Senator John Walsh
It would be an exaggeration to say that the week’s news has
consisted of nothing but major disasters.
Simply by moving away from the front page of the New York Times I was
able to find some minor ones, including the fact that Senator John Walsh of
Montana has plausibly been accused of plagiarism. Walsh, a “decorated war veteran” who was appointed to fill
out the term of Max Baucus, who resigned the Senate to become our ambassador
in Beijing, was already facing a difficult contest in the upcoming November
election. He now faces possible
ignominy greater than his probable political defeat. United States senators are not required to write term
papers, but when they do, they ought not to cheat. His excuse is at least novel. He does not claim that the dog ate the paper. Instead he suggests that PTSD “may have
been a factor” in inhibiting his recourse to quotation marks and
footnotes. “My head was not in a
place very conducive to a classroom and an academic environment.”
Walsh
is a Democrat, and since the balance of party power in Congress is very much an
issue of interest at the moment, the partisan angle has been prominent in the
news coverage. That is not my
angle, however. There is perhaps
not much that is truly bipartisan in our current political life except the
political sleaze. I am less
offended by what Walsh has said about it than by the judgment of his fellow
Montana senator, Jon Tester. “…I don’t
think it’s that big a deal, I really don’t. Look, Walsh is a soldier, he’s not an academic…”
Really? Plagiarism, which combines theft with
lying, is a quintessential violation of fair dealing just as stock market
fraud, embezzlement, and scamming little old ladies with unneeded roof repairs
are violations of fair dealing. All
too frequently we discover a major league embezzler in an academic
institution. Ordinarily the response
is not “This is no big deal…Schnackenfuss is an academic, not a banker…” It is hardly the case that academic
credentials accrue no material gain.
As a matter of fact Walsh is not a soldier but a politician who once was a soldier and apparently once
considered an advanced academic degree sufficiently important or valuable to
invest time and effort in its pursuit.
I
have a couple of professional reactions to the situation. The medievalist in me first scorns,
then pities the post-romantic cult of the ego that makes plagiarism possible
and commonplace. Medieval
plagiarism was abundant, but it was of a completely different sort. The idea was to pass off your work as
somebody’s else’s, not vice versa. Nobody knew who Schnackenfuss was, but
if Augustine wrote it, it must be
good. If somebody wrote some great
mystical theology in Greek, it must have
been Dionysius the Aereopagite (see Acts 17:34).
Pseudo-Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, taking a dim view of the proceedings
My
other reaction is slightly more severe.
The occasion of the alleged plagiarism was Walsh’s master’s
paper—it has also been called a “thesis”—at the United States Army War College
in Carlisle, PA. The paper is fourteen pages long and apparently
contains “several” unacknowledged borrowings from various sources, some of them
verbatim. One of the things that is making egregious plagiarism of
this sort less common than it once was is that it is so easy to spot. Anybody who has a reasonable
familiarity with the scholarly literature in a field and knows how to do a
Google search can expose it in five minutes. But it appears that nobody at the War College questioned the
paper in 2007. That role was
perhaps reserved for an “opposition researcher” in a political campaign seven years
later.
What
is the “War College”? One might be
curious to know more about an institution where a master’s thesis can be
fourteen pages long. If you visit
the institutional website you will learn that it is a fully accredited
institution of higher education. American
higher education is somewhat peculiar in its system of “voluntary”
accreditation. It is not some
government bureaucracy that licenses colleges and universities, at least not
directly. It is instead one of the
several autonomous regional accrediting agencies that have developed over many
years. For several years I served
as one of the members of the Commission on Higher Education of one of the
largest of them—Middle States—covering a geographical area including the
seaboard states from New York to Maryland, plus Washington, D. C. and Puerto Rico. That last venue was particularly useful for Commission meetings.
