Plagiarizing Never Ends Well
I want to be all cranky and yammer on about how it serves a plagiarizing professor right to lose his job, etc., but I’m mostly just sad. James Twitchell was a tenured professor at the University of Florida until last month, when he opted for early retirement in lieu of a five-year, unpaid suspension. He plagiarized the work of some fairly well-known writers, which calls into question (for me, at least) his survival skills.
I’m a black-and-white girl when it comes to rule following, and, according to everyone—especially academia—plagiarizing is bad and you’re not supposed to do it. If you ARE going to use other people’s writing and claim it as your own, then for pete’s sake, at least be smart enough to steal some unknown’s stuff and try to avoid the spotlight yourself. Which, I realize, goes totally against the entire point of publishing or perishing; being well-known and widely read is pretty much what the publishing professor-types are going for. And that brings us back to the original rule: Plagiarizing Is Bad, Don’t Do It. Sheesh.
I’m sad for Twitchell that his heretofore great career is going down in flames. I can’t imagine it was worth it in the end. And for the record, I’m not naïve enough to think of academe as some floaty, rose-colored land where colleagues support each other and backs are never stabbed and data is never tweaked in the name of grant-eligibility. Lawyers and boxers are at least honest about being hell-bent on taking their opponent down; professors who’ve gone a bit too far round the bend competing for tenure, research monies and article publication are a tad more underhanded about colleague annihilation.
Further Reading:
UF Professor Twitchell Admits He Plagiarized in Several of His Books
Student vs. Faculty Plagiarism
Posted by Alexa Harrington
