Behold - More Evidence of America's Cultural Death

I didn't see the Super Bowl this year, so I missed this little abomination of crass commercialism until it re-aired during the All-Star game last night.

All I can say is, congratulations, Rod Stewart - now you only have the second worst ripoff of the original version ever. (And seriously - I will always be amazed that he talked his way out of a plagiarism suit on this, given the similarities between this and this. It's not like Stewart had never plagiarized before - you just have to compare the chorus of this to this to hear it.)

(And in one last parenthetical, if anybody is unfamiliar with Jorge Ben, I can't recommend his material from the 1960s and 1970s strongly enough. Some of it has been re-released in the U.S. recently, and is outstanding, as is his 1975 accoustic-jam improv session w/Gilberto Gil.)

Blogging and the Academy

An adjunct professor at Texas A&M International University was fired this week for posting the names and grades of his students on a blog. The professor was trying to humiliate them after catching people plagiarizing.

Katherine Haenschen at Burnt Orange Report calls this "a worrisome precedent." I'm not so sure. This person was an idiot who deserved to be fired. Anyone who publicly humiliates students by name and gives out personal information about their performance is not fit to teach.

On the other hand, certainly the issue of blogging and the academy is on my mind. I blog under my own name. There is a risk involved. Theoretically, a school could google my name, see that I have a blog, and consider that too much of a risk to hire me. I hope this doesn't happen. I try to be professional here. I occasionally talk about teaching. Usually this is to work out a question or issue I am having, but occasionally I am frustrated with students. I would never ever give a name or any personal information. But it is a fine line. Being on the job market right now makes me nervous about everything I write.

Haenschen doesn't defend the said professor either; rather, her concern is that the story was spun so that it seemed he was fired for blogging rather than for violating professors' privacy. Instead of cracking down on plagiarism, TAMIU fired the professor. Personally, I think both sides are right here. Too often, by which I mean virtually always, universities are extremely lax on issues of plagiarism. I have an enormous problem with it. My sense is that professors just don't want to be bothered and don't care enough about teaching to deal with it. I now teach at a school that does it take seriously. It still happens, but it is nice having institutional support to fight it.

Nevertheless, the guy needed to be canned. Freedom of speech battles seem to always take place over cases where the person in question has done a loathsome thing that is hard to defend. And while TAMIU did not handle the matter particularly professionally themselves, there is no excuse for not canning his butt.

Would it KILL the NY Times to Get a Brazil Correspondent Who Is Professionally Ethical?

I often complained about the job Larry Rohter used to do as the Brazil correpondent for the NY Times, often blatantly showing his anti-Lula partisanship and getting the basic facts of a story wrong. I celebrated when Rohter was replaced, even wishing that "Now, maybe we'll finally get somebody competent to report on Brazil for the Times (even if it is not permanent)."

Well, apparently I was wishing for way too much. Alexei Barrionuevo, the new Brazil correspondent for the Times, has apparently plagiarized from other newspaper sources not once, but twice, with both coming to surface in the last two weeks. First, in late February, he wrote this piece on the paco (smokeable cocaine) crisis in Argentina, all the while sampling freely from articles from 2006 in the Christian Science Monitor and the Miami Herald (for a comparison of Barrionuevo's "work" and the previous reports, see this article here.) Barrionuevo said he must have "accidentally" mixed reports when working on his own material.

However, just this week, it was revealed that Barrionuevo apparently had plagiarized previously, copying a report on mad cow restrictions from Bloomberg news. As the Slate article comments, it's hard to believe you "accidentally" mixed your sources when you've done it more than once, with your reports looking strikingly like somebody else's work. This shouldn't even have to be said, particularly for a correspondent at the Times, but nonetheless, it apparently and unfortunately has to be said again: plagiarism is unacceptable (and Shafer offers 8 reasons why plagiarism is unacceptable, and while some of them are a little professionally self-absorbed, they are still worth remembering, even if few people really care anymore).

Now, would it be so damn difficult for the Times to get a Brazil correspondent who both knows what she/he is doing AND is ethical??? I'm not a journalist, so maybe I missed some valuable lessons in journalism classes I never took, but it strikes me that journalists have two basic obligations that should come before everything else when reporting: get the basic facts right, and don't plagiarize. Now, the Times has replaced a man who couldn't get the basic facts right with one who's plagiarizing. Ridiculous.

A Bit of Nostalgia for Old-Time Plagiarism

I was flipping through Afaf Lutfi Al-Sayyid Marsot's A Short History of Modern Egypt the other day. The first paragraph had some classic student notes next to it. A student had put a big square around the first paragraph that said, "Type First." Clearly, this student was stealing straight out of the book. There are sections throughout the book with "Type Second," "Type Third," etc. I laughed and laughed. It reminded me of the old days of plagiarism, when students would copy texts out of books that were absurdly beyond them and try to pass them as their own. The paragraphs put together don't actually make any kind of cohesive narrative.

Today, it's so different. The quality of plagiarism is so much less. Students just steal crap off the internet. So it's easier to pass off this low-grade stuff as your own, but it's also so easy to catch people! I personally like it when they leave the hyperlink in the paper.

Plagiarism. Fun for all!