lack of DNA.

This could also be an excuse for the lack of DNA.

The father also said that his daughter is under immense pressure, which is surely true, and that she has considered dropping the case.

My cautious prediction? If the price is right, she will drop the case. I'm guessing that she pushes for an out-of-court cash settlement, and the players involved will agree to it because either a) they're guilty or b) a trial would be hellish, and you never know what could happen.  ¶ 1:26 PM 2 comments   

  Will the Real Plagiarist Please Stand Up? There's a rather astonishing fact in today's Times piece on book packaging and Kaavya Viswanathan: both Viswanathan and the woman whose work was plagiarized from shared the same "editor."

Here's the Times:

....the same editor, Claudia Gabel, is thanked on the acknowledgments pages of both Ms. McCafferty's books and Ms. Viswanathan's "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life." Ms. Gabel had been an editorial assistant at Crown Publishing Group, then moved to Alloy, where she helped develop the idea for Ms. Viswanathan's book. She has recently become an editor at Knopf Delacorte Dell Young Readers Group, a sister imprint to Crown.

Ms. Gabel did not return calls for comment. But Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House, the publishing company that owns Crown, said Ms. Gabel, who worked at Alloy from the spring of 2003 until last November, had left the company "before the editorial work was completed" on Ms. Viswanathan's book.

"Claudia told us she did not touch a single line of Kaavya's writing at any point in any drafts," said Mr. Applebaum, who added that Ms. Gabel was one of several people who worked on the project in its conceptual stage.

Could Claudia Gabel be the woman who plagiarized material from one author to use in Viswanathan's "book"?

That is an interesting quote from Stuart Applebaum—"did not touch a single line of Kaavya's writing." Careful readers will note that it does not say whether Ms. Gabel added any material to Viswanathan's writing, which may have constituted ten pages, for all we know. Visnawathan herself says that her first contribution to the book was an autobiographical e-mail sent to the good people at Alloy, and they took it from there.

Here's a hilarious mistake from the Times, by the way:

Ms. Viswanathan was, in some ways, an unusual Alloy author. She was not recruited by the packager, but rather, was introduced to it by William Morris, the agent.

Um...William Morris is not an agent; William Morris is a literary agency (which, by the way, happens to represent me) founded in 1898 by one—surprise—William Morris. It is rather astonishing that the reporters who cover publishing for the New York Times could make that boo-boo. (Well, on second thought, maybe it isn't.)

One final thing: Readers of the Times piece may also note that everyone at Little, Brown is very careful to say that Alloy Entertainment couldn't have been responsible for the act of plagiarism and that it was, boo-hoo, Kaavya Viswanathan.

Little, Brown, for one, was not blaming Alloy. "Our understanding is that Kaavya wrote the book herself, so any problems are entirely the result of her writing and not the result of the packager's involvement in the book," said Michael Pietsch, the publisher.

Read between the lines: The Little, Brown people are distancing themselves from Viswanathan...cutting her loose, because they care more about preserving their relationship with a book packager.

Note that quote too: "Our understanding is that Kaavya wrote the book herself...."

This is not the same as saying, "Kaavya wrote the book herself...."

In other words, Michael Pietsch is giving himself some wiggle room, because, frankly, Kaavya probably didn't write the book. But now that Viswanathan has publicly claimed that she did, Pietsch, who probably knows the truth, can say that "our understanding is that Kaavya wrote the book," thus letting Alloy off the hook.

Later, if it comes out that Alloy wrote the book, Pietsch can come out with a statement like, "We were, sadly, led to believe by Kaavya Viswanathan that she had written the book by herself..."

The legal interests of Little, Brown and those of Kaavya Viswanathan—because that's what this language is really about—are starting to separate. Viswanathan herself is quoted all over the place, in this article and elsewhere, and her quotes are not helping her case. If her publisher were still in her corner, you have to think they'd tell her to shut up already. My bet is, she's out there on her own, exiled by the lawyers at Little, Brown.

This is getting ugly.  ¶ 9:34 AM 12 comments   

  Lest We Forget... ...at Duke, there's still a rape scandal going on, and the attorney for defendant Reade Seligmann wants the D.A. to release the accuser's medical, criminal and educational records.

According to the Duke Chronicle, "The complaining witness has a history of criminal activity and behavior, which includes alcohol abuse, drug abuse and dishonesty, all conduct which indicate mental, emotional and/or physical problems, which affect her credibility as a witness," defense attorney Kirk Osborn wrote in the motion.

Interesting. If true, that would both be intriguing (though not necessarily relevant) and, one presumes, an attempt to subvert the prosecution before this case comes to trial.

Meanwhile, D.A. Mike Nifong may reinstate misdemeanor charges against five of the lacrosse players for underage drinking and noise violations stemming from the infamous party.

He is tireless in his pursuit of justice, that man. Or, at least, someone he can convict of something....
  ¶ 8:37 AM 2 comments   

  Why Plagiarists Do It (Between the Sheets) (That's an old Lipton tea bag joke, by the way.)

Jack Shafer has a nice piece in Slate today on why plagiarists plagiarize. (I'm tempted to say "because they can.")

Among the reasons Shafer lists: writing is hard work, ambition exceeds talent, and contempt for the business.

I'd guess that Kaavya Viswanathan matches those three descriptions, and I'd throw in one more: In over her head. A young woman who dreams of being an investment banker—what kind of 16-year-old dreams of becoming an investment banker?—is told that she writes really well and she should write a novel. "I had only vaguely thought of becoming a writer," Viswanathan once admitted. But a book publisher throws money at her and says, We'll hook you up with some people who can help you with this....

The young writer gets the idea—probably not without reason—that everybody in the business employs ghostwriters. And so she isn't morally troubled by the fact that she's out promoting a book largely written (I'm guessing) by unknown scribes who "produce" content for the Generation Y market. And there you have it—the perfect ingredients for a literary scandal.

Viswanathan should have known better. But the ultimate responsibility here lies with Little, Brown, which was committing just as great a fraud as James Frey and Nan Talese at Random House....

What's the difference? Well, Frey and Talese were deceiving people who suffered from addiction. Viswanathan and her editor, Michael Pietsch, were pulling the wool over the eyes of teenagers.

Which is worse? Does it matter?  ¶ 8:15 AM 1 comments   

  KV's Ghostwriters I've been waiting for someone to do a piece looking into 17th Street Productions, the ghostwriting agency that's part of Alloy Entertainment, the marketing company behind Kaavya Viswanathan's How Opal Mehta.....

Good for the Harvard Independent for doing it. (Where's the Times on this seedy aspect of book publishing?*)

The Independent interviews Lizzie Skurnick, a former 17th Street editor and ghostwriter.

"The impulse at a place like the 17th Street is to have a house voice," Skurnick tells the Indy. "There are just reams and reams of stuff that’s written… It’s unavoidable that certain phrases will be recycled or said in a certain way… Often what you’ll find is that, it’s not that anyone is copying, it’s just that [these phrases] are the first things a mediocre writer would reach for.”

I wonder if the teen readers for whom these books are generated care whether or not the people who are claimed to have written them actually wrote them.

I know that when I was a kid, I would have been pretty broken up to learn that John D. Fitzgerald or Roald Dahl or Tolkien or E.B. White didn't really write the books that carried their names....
________________________________________________________________

P.S. A reader who has gotten to the paper earlier than I points out that the Times weighs in—oops—with a piece on exactly this subject on today's front page. (Did I say oops?)

Here it is.....
  ¶ 7:36 AM 5 comments   

  Apparently We're Still Trashy Welcome to the white-trash nation

——Helen A.S. Popkin, MSNBC.com, today

"White-Trash Nation"
—by Tad Friend, New York magazine, August 22, 1994

Who could forget the cover photo of Anna Nicole Smith consuming a bag of Cheetos—which prompted a lawsuit from Smith, who apparently had not been told that she would be characterized as "white trash".....





"White trash"...



Apparently not white trash....






  ¶ 11:53 AM 1 comments   

  Alex Beam and I Agree/World to End In the Globe today, Alex Beam agrees with me that Kaavya Viswanathan may not even have committed the acts of plagiarism for which she is not really taking responsibility.

Beam writes: Here is my cautious prediction: If and when the lawyers get through devouring one another, it will emerge that a staffer at Alloy, ''the creative think tank," introduced the plagiarism.

Yup. Beam and I cautiously agree. (I suggested the same thing yesterday.) I do wonder if Viswanathan has actually read the author, Megan McCafferty, from whom she claims to have plagiarized.

In other plagiarism news, Steve Ross, publisher of McCafferty's house, Crown Books, completely rejected Viswanathan's pseudo-apology.

According to the Globe, the Crimson, and the Times, Ross said: ''We find both the responses of Little, Brown and their author . . . deeply troubling and disingenuous. ...Based on the scope and character of the similarities, it is inconceivable that this was a display of youthful innocence or an unconscious or unintentional act."

Acording to the Times, Ross claims that there are "more than 40 passages in Ms. Viswanathan's book 'that contain identical language and/or common scene or dialogue structure from Megan McCafferty's first two books.'"

40 passages? Viswanathan really is a good internalizer.....  ¶ 10:30 AM 18 comments   

  Springsteen and the Plagiarist I went to see Bruce Springsteen last night at the Asbury Park Convention Hall in Asbury Park, New Jersey. The hall isn't really what its name sounds like; it's a big, brick, ramshackle building that looks like it hasn't met fire code in a while, and the part Bruce played in looked like a slightly bigger-than-usual high school gym. And as for Asbury Park—it's a dilapidated seaside town struggling to revive. Walking around the streets felt more dangerous than walking around the Harlem neighborhood where I live.

But against this gritty background, Springsteen was miraculous, heartwarming, authentic, inspiring—and generous. He's promoting a new record, called "We Shall Overcome—The Seeger Sessions," an album of American music popularized by the folk singer Pete Seeger. The concept is modest, an homage to an American legend and a musical tradition. But the show's spectacle was not; Springsteen was joined by no fewer than 19 other musicians on stage: a banjo player, an accordian player, four other guitarists (including his wife, Patti Scialfa, and a pedal steel player, such a gorgeous instrument), three backup singers, five horn players, a pianist, a drummer, a bass player and two violinists. All of them were fabulous musicians.

As the two-hour plus concert evolved, a couple of themes emerged: Springsteen's sense of family and community and his appreciation of history. When introducing one guitar player, a young man named (I think) Frank Bruno, Springsteen mentioned that Bruno's father, Springsteen's cousin, had taught him his first chords on the guitar, at age 13. "And then I went home and played, I don't know, Greensleeves—and right after that, Twist and Shout." That's an autobiography of an American great in a single sentence; I wish I could tell a story so well.

When beginning the song, "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight,"—and we danced by the light of the moon—Springsteen mentioned that his grandmother used to sing it to him when he was going to sleep at night, and did a sweet, off-the-cuff imitation of her singing to him.

When he asked a stagehand for his "magic guitar," Springsteen joked, "When I play this one, look out," then explained that he'd had the battered old acoustic guitar "since Catholic school."

And when he asked his wife Patti and two of the female backup singers to solo—a request the singers clearly weren't expecting, as they quickly conferred on stage—he explained, "These three used to sing together on the streets of New York City 25 years ago."

All this against the backdrop of the tough town where Springsteen began his career back in the 1970s. (And at the end of the show, Springsteen read a list of local charities that the concert was benefitting.)

Family. Community. Humility. Respect. Few American artists could convey such values in the midst of a rock concert. Yet Springsteen did it not just with his words, or with the people he chose to play with, but with the music he chose to play. Only three of the songs, I think, were his own compositions. The rest were either Pete Seeger originals ("Turn, Turn, Turn") or folk songs played by Seeger, and time and again Springsteen introduced the songs by mentioning their original writer and their origin—"this one's from about a century and a half ago," or, "this is an old Irish anti-war song," or, "this is from one of the original minstrels."

In the process, he conveyed a profound sense of history and of tradition, sometimes quite literally, as when he sang "When the Saints Come Marching In," with its wonderful beginning, "We are traveling in the footsteps of those who've gone before."

Maybe it was at this point in the show when I suddenly realized why the Harvard plagiarist, Kaavya Viswanathan, disturbs me so much. There is in her act of literary theft none of those qualities that Springsteen brought to life last night and embodies in his career—none of that humility, respect, and reverence toward those who've gone before. None of that sense of tradition, of being a part of something larger, a product of the toil and the heartbreak and the joy of past generations. None of that sense of family, community, and love.

Plagiarism is the antithesis of all those things. It is a rejection of community, an insistence upon the primacy of the individual. It is disrespectful and immodest and selfish. It is greedy; it invokes contempt for those who work hard and don't cheat. It says that the labor of others does not matter except insofar as I can use it to further my own ambitions—in this case, raking in a half-million-dollar book deal and becoming an investment banker. Is that why people go to Harvard these days? I hope not. But this is what plagiarism says; this is what it is.

And it may say something about what afflicts Harvard, and indeed our country, that there seems to be so much of it going around. I'm glad there are people like Springsteen left to remind us that we don't have to succumb to cynical opportunism, that we can strive to be better.  ¶ 8:46 AM 3 comments   

  Some students at Nova Southeastern University aren't happy about the choice of Salman Rushdie as Commencement speaker—they're Muslim, he wrote The Satanic Verses, this should be interesting—and Stanley Fish thinks they have it exactly right.

Fish writes in his blog, "When you’re the proud parent of a graduating son or daughter, the last thing you want to hear is something that will make you think. You want to hear something that will make you feel good."

I don't agree with the argument, but I do agree that Salman Rushdie doesn't make you feel good. Perhaps Fish would prefer his wife, Padma Lakshmi?



Padma Lakshmi:
Could make Stanley
Fish feel good.  ¶ 3:06 PM 2 comments   

  Viswanathan: The Story Gets Weirder One of the most curious aspects of the story of Kaavya Viswanathan is the role of a company called Alloy Entertainment, which helped create the book Viswanathan is rumored to have written.

According to the Boston Globe, Viswanathan turned to Alloy when her original idea for a novel was considered "too dark."

While Viswanathan said the plot was her idea, she acknowledged in a February interview with the Globe that Alloy had played a major role in fleshing out the concept.

Alloy co-holds the copyright to "Opal Mehta...", which strikes some people the Globe interviewed as hard to explain if the company's role was only "fleshing out the concept."

''We would never recommend to an author that they share copyright for something as minor as refining a concept," said Boston-area literary agent Doe Coover.

I am curious: What is Alloy Entertainment? Its website, linked to above, describes the company as "a creative think tank that develops and produces original books, television series and feature films."

And how's this for a line to send Orwellian shivers down your spine: "Alloy Entertainment produces more than 40 new books a year."

What's really interesting is that Alloy Entertainment turns out to be essentially a subsidiary of a marketing company. This isn't really even some bogus ghostwriting firm; it's "one of the largest and most successful marketers and merchandisers to the youth market." The company's CEO, Matthew C. Diamond, "founded Alloy in January 1997 to tap into the enormous spending power of the Generation Y market."

What becomes clear is that that Kaavya Viswanathan's book really isn't a book at all; it's a piece of marketing aimed at the Generation Y market, a product, and Viswanathan—how much of this did she really write, even excluding the plagiarism?—may be little more than an empty vessel. Young, attractive, a Harvard student, and a member of a successful ethnic group, Indian-Americans (imagine the foreign rights!), she's a marketer's dream...so who cares whether she can write? It's not just her book that's product—it's Viswanathan herself.

After all, why else would you sign an 18-year-old to a two-book, $500,000 deal—when she hasn't even written a book yet?

The answer is, you don't—unless it's not her literary talents that you're buying.

In fact, one of the more intriguing possibilities of this story is that Viswanathan might not even have committed the plagiarism....but that it was the ghostwriters at Alloy Entertainment.

Whew. This is a tawdry business.


(Chitose Suzuki/ Associated Press)
Kaavya Viswanathan:
Did she plagiarize—
or was it her ghostwriters?
  ¶ 8:48 AM 9 comments   

  Quotes of the Day "In a separate statement, Little, Brown publisher and senior vice president Michael Pietsch said [that...] Viswanathan is ''a decent, serious, incredibly hard-working writer and student, and I am confident that we will learn that any similarities in phrasings were unintentional.'"

—The Boston Globe, April 25th

"No. I haven't [started writing the sequel] and I probably should. But I'm actually terrified about the writing process this time around. What if I find out I have nothing to say? What if I can't write? I just wish I could just move forward to the time when the sequel would be written and I could go around promoting it. I enjoy that part." (smiles)

—Kaavya Viswanathan, The Hindu, April 23rd

  ¶ 8:38 AM 0 comments   

  Don't Show This Headline to Stephen Walt
Top White House posts go to Jews

The article goes on to say that "White House policy is now in the hands of two Jews...."

Sounds like something David Duke might endorse, right?

It's actually from the Jerusalem Post.....
  ¶ 8:16 AM 0 comments   

  At Harvard, A Plagiarist's Bogus Confession Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard sophomore who plagiarized from two novels by Megan McCafferty, is admitting that she plagiarized from two novels by Megan McCafferty.

Oh, heck, what am I saying? Of course she isn't!

Here's this from the Times:

Calling herself a "huge fan" of Ms. McCafferty's work, Ms. Viswanathan added, "I wasn't aware of how much I may have internalized Ms. McCafferty's words." She also apologized to Ms. McCafferty and said that future printings of the novel would be revised to "eliminate any inappropriate similarities."

What a load of nonsense.

If you read the link above, you'll see that Viswanathan "internalized" some remarkably specific language. The Times says that there are "at least 29 passages that are strikingly similar." Ms. Viswanathan would appear to have an excellent memory.

Let's be serious. This not a case of "inappropriate similarities"—it's just plain-old ripping off someone else's hard work. And because Visnawathan is young and pretty and goes to Harvard, she made a hell of a lot more money off these words than their original author.

You know, 19-year-olds make mistakes—especially hyper-ambitious ones—and I wouldn't want to fault a person that age for the rest of her life. But still: Sometimes you just want to hear somebody admit, "Yeah, I plagiarized." (Or, in James Frey's case, "Yeah, I made the whole thing up.")

Internalized. Inappropriate similarities.

Argh. Apparently even 19-year-olds know how to spin these days.

FAS press person Robert Mitchell has this to say about whether Viswanathan will face any discipline: "Our policies apply to work submitted to courses. Nevertheless, we expect Harvard students to conduct themselves with integrity and honesty at all times."

Hmmm. Given that Allan Dershowitz has been accused of plagiarism, and Larry Tribe has admitted to it, and Andrei Shleifer is returning to Harvard to teach next fall, it would seem a little odd for the university to punish Viswanathan. After all, she's only doing the same thing that some Harvard professors do—and get away with.

Then again, those men are friends of Larry Summers, and Viswanathan, so far as I know, is not.

____________________________________________________

P.S. Some of the headlines I've seen about this story say that Viswanathan "admits borrowing passages."

What, was she going to give them back?
_____________________________________________________

P.P.S. A friend who works in intellectual property law suggests that there might be very specific legal reasons for Viswanathan's diction—that it is very hard to prove theft of intellectual copyright if you can claim that a work is the product of an internal process, a self-creation. In other words: I read and read something, then I "internalized" it and came up with something of my own.

Which would suggest that perhaps it's Viswanathan's publisher—more specifically, her publisher's lawyer—who's telling her what to say.

Does this let her off the hook? I don't think so.....















  ¶ 7:25 PM 6 comments   

  The Biz School Gets a Dean Here's the announcement:

Dear Alumni and Friends,

I wanted you to be among the first to know that Professor Jay Light has been appointed as the next Dean of Harvard Business School. Please see today's press release that follows.

Sincerely,

Donella M. Rapier
Vice President, Alumni Affairs and Development
Harvard University

********************************************************************************************

Jay O. Light Named Ninth Dean of Harvard Business School


Jay O. Light, an expert in finance and investment management and the Dwight P. Robinson, Jr., Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS), will be the School's next Dean, President Lawrence H. Summers announced today.

"I am very pleased that Jay Light has agreed to become Dean," said Summers. "He has done an outstanding job as Acting Dean, and no one is more familiar with the range of opportunities and challenges facing Harvard Business School or better prepared to guide the School in meeting them. As his colleagues and friends well know, he has made extraordinary contributions to HBS over the years, and the School will be well served by his leadership qualities, his deep knowledge of the School's distinctive character, and his devotion to keeping its programs fresh, forward-looking, and strong as HBS heads toward its second century. Jay is also an excellent citizen of the University more broadly, and his collaborative outlook and engagement with issues of University-wide significance will help strengthen Harvard as a whole."

A member of the HBS faculty since 1970, Light will assume his new duties immediately. He has been the School's Acting Dean since August 1, 2005, and previously served in a range of senior leadership roles at HBS. He was chair of the School's Finance unit from 1986 to 1988 and played an active role in the recent restructuring of the required first-year MBA course in finance. From 1988 to 1992, he was Senior Associate Dean, Director of Faculty Planning, and from 1998 to 2005 he was Senior Associate Dean, Director of Planning and Development, responsible for the School's strategic planning and new initiatives.

"I am honored to take the helm of a School that has been my life's work for more than three decades," Light said. "I follow in the footsteps of some great leaders in management education, including Kim Clark, who stepped down from this office last July, and John McArthur, who ended his tenure as Dean in 1995. I am grateful for the lessons in leadership I learned from them."

"Harvard Business School is a unique place with extraordinary faculty, students, staff, and facilities, as well as an alumni body of 65,000 women and men who aspire to make a difference in the world," Light added. "I look forward to working with my colleagues in the years ahead to keep Harvard Business School the world leader in general management education."

Former Dean Kim Clark said, "I am delighted that President Summers has named Jay Light to be my successor. He has earned the respect of the entire HBS community. With years of wide-ranging experience in academia and the world of business, gifted in planning and implementation, he is especially well prepared to lead the School in an age of innovation, globalization, and technology." Clark concluded his service as Dean of HBS last summer to assume the presidency of Brigham Young University-Idaho.

As Acting Dean, Light has overseen the completion of Harvard Business School's successful $600 million campaign, the launch of new faculty initiatives in health care and science-based business, and the final stages of the renovation and restoration of Baker Library, which houses the world's preeminent collection of business books and archival materials. He also has led innovations in the School's core educational programs, including a team-based learning initiative in the MBA program and the launch of a new, modular leadership development program in executive education. He has played an active role in the University's planning for new facilities and activities in Allston as well.

Light earned a bachelor's degree in engineering physics with highest honors from Cornell University in 1963 and a DBA from Harvard University's joint program in decision and control theory in 1970. Before joining the HBS faculty, he worked in satellite guidance and systems planning at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. He was later affiliated with a management consulting firm specializing in corporate strategy and planning. From 1977 to 1979, he took a leave of absence from HBS to serve as director of investment and financial policies for the Ford Foundation in New York, where, as Director of Investment and Financial Policies, he was responsible for formulating and implementing the policies used in managing the Foundation's multibillion-dollar investment portfolio. He returned to HBS in 1979 as a full professor with tenure.

Light is a director of the Harvard Management Company, which oversees the investment of the University's endowment. He also serves on several other boards, including those of Partners HealthCare and the Groton School. He is a member of the investment committee of several endowments and an adviser to several corporate and institutional pools of capital.

Light's extensive professional, research, and teaching interests have focused on the capital markets and institutional asset management, including the management of pension funds and endowments, as well as on the entrepreneurial management of technology companies. He is the author of The Financial System, numerous articles for professional journals, and many cases, notes, and working papers on asset management, risk management, negotiation, and corporate finance. In his decades at the School, he has taught many thousands of students in the MBA, doctoral, and executive education programs; his most recent teaching assignment was in the first-year required course on finance.

In announcing Light's appointment, Summers expressed appreciation to members of the HBS community for their advice on the selection of the new Dean. "I want to thank the many members of the community who offered their counsel during the course of the search, on both the choice of a new Dean and the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead for HBS," Summers said. "Your advice has contributed a great deal to an outcome that will carry forward the School's proud tradition of strong leadership and educational excellence."

Light lives in Belmont, Massachusetts, with his wife, Judy. They are the parents of two grown children.   ¶ 5:25 PM 7 comments   

  The Morality of Economists? From today's Crimson:

Georgios N. Theophanous ’06, an economics concentrator who had Shleifer as a thesis adviser, called the professor a “very accurate” speaker and “remarkably energetic” thinker. He also rejected the relevance of Shleifer’s legal troubles to his standing as a Faculty member.

“He is an excellent professor and does remarkable research and those to me are the two main criteria that you should be using in deciding whether or not he’s going to be a valued professor,” Theophanous said. “The other stuff, that is for other people to worry about.”

Mmm-hmmm. And they say Hitler was a pretty dynamic speaker. Anything else, that's for other people to worry about.

A more serious point of comparison: As David Warsh has pointed out, Yale fired Shleifer's protege, Florencio López-de-Silanes, for double-billing about $150,000 worth of expenses. Yale spokesman Tom Conroy put it bluntly: "He has resigned from Yale as a result of financial misconduct and irregularities in his role as director of the International Institute for Corporate Governance. ....Appropriate corrective actions have been taken."

As Fred Abernathy and others have pointed out, Harvard has never said a peep about the $30 million that Shleifer cost the university....  ¶ 3:43 PM 0 comments   

  Andrei Shleifer: He's Back! Well, almost. The Crimson reports that Andrei Shleifer, Harvard's $30-million man, will be teaching in the econ department this fall.

In other news, the business school has awarded tenure to Ken Lay, Jack Abramoff is the new dean of the Kennedy School, and the law school has given Zacaria Moussaoui a three-year scholarship, providing he is not executed before September.  ¶ 3:17 PM 3 comments   

  Monday Afternoon Zen   ¶ 1:23 PM 3 comments   

  Plagiarists of the World, Unite! Gawker catches Newsweek plagiarizing from Slate...while the Crimson catches sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarizing from novelist Megan McCafferty...while the Times nabs Raytheon CEO William Swanson plagiarizing from a 1944 book, "The Unwritten Laws of Engineering," by W.J. King.

What is it with you people?

My thoughts....

Plagiarism is never the original sin, it's the symptom of some deeper dysfunction.

The Newsweek writers were probably so bored with the banal pseudo-sociological nonsense that they were writing about Duke lacrosse—I mean, just look at what they stole—that they couldn't trouble themselves to muster any original thoughts.

The Harvard student absorbed what may be Harvard's ascendant philosophy, if I may paraphrase—achievement without a soul. (She wants to go into investment banking. Shocker.)

The Raytheon chief surely had his "laws" of leadership written by a ghostwriter, who likely thought that the whole enterprise was so corrupt in the first place—he's writing "principles" to be spouted by a war profiteer— what's a little plagiarism in the mix?

One related example: Donald Trump allegedly wrote the foreword for a beauty book featuring the Miss USA contestants (Trump sponsors the pageant). When he threw a book party, he buried the author's name on the invitation, and when her father introduced himself to Trump as the father of the author, the sleazebag developer looked at him blankly, then said, "Oh, right. The author. Congrats."

Oh, right. The author.  ¶ 1:05 PM 3 comments   

  Larry Summers—Dissed by Tufts Robert Sternberg, dean of Tufts' Faculty of Arts and Sciences, has this to say about leadership...with a little editorial aside from the Boston Globe.

"Our education system is idiotic," says Sternberg. ''We're actually going backwards. There's more emphasis on mindless thinking. What matters is how you use information. A manager won't last long on IQ alone." (Hello, Larry Summers.)

Ouch. While I think that the point is a fair one—heck, I pretty much said the same thing in this month's issue of Boston Magazine —that seems an underhanded way to make it—a little shiv between the ribs, as it were.

  ¶ 12:09 PM 5 comments