PLAGIARISM BY DESIGN? MIT Press is demanding compensation from McGraw-Hill for infringing on MIT’s copyright on Pietro Belluschi: Modern American Architect, by Meredith L. Clausen, a professor of architectural history at the University of Washington. Portions of Ms. Clausen’s monograph are reproduced, without acknowledgment, in Structures of Our Time: 31 Buildings That Changed Modern Life (McGraw-Hill, 2002), by Roger Shepherd, a professor of fine arts at the Parsons School of Design, in New York.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Shepherd acknowledged the plagiarism, and said that there were “a variety of reasons why some chunks of that book ended up in a book of mine from two years ago.” He said the situation involved “one of the research assistants I had hired, and the pressure I was under during 9/11.” Some of Ms. Clausen’s book “had been put in as rough stuff, meant to be rewritten, and it remained in.”
It is not the first complaint provoked by Structures of Our Time. About a year ago, Mr. Shepherd said, Princeton Architectural Press contacted his publisher about passages from one of its books that had been incorporated into Mr. Shepherd’s volume. Kevin Lippert, the publisher of Princeton Architectural Press, confirmed that the press had complained to McGraw-Hill. But he also indicated that material from not one but three PAP titles “appeared without attribution or permission” in Structures.
“McGraw-Hill went so far as to recall the book,” said Mr. Shepherd. “It’s shredded them.” April Hattori, McGraw-Hill’s vice president for communications, confirmed that the press had received a complaint about the book in 2003, but said that the book had not been withdrawn because of the plagiarism charge. “For business reasons,” she said, “it was taken out of print.”
Ms. Clausen cites 19 passages from her book -- including several long paragraphs -- that are reproduced in Structures of Our Time. Sentences appear to have been copied intact, then altered for punctuation, or slightly reworded. Someone identified as “an all but ideal client” in Ms. Clausen’s account “proved to be the ideal client” in Mr. Shepherd’s telling.
“This is about as clear a case of copyright infringement as I’ve seen,” said William S. Strong, a lawyer in Boston who is representing MIT Press. “It isn’t just plagiarism, though a lot of people don’t get that distinction.” Plagiarism includes, for example, paraphrasing a work without acknowledging the source. “Plagiarism is a moral violation,” said Mr. Strong, “but it’s not illegal.” Taking over the actual words appearing in a copyrighted text, however, is legally actionable, and a matter to which Mr. Strong has devoted close attention over the years, as author of The Copyright Book: A Practical Guide (MIT Press), now in its fifth edition.
Mr. Shepherd said that he is now writing a letter to Ms. Clausen. “I’m going to tell her I have remorse for this, and that I take total responsibility. And in fact, I’m probably not going to be able to write any more books.”
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Mr. Shepherd started drafting his letter at just about the time Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a professor of law at Harvard University, made a widely publicized apology for the six paragraphs from another scholar’s work appearing, without attribution, in Mr. Ogletree’s recent book All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education (W.W. Norton). An official report from Harvard called the borrowing “a serious scholarly transgression” -- though not necessarily a case of deliberate wrongdoing on the part of Mr. Ogletree, who told The Harvard Crimson that he is guilty only of editorial neglect in handling a draft prepared by a graduate student.
Clearly something must be done about those rogue graduate students.
While waiting for that to happen, scholars might want to consult an article by Matthew C. Woessner, an assistant professor of public policy at Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg, appearing in the April issue of the journal PS: Political Science & Politics. Applying rational-choice theory, Mr. Woessner contends that “the costs imposed upon those who are caught cheating are often insufficient to outweigh the objective benefits of cheating” -- just as, in a game of blackjack, it is sometimes worth the risk of “busting” (exceeding 21) by taking another hit, if the player thinks the dealer is bluffing. The title of Mr. Woessner’s paper is “Beating the House: How Inadequate Penalties for Cheating Make Plagiarism an Excellent Gamble.”
While his analysis focuses on student plagiarism, Mr. Woessner writes by e-mail that the logic of his argument “applies quite readily to faculty.” In short, if the profits of misconduct exceed the costs of getting caught, then you don’t need an M.B.A. to see the bottom line. The challenge is to figure out how to increase the costs of getting caught in an effective way.
And that, says Mr. Woessner, requires more than the expectation that the light-fingered Professor X must pay monetary damages to the unhappy Professor Y. “There are actually two aggrieved parties,” writes Mr. Woessner: “Professor Y and the institution that employs Professor X. ... If the stolen material is a substantive component of a research project, the theft might well have saved (the plagiarist) dozens, or even hundreds, of hours of work. This is research time presumably owed to the institution.” And that’s not counting such benefits as tenure and promotion that may accrue to a faculty member on the basis of plagiarized work.
“When the considerable benefits of fraud are weighed against the improbability of detection,” writes Mr. Woessner, “the requisite penalties for willful conduct ought to be fairly dramatic.” At very least, raising the costs might make scholars more careful about hiring intellectual kleptomaniacs as research assistants.
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 51, Issue 5, Page A18