Plagiarism

Re "If This Were a Term Paper, You Might Have Seen It on the Web," June 17 Isn't students using the Internet to plagiarize term papers just the tip of the unethical iceberg in our society? Where is the adult ethical leadership in our society in which resumes are frequently embellished, people cheat on their taxes, CDs and DVDs are pirated, purses, watches and clothes are "knocked off" and some executives commit Enron-like misdeeds? I witnessed student plagiarism when I was a middle and high school teacher over 35 years ago. Some students thought it was acceptable to copy word-for-word from the encyclopedia.

School term papers may be going the way of the typewriters once used to write them. "It's so easy to cheat and steal from the Internet that I don't even assign papers anymore," said Bobbie Eisenstock, an assistant professor of journalism at Cal State Northridge. "I got tired of night after night checking for cheaters."

Ward L. Churchill, a University of Colorado professor who gained notoriety for comparing some victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to "little Eichmanns," committed research misconduct and plagiarism in his writings on Native American history, a faculty panel concluded in a report released Tuesday. Churchill's lawyer, David Lane, dismissed the findings as part of an effort to fire the ethnic studies professor for political reasons.

A freelance TV producer who plagiarized passages from "The West Wing" has been let go by NBC Universal Sports, the network said Thursday. A short feature broadcast on NBC before the Kentucky Derby on Saturday praised a horse trainer who led three children to safety after a plane crash. The script said that trainer Michael Matz "ran into the fire to save the lives of three children." The narrator paused dramatically and said, "ran into the fire."

A Pasadena newspaper said Thursday that it is reviewing a guest column written by the superintendent of public schools because the text contains phrases similar to a widely distributed sermon delivered years ago. The column in Thursday's edition of Pasadena Weekly written by Pasadena Unified School Supt. Percy Clark Jr. was removed from the publication's website after questions about the origin of several passages were raised, Editor Kevin Uhrich said.

Amid new charges of plagiarism, the publisher of "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life" said Tuesday that there would be no revised version of the novel, as had been promised earlier, nor would the company publish a second book under contract to the author, Kaavya Viswanathan. The statement by Michael Pietsch, senior vice president and publisher of Little, Brown & Co.

The rise and crashing fall of the Harvard University sophomore accused of plagiarizing passages of her debut novel has made some of her classmates smile, some sympathize. A quiet jealousy circulated on the competitive campus when Kaavya Viswanathan's hefty two-book deal became public, before allegations surfaced that she had cribbed from other teen novels. Last Thursday her publisher, Little, Brown and Co.

PARENTS are worried; pundits are alarmed; publishers -- on their good days -- are anxious and on the others, hysterical. The cause of their apprehension is the same: A declining number of American young people read books for pleasure, or at all. Cut through the pro forma moralizing, discount for schadenfreude, and the literary scandal du jour suggests something important about why fewer and fewer kids curl up with a good book.

Not coming to a theater near you: the movie version of "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life," the debut novel by Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan that was yanked off shelves this week when it was discovered to contain multiple plagiarized passages. A source close to DreamWorks, which had optioned "Opal Mehta," said Friday that work on the movie, which was in the early stages of development, has been halted.

A teen novel by a Harvard student accused of plagiarizing a successful author of young adult fiction was yanked Thursday from bookstores by its publisher, Little, Brown & Co. "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life" by 19-year-old sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan contained at least 40 passages similar or identical in theme and content to parts of two novels by Megan McCafferty, "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings."