Plagiarism, Part 2

My young friend Daryl Deanne Dayanan is a junior at the University of Negros Occidental-Recoletos in the Philippines. She is majoring in secondary education with a focus on math, and making excellent grades. DD, as I often call her, contacted me earlier today and had something rather important on her mind. The professor in one of her classes had read his/her students the riot act about plagiarism.

Daryl Deanne says that it is rampant among college students these days, a fact that does not surprise me in the least. The Internet allows one to cut and paste an entire paragraph or an entire page in about five seconds. In previous generations, doing so would have taken far more time and effort. I readily admitted that academic or journalistic thievery is tempting, although there are degrees of plagiarism. Who will quibble if you borrow three words, or five? But the higher that number goes, the guiltier you are of stealing. Is there a problem with paraphrasing—that is, employing new verbs and nouns, and re-arranging the furniture so to speak? I do this sometimes, and I regard it as fair game although I acknowledge that it’s best to come up with my own words, idioms and expressions.

What if a student finds something he or she wants to use? The answer there is simple—cite the source, whether in a footnote or in the body of the paper.

Daryl Deanne’s teacher at UNO-R handed out the results of a survey done between 2002 and 2005 by Dr. Donald McCabe of Rutgers University. It showed that many students were willing to admit they copied, fabricated and turned in work done by another student or a “paper mill.” I sent her the link to my story about Martin Luther King egregiously plagiarizing on his doctoral dissertation at Boston University in 1955, which is proof enough that even good-hearted people can succumb to the urge to take the easy way and plagiarize.

Another example is as follows. In June 2017, I read T.J. English’s Havana Nocturne / How the Mob Owned Cuba and then Lost It to the Revolution. This would have been just another book to add to my library if not for my long-established habit of doing follow-up research. I annotate, and then visit Google and—97% of the time—Wikipedia to learn more. So there I was, getting the details about Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano and other Mafiosos down in Cuba before Fidel Castro, Che Guevara et al. chased them out on January 1, 1959.

In the process, I saw something that really rang a bell. It was an Associated Press review of Tad Szulc’s 1986 biography of Castro entitled Fidel / A Critical Portrait. Szulc had discussed a 1958 CIA plan to co-opt the revolution. I will quote him directly: “It is a sound assumption that the CIA wished to hedge its bets in Cuba and purchase goodwill among some members of the movement, if not Castro’s goodwill, for future contingencies.” Compare that with what I found on page 286 of English’s book: “It is a sound assumption, however, that the agency wished to hedge its bets in Cuba and purchase goodwill among some members of the movement for future contingencies.”

English had added “however,” changed “the CIA” to “the agency” and deleted “if not Castro’s goodwill.” The rest is a verbatim quote from what Szulc told an AP writer in 1986. Since English’s book, as indicated above, was published 21 years later, he did not have a leg to stand on.

I wasted no time in looking into this T.J. English. He has written seven other books, done podcasts and had articles in such publications as JazzTimes, Playboy, Irish America, Brooklyn Bridge, New York, Esquire and the Los Angeles Times Magazine. I was pleased to find his e-mail address. You can be assured I wrote to him, demanding that he explain the correlation between Szulc’s line and his almost word-for-word quote on page 286 of Havana Nocturne. If he liked Szulc’s phrasing so much, he should have just quoted him! An alternative, of course, would have been to give it a wholesale revision. Any competent writer could have done that in two minutes.

He chose not to reply, and why would he? The man had been caught red-handed. I thought about contacting his publisher, Harper, whose antecedents go back to 1817. English’s editors there would have found this item rather interesting, but I decided to let it drop.

If English was guilty of plagiarizing in his book about Cuba and the Mob, King was even more so as he cribbed huge swaths from the dissertation done by a fellow BU student named Jack Boozer. In this regard, America’s great civil rights leader was both lazy and arrogant.

My advice to Daryl Deanne and her fellow students at UNO-R is to remember that written words are intellectual property and should be respected. Do your own writing, I would tell them, and if you use sources go ahead and cite them.  But if you plagiarize, there is a good chance that you will be caught by your professor—there are now computer programs designed specifically to spot such fraud—or some curious reader like me.