WITH ALL the attention that student plagiarism receives, and the attendant pious hand-wringing on the part of university administrations and ubiquitous admonitions from faculty, we expect professors to exemplify the highest standards of intellectual honesty. So it should be a matter of great concern to all of us that some of the nation's most respected professors in their own published work wantonly and rather brazenly disobey the standards of intellectual honesty that these intellectuals would expect from their own students. I am referring, of course, to recent plagiarism scandals that have befallen nationally-known and celebrated Harvard Law Profs. Laurence Tribe and Charles J. Ogletree. While friendly fellow professors and other loyalists insist that the intellectual dishonesty reflected by these men's often verbatim pilfering of other's work should not impugn their reputation, and that their theft was the result of minor bureaucratic errors, these professors deserve to see their reputations destroyed over their patent dishonesty. We should not credit the arguments of their defenders. The same standards that apply in cases of student plagiarism should be applied even more severely in the case of big-time professors who should know better.
Tribe, the patron saint of liberal law professors who has argued for the leftist side of such watershed Supreme Court cases as Bowers v. Hardwick and Bush v. Gore, acknowledges that he copied verbatim a 19-word passage in his 1985 book, God Save This Honorable Court, from a book by venerable Supreme Court guru and retired University of Virginia Law School Prof. Henry J. Abraham, and copied closely from several other sections of Abraham's 1974 book, Justices and Presidents. Abraham told the Weekly Standard in article that exposed Tribe that the Harvard professor is "a big mahatma and thinks he can get away with this sort of thing." Indeed, Tribe's actions, with their casual disregard for the rules, reflect a deep contempt for the ordinary standards of intellectual discourse, as well as sheer laziness. As Abraham opined to the Standard, Tribe's actions likely resulted from "a combination of being lazy and making a little money."
Despite all of this, many of Tribe's friends in the law school fraternity rushed to defend him. "Tribe's towering contributions to the field of constitutional law over four decades should not be overshadowed by this episode," wrote former Stanford Law dean Kathleen Sullivan in an e-mail to the Harvard Crimson. "I think Larry [Tribe] may be overreacting," added Alan Dershowitz, another Harvard Law Professor who has recently battled plagiarism charges. "Abraham sat on this story for 20 years. If he had a gripe, he should have written to Larry 20 years ago," as if this were solely a matter between Tribe and Abraham.
Nor should it be a defense of Tribe's book that Tribe intended the work for a mass audience. Though, as UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh noted on his blog, editors often dislike footnotes, and plain facts do not need attribution, Tribe appears to have copied not so much Abraham's factual statements as Abraham's historical interpretations on such matters as various presidents' attitudes toward their appointments and various nominees' competence, matters which are often controversial and almost never self-apparent: certainly not "facts" which anyone may copy. Tribe had a duty to attribute Abraham's ideas to Abraham.
And Tribe is not alone in his perfidy. Charles J. Ogletree, also a well-respected Harvard Law professor, recently had to admit to copying six full paragraphs nearly verbatim in his recent book All Deliberative Speed from Yale Law School Prof. Jack Balkin's 2001 compilation of essays, What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said. Ogletree, while apologizing, offered a truly bizarre account of the errors: Ogletree told the Crimson that he had not read Balkin's passage, which apparently was inserted into Ogletree's manuscript by an assistant, for another assistant to eventually summarize. Even Ogletree, however, attracted some defenders. Said Harvard President Derek C. Bok to the Boston Globe: "There was no deliberate wrongdoing at all. He marshaled his assistants and parceled out the work and in the process some quotation marks got lost." Brushing aside Bok's implicit claim that it would have been ok for Ogletree to use six paragraphs from another's work if only quotation marks were added, Bok is saying that Ogletree's actions were alright because apparently it is expected that law professors are supposed to delegate substantive writing tasks to assistants. Imagine telling that to the Honor Committee.
As a student at the University, like most students, I stake quite a bit on my own intellectual honesty. Copying directly from someone else's work, especially in such large chunks, without any citation is verboten for University students and should be unimaginable for people who are supposed to serve as the intellectual role models for their students. The actions of Tribe and Ogletree were not good-faith mistakes or bureaucratic errors, but outright dishonesty and laziness. Having been caught red-handed, these academic hot-shots can offer nothing but lame excuses and wan apologies for their blatant lies. They deserve the same fate that would likely befall a student caught handing in someone else's work: exile from their academic community.
Noah Peters is a Cavalier Daily viewpoint writer. His column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily.
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