Comments on: Monica Crowley and plagiarism

By: Frog

Frog — Tue, 17 Jan 2017 23:34:33 +0000

Plagiarism Claim Costs Commentator

Media commentator Monica Crowley won’t be joining the incoming Trump administration as a member of the National Security Council following accusations of plagiarism, a transition official said. Her decision comes after CNN reported that several passages in her 2012 book were plagiarized. Publisher HarperCollins then pulled the book.

–Associated Press 1/17/17

By: Countermeasures_Dispenser

Countermeasures_Dispenser — Sun, 15 Jan 2017 01:37:24 +0000

I remember this same issue being discussed when Ms. Crowley scored a talk slot on powerhouse WABC 770 New York a few years back. The plaigarism thing has been out there lurking for some time.

By: Frog

Frog — Sat, 14 Jan 2017 00:29:29 +0000

Crowley’s pending job title is ” senior director of strategic communications” for the NSC. I have no idea what that job entails.
She has apparently been quite good in the communications business for a right good while.
So while the evidence of plagiarism is doggone clear, that was in her PhD thesis of 17 years ago. Its relevance to her pending position is not clear to me.
I am not going to get all lathered up about this. Not in these days of BuzzFeed, CNN and “golden showers”. Not in the days of Clinton and Lynch meeting in her plane on the tarmac to “discuss grandkids.” Or “If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan”. Et cetera.

By: Lee

Lee — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 22:11:00 +0000

431 pages. Descriptive factual background, com what I can tell. It’s twelve bits, here and there sprinkled through the 400 some pages.

By: y81

y81 — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 19:35:58 +0000

In addition to some of the other issues raised here, note that there is a wide variety of opinion as to footnote placement. Politico suggests that some of Crowley’s footnotes are in the wrong place, but some people (including Kate Turabian, may she rest in peace) believe strongly that the number of footnotes should be minimized, and they should be placed at the end of paragraphs, even if it requires the reader to think a little, or even check the source, to be sure exactly which items derive from the footnoted source. Others think footnotes should be sited close to the text to which they relate, even if it means several footnotes to one paragraph, and even if the later ones say “Ibid.” Crowley’s dissertation advisor, or the IR department (or the IR department secretary), may have instructed her.

By: T

Fri, 13 Jan 2017 19:19:02 +0000

“I am puzzled by the idea that her committee should have detected the plagiarism.” [Neo @ 12:27 pm]

It’s a matter of style. When you read the same person’s work over and over in draft after draft one becomes used to their style of writing. Now would a student’s own style mimic some of it’s sources? Probably so, but not ALL of the sources. If the plagiarism was as grievous as the MSM would have us believe, then someone on her committee should have picked up some inference of it. That’s when you insert the marginal note:”This seems to warrant a footnote. Is this your original work?” (which I have done with student work). Triggered by such an instance (or instances) it is the committee members’ duty to have a discussion with the student about whether this is a one-off incident, or whether there are other instances of this in the dissertation. No, it’s not always intentional, but if the committee isn’t watching for that, then they are not doing their job. That’s part of the difference between the student and the “master.”

Now as devil’s advocate let me ask the question another way: If this was okay for the experts on her dissertation committee, then who the Hell are the MSM to second guess specialists in the field?

She may have been sloppy or devious. Even so, then her committee was less than fully competent or the MSM has no basis for criticism.

By: AMartel

AMartel — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 18:24:34 +0000

2 pages, 4 pages, whatever. Not near the same impact as “thousands of words.” Word count/page varies due to font size and margins. And how long was the dissertation? What was plagiarized – substantive conclusions or descriptive factual background? The former is so much worse than the latter. I don’t care about Monica Crowley. If she stole ideas for academic promotion then she can go to hell. Otherwise, this is all just more Trump outrage. I hate being led about by the media from outrage to outrage.

By: neo-neocon

neo-neocon — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 17:27:05 +0000

Gringo and others:

I am puzzled by the idea that her committee should have detected the plagiarism. A thousand words among hundreds and hundreds of pages and no doubt hundreds if not thousands of footnotes? No committee is going to be checking every source listed to see if it’s an exact quote or a paraphrase, and how are they to recognize a few times something is unsourced but paraphrased? These were almost certainly hard-copy books (or hard-copy articles) she was quoting. Unless the committee members had memorized the exact wording of every book and every article ever written on the subject, they could not possibly have caught it.

Only a computer program could do that, or a person who had read every single source AND had a perfect photographic memory.

By: Lee

Lee — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 17:18:22 +0000

As you move from your notes to your rough draft to your first draft through subsequent drafts, you make changes. In one you might quite directly, note it. And then you decide instead to paraphrase, but of course, you still footnote. And in the course of writing and rewriting, you sometimes lose track of the source material.

One of the things that happens if you get overly happy with the delete key in MS Word, as you delete the footnote number, the entire footnote itself disappears, and the subsequent notes renumber.

I’m assuming she used MLA and endnotes, not APA style — it’s more tedious to find APA cured information, but it’s harder to accidently delete the note. In the old days of typewriters, the note remained until you cut it out.

(I pasted up footnotes and photocopied, so I literally cut out footnotes. Bastard professors wanted FOOTNOTES when we freaking TYPED, but in the computer age, they prefer ENDNOTES, now that it’s so easy to do FOOTNOTES at the bottom of the page.)

I think Endnote helped take care of preventing accidently deleted notes, but I’m willing to bet she used Word.

By: Gringo

Gringo — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 16:35:59 +0000

I am reminded of the “term papers” I and my friends wrote in high school, which were replete with plagiarism. One claimed to have submitted a paper in an AP Modern European History class about an invented battle. He got a good grade, so the story went.

Her dissertation committee should have caught the plagiarism. Isn’t that what they are for? Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.