I wouid be money on it that her degree will be rescinded.
My S was required to write a thesis in undergrad to graduate. His initial advisor, who approved his topic, went on sabbatical so the following fall he was assigned another advisor. He had done a ton of research over the summer and sent it to new advisor in the fall. When they met a few days later advisor whipped out a paper that had just been published the day before, which was basically my son’s same thesis. He had to change his whole approach. Very frustrating for him but he had no choice.
Given the 2000 submission year, her plagiarism was likely the cut and paste variety. The plagiarism detector Turnitin was invented in 1997, but apparently she wasn’t worried about getting caught. I haven’t heard of professors turning their PhD student’s work into Turnitin. I wonder if universities do this.
I think it would be difficulty to catch… you would have had to have read the plagiarized works and memorized or remembered them well enough to catch the errors. I am not surprised at all.
@emilybee Having to redo an undergraduate thesis because someone else published on the same topic the day before is harsh. If the the two people worked independently and didn’t collaborate during the research without attribution in the paper, one could be seen as, at the minimum, confirming the other and perhaps even offering new thinking to the one question at hand. Or the advisor could have said take this new publication and incorporate it in some way.
Also, has undergraduate thesis become so difficult it is no longer sufficient to research and write a paper without it being completely original to the field? Sorry this happened to your son. That’s more PhD treatment, imho.
She submitted it in 2000 and that may have played a role in it. These days, colleges routinely use programs that check submitted papers and stuff, especially Thesis work, to see if there is plagiarism, and something that has as many issues with copying as this thesis does would raise red flags (my son’s minor’s thesis was checked like that, and they found someone whose work was close enough to my son’s they asked him to make changes; they knew it wasn’t plagiarism, but they didn’t want any chance of that, they were talking about having his thesis published in a journal who would check). I don’t know if this kind of stuff was available in 2000, it also depends on what she plagiarized from as well, if that was online, back then it may not have been, today almost everything is.
As to why an advisor would miss it, it could be the person was sloppy and simply trusted her, it could be that the wording in the thesis didn’t strike him/her as being different than what Crowley wrote before, or if you are a more cynical person you could assume corruption of some sort on the part of the advisor…
I think Columbia is right not to immediately comment, they have to go through a process of review. On the other hand, given how egregious this is, and given that they likely have all kinds of tools to check her thesis against what is out there and see for themselves if it is plagiarism, they won’t have much excuse to drag this out and not only that but dragging it out will make it seem like they are trying to cover this up to protect crowley and/or themselves (I release the report years down the road when she is no longer a hot item in the papers and few people would notice it), I will say that they should have every reason to expedite and no good arguments not to, if tools show she pulled this amount of stuff from other writings, as the article claims, there can be little in her defense, this is not similar ideas from what I can tell, but word for word plagiarism.
Even if we assume that her advisor couldn’t have (for whatever reason) figured out that it wasn’t plagiarized… how the heck did her publishers not check for plagiarism before publishing her books? Isn’t that part of a publisher’s job?
Tom, do you think Crowley herself was plagiarized? Maybe Kissinger plagiarized his memoirs from Crowley’s not yet published work? The timing of the publications makes it unlikely.
^^ Actually, the examples of plagiarism outlined in the CNN article in the OP and much more numerous and more obvious than those outlined in the Politico article…but the examples are everywhere, in multiple sources. There’s really no doubt that she copy-and-pasted much of her thesis.
And it’s not like this behavior was uncommon for her, since she has since plagiarized articles and books.
When I saw the original Politico article, it was immediately obvious to me that further investigation would reveal further plagiarism. Someone who plagiarizes so blatantly in one part of her thesis, who is so unwilling or unable to bother to express someone else’s thoughts in her own words when citing some sources, is going to exhibit the same academic dishonesty in the rest of her thesis. Clearly, her method of “writing” is cut and paste.
@Building, at his college it has to be original to the field.
He didn’t have to redo his whole thesis. It was his outline, based on his research he had done over the summer, that he submitted to his advisor. He hadn’t starting writing in depth yet, except for the thesis question he was asking. He had to alter his research question and look at it from a different angle then his original proposal due to the published article.