The Plagiarizing President
A retired military man was named a few years ago to be the President of the University of South Carolina. His has been a rocky tenure, but his most recent commencement speech, which ended with a stirring peroration that turned out to be copied, word-for-word, from a speech by another military man, finally did him in, and he submitted his resignation, which was promptly accepted. More on the plagiarizing president can be found here.
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Robert Caslen, pictured in 2014 when he was superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy, resigned Wednesday as president of the University of South Carolina.
Seniors at the University of South Carolina had already dealt with one disaster — the pandemic — when they took their socially distanced seats at the school’s commencement ceremony last weekend.
Then came another train wreck.
The university’s president, Robert Caslen, delivered a speech so bungled — with the wrong school name and closing remarks lifted nearly word-for-word from another famous commencement address — that it prompted widespread criticism from social media users to state legislators in South Carolina.
Now, less than a week later, Caslen has resigned.
“I am truly sorry,” said Caslen, a retired Army lieutenant general, in a statement announcing his resignation. “I was searching for words about resilience in adversity and when they were transcribed into the speech, I failed to ensure its attribution. I take full responsibility for this oversight.”
Robert Caslen uses the passive voice to minimize his role: “when they [those words] were transcribed” — possibly by someone else? — rather than the forthright “when I wrote the speech.” It’s as if the offending words had gone off by themselves on their vulgar spree, while Caslen helplessly looked on.
Criticism of Caslen’s address, which was delivered Friday night, began immediately after he called students “the newest alumni from the University of California” to shocked laughter from the crowd.
After a university official standing near him whispered “South Carolina,” Caslen corrected himself, then joked about owing the crowd pushups.
Apparently Caslen was not so deeply committed to, or immersed in, the university, as to be able to call it by its right name.
But it was the plagiarism that ultimately prompted his resignation.
In the closing words of his address, Caslen urged the graduating students to face adversity boldly.
“Know that life is not fair and if you’re like me, you’ll fail often,” Caslen said. “But if you take some risks, step up when times are toughest, face down the cowardly bullies and lift up the downtrodden — and never, never give up — if you do those things, the next generation and the generations to follow will live in a world far better than the one we have today. And what started here, today, will indeed change the world for the better.”
Those words were copied almost identically from a famous 2014 commencement speech given by Adm. William McRaven, the Navy SEAL who oversaw the mission that killed Osama bin Laden. Caslen did not attribute the words to McRaven, whose speech has been viewed more than 13 million times on YouTube.
Stirring words of the usual commencement-uplift variety, but not so stirring once you discover that President Caslen didn’t write them himself, but stole them from another military man, Adm. William McRaven. And how stupidly careless Caslen must have been to have chosen to steal from a speech that had been so widely seen, with more than 13 million views on YouTube.
With egg on his face, and uproar in the press and in the South Carolina Statehouse, the plagiarizing President Caslen resigned from his post. It could be said of him as was said, in slightly altered fashion, of the Thane of Cawdor, that “Nothing became his presidency like the leaving of it.”
A Brief Digression On Another Plagiarizing President:
Not everyone caught in a plagiarism scandal, or even several such scandals, suffers what should be the consequences, as President Caslen did. When Joe Biden was a law student, he submitted a course paper that was copied from a law review article. But he received his degree, he passed the Bar, and went – as we all now know – from strength to strength as a politician.
Biden, unchastened by his previous experience of being found out as a plagiarist, has copied others many times since – especially phrases and sentences from John Kennedy, lifted for reuse without attribution. In 1987, when he was running for President, he gave a speech that copied the words of Neil Kinnock, the Labour Party leader. Here is Biden who, in his closing remarks at an Aug. 23, 1987 debate at the Iowa State Fair, said:
“I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?
Biden then gestured to his wife and continued:
“Why is it that my wife who is sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I’m the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? … Is it because they didn’t work hard? My ancestors who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come after 12 hours and play football for four hours? It’s because they didn’t have a platform on which to stand.”
Kinnock had said:
“Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?
Pointing to his wife, Kinnock then said:
“Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because all our predecessors were thick?
“Does anybody really think that they didn’t get what we had because they didn’t have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.”
Biden been a serial plagiarist since his first year in law school, where he submitted a law school article as his own work in a class on Professional Ethics – his copying of Neil Kinnock is only the best known of dozens of examples of his plagiarism, especially passages lifted from John Kennedy.
Biden was not just a plagiarist in his copying Kinnock, but also – and not for the first or the last time — a liar. He added a personal detail, claiming that “My ancestors worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come after 12 hours and play football for four hours.” None of Joe Biden’s ancestors was a coal miner; a great- grandfather was a mining engineer, which is a very different thing. Why did Biden lie? He knew it made a good, tugging-at-the-heartstrings salt-of-the-earth story. He never counted on his story being checked on.
Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino Accused of Data Fraud
A professor at Harvard Business School, Francesca Gino, has been accused by three academic researchers of having falsified data in at least four of her papers. Once a Business School star, that star has now imploded. After Harvard completes its own investigation, she may well be out of a job. More on this scandal can be found here.raud in at Least Four Papers
A group of three data investigators has accused Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino of publishing fraudulent data in at least four papers.
Uri Simonsohn, Leif D. Nelson, and Joseph P. Simmons — who teach at University Ramon Llull in Barcelona, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively — wrote on their data investigation blog Data Colada that they plan to detail multiple instances of academic misconduct by Gino in a four-part series. Only two posts were up as of Thursday {[June 22}evening.
The professors wrote that they first contacted HBS in fall 2021 with concerns of academic misconduct by Gino.
Specifically, we wrote a report about four studies for which we had accumulated the strongest evidence of fraud. We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data,” the three wrote in a blog post last week. “Perhaps dozens.”
According to her HBS faculty page, Gino is now on administrative leave. In the past month, Gino’s endowed faculty position — the Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration — has also been removed from her faculty page….
Gino will hav a hard time explaining away this extensive history of manipulated and fraudulent data, which her accusers say likely involves “dozens” of her papers. Gino puts me in mind of another fetching female star in the firmament of fraud — Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, who is now serving an 11-year prison sentence for her fraudulent claims about a blood-analyzing device that, she claimed, could diagnose dozens of illnesses from a single drop of blood.
Academic life in America today puts such pressure on people to publish or perish, that in their determination to get to, and remain at, the top of the greasy professorial pole, some become unhinged. Such, I’m afraid, is what happened to Francesca Gino.
The moral of this tale is as old as the hills: What a tangled web we weave, when e’er we practice to deceive.
Bexarkat says
There is an old refrain in academia that goes “to steal from one is plagiarism, to steal from many is research.”
All this article proves is Joe Biden simply cannot count.
Jim says
I rhink it is perhaps not so great that so many people go to college now and get degrees. Most of those people have wasted their time getting worthless degrees that did not get them a good job. Others had skills and no degrees but still got a good job, such as in the computer branch. Sometimes people without a degree perform every well in a profession, at least until they are caught. Examples are doctors with no medical degree. There was a fictional case in Dr. House where a person who was a nurse or technician with acquired proficiency in medicine was competing to become House’s assistant. He was really smarter and more knowledgeable than many other candidates, although House eventually eliminated him. It shows that skills and not graduate degrees are very essential. My three degrees never got me any profession, so I feel I wasted most of my time in college, when I might have been earning a good living without college. I am not impressed by colleges and their degrees, as I was when I thought it would get me something good in the future. So, I do not much care whether Joe copied speeches and articles as his own. The main thing is he is a stupid phony with bad intentions who is ruining our country. The lying is just a means to his bad ends.
Robert March says
Now that the idea that a college degree is a ticket to a good job has fallen out of favor, perhaps it’s time to reassess why it might still be worthwhile for some to attend college anyway. The old concept of a liberal education was to produce citizens with a deep connection with the distinctive achievements of their culture, the history of the nation they were part of, and the way that nation was governed. That’s a worthwhile pursuit, but not everyone wants it or is ready for it when they’re 18. It might be better if we educated everyone at that young age for productive work that would give them the good material life most people naturally desire, while offering the equivalent of that old “liberal education” as an option when they are a bit older and really want it.