Plagiarism Alleged in Duke Student's Commencement Speech

[bundabergdevil]

I had a friend who taught Freshman Comp at Crapel Hell around 20 years ago. She busted a gaggle of female frosh for plagiarizing papers. And it wasn't just that they were plagiarizing their papers individually, but that they were all using the SAME plagiarized words. Cold Busted! And she failed them all. And the parents came barging in and blaming her! They didn't blame their children for cheating, and cheating very badly, but they came down on the instructor for punishing them. She was floored. I am cynical, so I was not.

My point is, no responsibility for one's actions. That is what young people are being taught too often.

An enduring memory of high school was the time nearly every single student in the AP Calculus class was caught with cheat sheets in their TI-82s. The teacher, who was the National Honor Society sponsor, first caught, let's call him, Ambercrombie Brad, who was the National Honor Society student president.

We all had to re-take the test but nothing other than that came of it.

The teacher, let's call her S&M Sue, had also accidentally printed dozens of pages of a sex toy catalogue to the school printers, which someone else found. These pages were in the teacher's file. I dated the superintendent's daughter and after I graduated, she told me w/ absolute GLEE in her eyes.

I don't know what this has to do with anything but it does not surprise me that cheating is still rampant.

[acdevil]

I'm not crazy about floating the idea of revoking a degree unless it's shown that (some of) her academic work to fulfill degree requirements was plagiarized / fraudulent. Even with that as a starting point, it's pretty rare. Though it apparently has happened to Duke's own Mathew Martoma (not his name while at Duke), though it wasn't his Duke degree that rescinded. He went on to other adventures after Duke.

IDK if violating the Duke Community Standard moments before having a degree conferred upon you is sufficient for retroactive revocation. It's an interesting question.

It definitely happens. I know someone who had their degree revoked after the fact for behavior that didn’t affect the university directly. And it had nothing to do with academics. (Im being intentionally vague on details here)

[CameronBornAndBred]

I'm not crazy about floating the idea of revoking a degree unless it's shown that (some of) her academic work to fulfill degree requirements was plagiarized / fraudulent. Even with that as a starting point, it's pretty rare. Though it apparently has happened to Duke's own Mathew Martoma (not his name while at Duke), though it wasn't his Duke degree that rescinded. He went on to other adventures after Duke.

IDK if violating the Duke Community Standard moments before having a degree conferred upon you is sufficient for retroactive revocation. It's an interesting question.

She earned her degree (unless it's proven that she plagiarized her way to it), so I don't think that's an apt punishment either. However, she's going to get punished by the real world, as has been pointed out, as this will follow her with every job interview she sits down for. (And several interviews won't even happen, after a quick background search.)

[Acymetric]

Yes some people/companies will disqualify her over this, but there are enough that won't care that I doubt she will be negatively impacted in any meaningful way long term.

[jv001]

I had a friend who taught Freshman Comp at Crapel Hell around 20 years ago. She busted a gaggle of female frosh for plagiarizing papers. And it wasn't just that they were plagiarizing their papers individually, but that they were all using the SAME plagiarized words. Cold Busted! And she failed them all. And the parents came barging in and blaming her! They didn't blame their children for cheating, and cheating very badly, but they came down on the instructor for punishing them. She was floored. I am cynical, so I was not.

My point is, no responsibility for one's actions. That is what young people are being taught too often.

Nail-Hammer! This is the world we now live in. Speaking more about high school kids, many parents send their kids to school and expect the teachers to perform miracles, when the parents don't do their job of parenting. Teaching them right from wrong. Then to top it off, when the teacher corrects or punishes the student for their bad behavior, the parents come down hard on the instructor and not their kids. By the time the kid reaches college, he/she has an attitude of entitlement.

[BigWayne]

What I get from her response is that she still admits not writing parts of the speech herself, but now she's blaming the others that contributed for giving her plagiarized paragraphs?!?

It's a baffling statement that seems to generate more questions than it answers.
You can see the touch of the PR firm in the way it "takes responsibility" but only for not catching the bad behavior of others.
Reading between the lines you can see that besides any breach of ethics, she is basically admitting to being lazy once she got past the hurdle of getting picked for the speech. She is essentially stating that she crowd sourced her material and simply cobbled it together from other's inputs without considering where it came from.

[cspan37421]

reading the short PR statement is interesting ...

she was "asked" to give the speech, in the same way that Duke "asked" me to matriculate.

Then, if you read only a little carefully, she throws her friends and family under the bus for having provided her with "suggested passages" to include.

She might as well have said, "I take full responsibility for foolishly trusting friends and family to write (parts of) the speech for me." So are we to believe she plagiarized them, and it was they who plagiarized the Harvard speech?

OTOH she may not have written the statement. It's looking like plagiarism all the way down! Does Duke offer a degree in that? Or at least a class?

[acdevil]

To be fair, they properly attributed the statement to the crisis PR firm so at least that wasn’t plagiarized.

[Acymetric]

To be fair, they properly attributed the statement to the crisis PR firm so at least that wasn’t plagiarized.

That read like a disclaimer by the Chronicle staff rather than an attribution by her.

[acdevil]

Fair enough.

Don’t understand why she didn’t just send it in. Those firms do statements like that behind the scenes all the time. It definitely makes her look a little shadier (or at least, entitled) to have hired a firm to write a few sentences.

[Section 15]

Name one area of modern life where ethical behavior is rewarded though.

The ability to sleep well at night? Perhaps I am just old fashioned, or more likely naive. To that I plead guilty.

To add a different perspective to this conversation, as someone whose published work has been plagiarized (by an author who shared the same publisher even) I felt briefly annoyed and then just went on with my business. It wasn't even worth it to complain to my editor. This author did get into trouble with the publisher for something else I learned later.

I see the biggest problem as a lack of imagination on the part of the plagiarizer followed perhaps by being too lazy to do his/her own work. Imagine having to go through life with such a limited horizon. That seems punishment enough to me. What was it that Dean Wormer said? "Lazy, unproductive, and unimaginative is no way to go through life" or something like that.

I used to worry about people who seemed to gain advantage by unethical behavior. However, I've now lived long enough to see that it really doesn't work out that way, even if it doesn't appear that way to those of us looking in from the outside.

Not trying to dispute BD, just thought her comment was an interesting jumping off point.

Section 15

[Stray Gator]

reading the short PR statement is interesting ...

she was "asked" to give the speech, in the same way that Duke "asked" me to matriculate.

Then, if you read only a little carefully, she throws her friends and family under the bus for having provided her with "suggested passages" to include.

She might as well have said, "I take full responsibility for foolishly trusting friends and family to write (parts of) the speech for me." So are we to believe she plagiarized them, and it was they who plagiarized the Harvard speech?

OTOH she may not have written the statement. It's looking like plagiarism all the way down! Does Duke offer a degree in that? Or at least a class?

And of course, all those various friends and family members from whom she solicited ideas just happened to select the same Harvard commencement address as the sole source of their suggestions. What a remarkable coincidence!

You would think that somewhere along the way, this young woman would have become familiar with The First Law of Holes.

In any event, I'm not suggesting that her degree should be revoked. But I would certainly advocate that Duke take some appropriate action to punish her disgraceful plagiarism, which she has now compounded by offering up a poorly fabricated defense that is manifestly dishonest. Again, I believe that at a minimum, Duke should enter a prominent notation on her record reflecting this breach of honor and academic integrity for future reference.

[aimo]

Fair enough.

Don’t understand why she didn’t just send it in. Those firms do statements like that behind the scenes all the time. It definitely makes her look a little shadier (or at least, entitled) to have hired a firm to write a few sentences.

Well, she can't write her own speech, so why should she be expected to be able to write her own mea culpa?

[acdevil]

Frankly, I’d have no issue with the university revoking her degree. She broke the honor code and deprived a truly deserving person from the opportunity to deliver the speech. Given that she was able to hire a crisis PR firm, I’m guessing that she’s led an entitled life and didn’t always have to work hard to get what she got.

[bundabergdevil]

Bless all y’all that think every lie gets caught, sin accounted for and cheaters never prosper. You’ve come to a very different conclusion about how this merry old earth of ours operates than I have.

[duke79]

It's a baffling statement that seems to generate more questions than it answers.
You can see the touch of the PR firm in the way it "takes responsibility" but only for not catching the bad behavior of others.
Reading between the lines you can see that besides any breach of ethics, she is basically admitting to being lazy once she got past the hurdle of getting picked for the speech. She is essentially stating that she crowd sourced her material and simply cobbled it together from other's inputs without considering where it came from.

Obviously, I have no clue as to what might have really transpired here, but, if I were to guess, I would speculate that, after being picked to be the speaker, she got very busy at the end of the semester with school work (or maybe was partying a little too much) or had "writer's block" (and I'm sure it's not easy to draft an original speech for an occasion like this) and she panicked and began searching the internet for other student commencement speeches or, as she maintains, asked friends and family members for assistance with the speech and she cobbled this speech together "on the run", ultimately using too much from the "Harvard" speech (at least, she had the sense to use a speech from a top university and I mean this jokingly). You can call it laziness, dishonesty, or just not putting in the time to prepare an original speech.

[aimo]

Obviously, I have no clue as to what might have really transpired here, but, if I were to guess, I would speculate that, after being picked to be the speaker, she got very busy at the end of the semester with school work (or maybe was partying a little too much) or had "writer's block" (and I'm sure it's not easy to draft an original speech for an occasion like this) and she panicked and began searching the internet for other student commencement speeches or, as she maintains, asked friends and family members for assistance with the speech and she cobbled this speech together "on the run", ultimately using too much from the "Harvard" speech (at least, she had the sense to use a speech from a top university and I mean this jokingly). You can call it laziness, dishonesty, or just not putting in the time to prepare an original speech.

She should not have accepted the invitation to speak if she was going to farm it out to others to help her.

[budwom]

She should not have accepted the invitation to speak if she was going to farm it out to others to help her.

yeah, I mean the bottom line is that she was given an honor, and the best she could do with it was steal someone else's words? Even I would have gotten off my lazy butt to write something original...has she nothing to say after four years at Duke?

[Section 15]

Bless all y’all that think every lie gets caught, sin accounted for and cheaters never prosper. You’ve come to a very different conclusion about how this merry old earth of ours operates than I have.

I will pray for you

FWIW: I would say that it is less a conclusion than an observation. There is a difference. Of course, we all create and live in our own reality.

Section 15

[SouthernDukie]

Bless all y’all that think every lie gets caught, sin accounted for and cheaters never prosper. You’ve come to a very different conclusion about how this merry old earth of ours operates than I have.

I feel like some comment about the concept of an afterlife would be helpful here, but I dare not mention it.