Maps: Plagiarism At The American College Newspaper
Mind thievery at Brown University! A couple of rascally student reporters at the college's daily paper stand accused of lifting material from the Yale Daily News and Harvard's Crimson. (We're assuming there's no point in cribbing from the Cornell paper.) New York Times ethicist Randy Cohen dispensed a little sage advice there in December, telling a very interested crowd that taking Adderall to keep up a GPA was basically fine. "You can't be unethical all by yourself," he said. Great-like the world needs more overly-ambitious tweaked-out fabulists. This is Brown's third incident of plagiarism in as many months, and something like the tenth at an Ivy League school in the last year. Do Ivy Leaguers stretch the truth more than their counterparts? Who are the fibbiest kid reporters in the country? After the jump, a map of collegiate plagiarism scandals from the last few years.
Click the pushpins for details-bullets indicate more than one instance of interpretative borrowing.
Not surprisingly, there's been quite a bit of heavy lifting at colleges in the Northeast, where there are...a lot of colleges! But of the 28 incidents we found nationwide, only three occurred west of the Rockies, and two of those were several years ago. In April, a Yale student poached from Slate. Perhaps you recall the exploits of Harvard fictionalist Kaavya Viswanathan and Yale's Aleksey Vayner? Fabulous fabulist Stephen Glass edited the student daily at the University of Pennsylvania and Jayson Blair got creative at the Univ. of Maryland. Other than the pretty map above, we don't have scientific proof of this phenomenon (this would require something akin to actual labor), but we're going to go ahead and declare the Eastern half of the American student population ethically bankrupt and growing shadier each year.
