White House Aide Resigns Over Plagiarism

by Randy on March 1, 2008 · Comments

My thoughts after the jump …

White House Aide Resigns Over Plagiarism
WASHINGTON AP - A White House official who served as President Bush s middleman with conservatives and Christian groups resigned Friday after admitting to plagiarism. Twenty columns he wrote for an Indiana newspaper were determined to have material copied from other sources without attribution.

Timothy Goeglein, who has worked for Bush since 2001, acknowledged that he lifted material from a Dartmouth College publication and presented it as his own work in a column about education for The News- Sentinel in Fort Wayne, Ind. The newspaper took a closer look at his other columns and found many more instances of plagiarism.

The president was disappointed to learn of the matter and he was saddened for Tim and his family, White House press secretary Dana Perino said in a statement.

She said Goeglein had accepted responsibility and has apologized for not upholding the standards expected by the president.

The White House sought deal with the embarrassing situation quickly, the same day the plagiarism was reported by a blogger, Nancy Nall, a former News-Sentinel columnist.

His behavior is not acceptable and we are disappointed in Tim’s actions, said White House spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore. He is offering no excuses and he agrees it was wrong. …

It is very disappointing to learn of this.  There is a silver lining in that Tim took responsibility and hasn’t tried to fight it.

I only met him a handful of times at various events so I can’t really say anything except that it is a huge  disappointment.  He is  a very gifted man and good communicator in his own right.  There is no need for him to have done something like this.

Yet it happened.  I pray that grace and forgiveness is extended to him.  At the same time I have sympathy for the people he stole from.  Plagiarism may not be someone breaking into your home and stealing a television or stereo but it is stealing someone’s carefully crafted intellectual property.  Plagiarism is theft and intellectual laziness.

I pray that Tim’s forthrightness in confession will empower the true gifts within him to come forward and turn a bad situation for good.

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Viewing 5 Comments

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    The prevalence of plagiarism in our society is both scary and sad to me. Colleges have moved to using services like turnitin.com, which compares student papers against the entire internet, every paper ever submitted to the site, and a huge number of print sources. Amazingly enough, students submit plagiarized papers to it, and are shocked when they're caught and the professor takes disciplinary action.

    I think that, at least with people in their teens and twenties, it is tied in to pirating music and movies, and writing fanfiction (which is essentially a type of blatant plagiarism). They don't understand the abstract idea of intellectual theft, so they have no problem with plagiarism, or pirating a song. They don't think they're hurting anyone.

    Now why do white house staffers do it? I don't know.
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    Ellie ... what is "fanfiction?" I think I know what you are talking about ... like the guy JK Rowling is upset with for creating the Harry Potter Lexicon without her permission or input?

    and I am astonished that Goeglein did it as well. I mean... he works in the White House, just by his position people would want to hear what he had to say.
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    Fanfiction is fan generated fiction based on a published author's original work (or a movie, or a television series). The original work is considered the canon and supplies all of the basic information such as the world/universe that the stories are set in and (most importantly) the characters. The canon universe is then used to create new stories in the fanverse, creating a fandom version of that work. In highly developed fandoms like HP (Harry Potter) or the Whedonverse (Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel) you wind up with things like the HP Lexicon (a great portion of the HP lexicon is not based on Rowlings original work, but things made up by subsequent fanfic authors). About 99% of all fanfic is produced by women, ranging from teenagers on up (very often HP is what gets teens into fanfic in the first place). Originally fanfic was distributed through 'zines, but since the internet arrived it has existed on fanfiction.net (aka, the pit of voles), livejournal, and geocities, along with sites specifically devoted to hosting stories based around certain fandoms or pairings.

    There are two questions with fanfic. One, is it legal? Two, since most fanfic is usually based around slash or het pairings and romantic subplots (very often between two charcters that weren't involved in the canon universe [in point of fact many fanfic writers would consider a relationship extant in the canon universe as gen (general fiction), even if the story is romantic]), is it even worthwhile?

    The reigning authorial stance, is that, so long as it doesn't cross the line into illegal behavior (see here adult/minor pairings; HP is the only fanverse this is a big issue for) and does not generate any profit, it should be tolerated, if not encouraged. Only a few authors, Robin Hobb or Anne Rice (TM), actively are trying to root out fanfic. Anne Rice (TM) is so famous for this that it has become traditional to put a trademark symbol after her name, and fanfic based on her work is almost completely underground. Others like Diana Wynne Jones (my favorite author) or JK Rowling actually tolerate or even encourage fanfic.

    Two answer the second question, I think that the huge amount of literary creativity that fanfiction represents is a good thing, but the fact that it is going towards poorly written fanfic rather than creating new work is a huge loss. I understand the motivation for creating it. Readers form emotional attachments to characters and don't want the last page of the book to be the end of the story. Or, in situations like X-Files where there is an obvious romantic relationship that isn't explored in the canon, the fan wants to let out frustration by developing it. But fanfic doesn't tend to have very high standards with issues like Mary Sues (perfect characters that are meant to be stand-ins for the fan herself) and PwoP dominating. So it doesn't seem to be as elevated as it could be if people were developing their own work and sharing it.

    And I'm sure that was much more than you wanted to know...
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    Oh, I should add that there's not one 'guy' trying to publish HP Lexicon. It's a group of people. And HP Lexicon isn't (I think) an actual host site for HP fanfic.
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    That was a little more than I bargained for but worth the read. Very interesting. I knew that kind of stuff existed but I didn't know it was to that extent.
 

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