Plagiarism? What Plagiarism?
On Sunday, we noted that Professor Larry Tribe, the Democratic Party's top scholar, had been charged with plagiarism by Joseph Bottum of the Weekly Standard, in connection with Tribe's 1985 book God Save This Honorable Court, which provided the intellectual justification for the Borking of Judge Robert Bork.
Professor Tribe lost no time in acknowledging the accuracy of Bottum's charge, as reported by the Harvard Crimson:
Tribe could not be reached directly for comment yesterday, but issued a statement to The Crimson via e-mail.He said he recognized his “failure to attribute some of the material The Weekly Standard identified.”
“I personally take full responsibility for that failure,” Tribe said.
The reaction among Tribe's Harvard colleagues was disquieting, however. Alan Dershowitz suggested that different standards of plagiarism may apply to lawyers:
But Dershowitz said guidelines in the legal profession are murkier.He said that judges frequently rely on lawyers’ briefs and clerks’ memoranda in drafting opinions. This results in a “cultural difference” between sourcing in the legal profession and other academic disciplines, Dershowitz said.
This is eerily reminiscent of the reaction of some liberals when it was revealed that Martin Luther King had plagiarized his doctoral dissertation; they argued that plagiarism is a cultural tradition among black people. (Why is it that more blacks don't realize that liberals are constantly insulting them?)
Beyond that, the principal reaction at Harvard seems to have been to attack Bottum for pointing out Tribe's plagiarism:
Dershowitz said yesterday that The Standard’s charges against Tribe were politically motivated."Show me the man, and I’ll find you the crime," Dershowitz said—a quotation he attributed to Soviet spymaster Lavrenti Beria. "Clearly someone was looking to pin something on the most prominent liberal constitutional scholar in the country."
Professor Charles J. Ogletree, who himself recently acknowledged committing plagiarism, also denounced the Weekly Standard, characterizing the magazine's charge against Tribe as "nonsense."
And Tribe's former colleague (and fellow Democrat) Kathleen Sullivan, now Dean of Stanford's law school, said:
Tribe’s towering contributions to the field of constitutional law over four decades should not be overshadowed by this episode.
Well, perhaps not. However, given that this is the fourth plagiarism scandal to strike Harvard in recent months, one might have expected a bit more concern and a bit less eagerness to denounce Joseph Bottum. Harvard, like the New York Times, the Associated Press, and CBS News, has a problem that it does not choose to acknowledge, let alone try to correct.
