Is That Legal?

I'm not sure what to think about the first comment above. Part of it sounds like she's joking, but part of it doesn't. This guy should be fired. No matter how you look at it, he is academically dishonest and can't be trusted. I wouldn't take a class from him, nor would I attend a school that would knowingly keep someone who does such things on staff. What are students supposed to learn from somone like this?? At Carolina, even lying to a teacher is a violation of the honor code.

In my department (History Dept at a UNC constituent institution) we have defined plagiarism to include much more than just the improper use of someone's else's written work. You really have to, or creative students will try to find a way to wiggle out. According to our rules, LeBeau would be toast.

I am no lawyer, but intellectual property rights and copyright law include speeches (MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech--written and recorded--is under copyright law ). Similar standards should apply to university level work.

If I were UMKC, I'd ask for my money back: if there was a speaker's fee involved, he might be in violation of contract, or Cornell West might have grounds for action (I'm not a lawyer, obviously)

Re: oral v. written theft: If all he had done was give the speech, then there'd be no problem. No, he put it online in searchable text form: that's how he got caught. He published it on the web.

Marietta has done an excellent job of poking fun at the postmodern view of truth, honor and accountability.
An assertion that we should hold others to no standard higher than the worst that we accuse others of is classic.
Bravo.

I published an op-ed in the Boston Globe on this subject this February. In it I called for academic publishers to shun known plagiarists; publishers, I wrote, have a stake in ensuring honesty among their authors. This speech is not published by an university press, but the incident might prompt others to discover instances of plagiarism among LeBeau's academic writings. Since plagiarism is often a habit, it's possible that he's cut corners elsewhere.

Thanks for the heads up on this, Eric. We've reported the story at Cliopatria, a history blog where Bryan Le Beau is well known. But I'd like to know what your answer to your question should be. There have been, ah, less than severe consequences for distinguished plagiarists in the law school at Harvard and I've seen rationalizations for that suggesting that, in the law, there's no need -- indeed there's risk -- to re-inventing rhetorical wheels in the law. On one level, I understand that kind of argument: the way a legal tradition replicates itself is by the replication of argument and citation. That kind of rationale also holds for the pulpit. But the distinguished plagiarists at Harvard were not issuing judicial opinions. They were producing academic texts. I'm not arguing that Le Beau should face no consequences, but I am asking if the Harvard cases don't show that some academic people reach a level of being beyond the law and it's just odd that they should happen to be the lawyers.

Ralph, you're quite right. In my view the Harvard folks got off too easy. I wonder, though, whether it's accurate to say that the system treats lawyer plagiarists more leniently than others. It seems to me--as argued in the series on plagiarism that the Chronicle ran last December--that *most* instances of plagiarism by academics of all stripes end up getting treated too lightly. When students plagiarize, there is a system of university sanctions to deal with it, and the sanctions have real bite. There is no comparable system of enforcement for academics who plagiarize.

What's more, when academics plagiarize, there is inevitably a great deal of concern (voiced and unvoiced) about a potentially devastating impact of the allegation on the career of the person charged; when a student plagiarizes, we never hear such worries (except, typically, from the student him- or herself, and we usually respond by saying that the student brought the problem on him- or herself).

In short, by pointing to the Harvard cases, I think you're really just identifying one somewhat exaggerated facet of a much larger problem.

Another prominant historian goes unreprimanded

RALPH E. LUKER: Khalidi Accused ...
Just within the last 24 hours, accusations of plagiarism against Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University's Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies and Literature, have appeared on the net. The accusations seem first to have appeared yesterday in "Rashid Khalidi ... A Case of Plagiarism?" on Solomonia.com, a pseudonymous blog…

Update: After examining the evidence presented at Solomonia.com, I believe that: 1) the author of "Jerusalem: A Concise History" crossed the line of acceptable paraphrase from Kamil Jamil el Asali, "Jerusalem in History: Notes on the Origins of the City and Its Traditions of Tolerance," Arab Studies Quarterly, XVI (Fall 1994); and 2) the implicit evidence of a crude cover-up, as indicated by this ascription of authorship compared with the Wayback Machine's recovery of prior ascription, is additionally damaging.
http://hnn.us/blogs/comments/12361.html

In our "American" legal system are there consequences for plagiarism? Is it considered a criminal act or would it depend on the circumstance in which it is used?

thanks,
Jacob