Dismissed for plagiarism

cosmicfish
Wed, 07 Aug 2013 13:33:12 +0000

Cosmicfish you are a pessimist who has no idea what they are talking about.

Strange, people usually need to know me a lot longer before they realize that!



One of my pet peeves is people who think they know it all.

Good, everyone should have a pet. One of mine is people who think that anyone who has a different opinion or perspective is necessarily a “know it all”.



Jane Goodall. Look her up if you do not know who that is. Her new book was found to have taken content without citing where she got it from just like OP here. She apologized, gave a couple of press release and is releasing the edited book in a couple of weeks.

Goodall, Goodall, Goodall… yes, despite having been born, raised, and educated in a janitor’s closet, I think I have heard that name before! And if I recall correctly, her plagiarism incident was outside the academic system, beyond the purview of any particular authority figures, and after more than a half-century of scholarship… all of which I would consider mitigating factors that do not apply to the OP.



Jayson Blair is a former NYT journalist who was found to have plagiarized, he resigned from his job and went back to college to get a new degree and a new job.

How is this a counter-example? He plagiarized, was caught, lost his job and left the field of journalism to work in human resources! I count that as a worst case scenario, not a “take heart” story!



Fareed Zakaria is one of the top journalists for CNN. He plagiarized a column from the New Yorker on gun control. He was suspended from his job. He apologized and described it as a ‘lapse of judgment’. After careful review of the incident it was decided that that it was an isolated incident.

CNN kept him, based on two decades of otherwise unblemished journalism. If that was in his first year, do you think they would have kept him? I don’t.



I’m trying to say that everyone can recover from an incident no matter how great, based on how they handle it.

Absolutely! But do not fool yourself (or anyone else) into thinking that such mistakes can be recovered without cost in time, effort, or money, and also realize that the very top limits of your field become harder to reach with each such stumble.

As a personal anecdote, I flunked out of college at the age of 22. I recovered. I spent 6 years out of school, got permission to re-enter, did very well, and am now professionally employed and in a top PhD program. The fact that I stumbled and recovered is not a complete story without understanding that I could not have gone straight into a decent college immediately after flunking out, and that despite my improved performance since that time I am still penalized in some quarters for flunking out 15 years and 2.5 degrees ago.



What about BP and their oil spill? Did they not recover from it? Or the Embezzling wall street bankers?

BP is a corporation not a person, lost billions, and may not regain their reputation and standing in the US for decades. Bankers who actually do embezzle go to jail, and rules that apply to corporations are not especially applicable to people.



Don’t come at me with your 1) 2) 3) facts because I don’t have time for people who just like to argue for no reason.

I like facts. And while I do enjoy a good argument, I don’t do so for no reason. If I did, you would see me posting a LOT more often.