Plagiarism in High Places

One of the big running debates over the last few weeks--"big" for those of us who teach first-year writing--is Hillary Clinton's accusation that Barack Obama "plagiarized" his good friend Massachusetts Governor Devall Patrick in a speech of his. The Obama campaign's response was first that (a) Patrick had given Obama permission to use his words; then, after the Clinton campaign protested that approval doesn't make a difference if the intent is to deceive the American people into thinking that Obama is a great orator, they added, more substantially, that (b) political speech is not protected, and American politicians borrow from each other all the time, and (c) that Hillary Clinton does this herself, even borrowing, over the course of this campaign, several catchphrases from Obama. The Clinton campaign's response to that last? "Plagiarism" only counts if Obama does it, because Clinton isn't running on her rhetorical prowess.

The pundits on the left and the right have been fairly dismissive of Clinton's charges, largely along the lines of (b), above. Now, though, we seem to have a new plagiarism scandal brewing in high places: Nancy Nall, a blogger who used to write a column for the (Fort Wayne, Indiana) News-Sentinel, just this morning has outed News-Sentinel columnist Tim Goeglein, whom one of the commenters on her blog describes as a "White House Public Liaison officer and Karl Rove gopher" (primarily he is a liaison between the White House and the Christian Right), as plagiarizing extensively from "What is a College Education?", a late-90s piece in the right-wing Dartmouth Review by Jeffrey Hart, a long-time Dartmouth English professor who also served as an aide under Nixon and Reagan. She provides long quotations from both sources, showing just how little Goeglein changed in stealing Hart's words; Goeglein has now admitted the plagiarism (Nall broke the news this morning, and Goeglein had confessed online by noon).

But meanwhile, Nall's readers have been busy, and have uncovered numerous other plagiarized pieces "by" Goeglein, and have documented them in the comments section to her post.

As one commenter pointed out: how stupid do you have to be to plagiarize off the Internet? We shake our heads in amazement at our freshmen, who apparently aren't savvy enough in the ways of the world to avoid ripping off other people's work from websites; but this is a senior public liaison in the White House ... and a conservative guru on (get this) media ethics ... writing on education!