--Alexander Lindey, Plagiarism and Originality (l952)

When the first sentence was written a few millennia ago someone copied it and put exposition on the plagiarism warpath. It is a universal physical law that everything is derived from earlier antecedents, more complex in its unfolding when symbols and syntax are involved because the game of symbolic processing is exclusively human and without it we would be homo agnosia not sapiens. Apparently the price to be paid is periodic plagiarism ad nauseum, the accusers sickened and the accused eviscerated and abandoned.

This time the targets are Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin and when they are driven from the intellectual market place other targets are sure to follow. Why, we must ask!

The obvious response is our obligation to protect our original scholarship from the envious siphoning of lesser scribes. However vital that protection is deemed, neither the academy nor the law has managed to establish a syntactical minimum offense. A classic instance on the record is that of an otherwise sane professor of criminology who publicly claimed his surprising gift for identifying one word plagiarism! It is the academy that is responsible for this sad state of affairs.

This essay should proceed no further without the writer offering some assurance of his objectivity. Neither author has been met and they are, I am certain, completely unaware of my existence, prior to the revelations of the alleged plagiarism. At age 8l I felt familiar enough with WW II and the Kennedy Dynasty to go directly to the plagiarism issue. But we must note that both authors are writing where multitudes have scrolled at prodigious length. To expect pristine originality in history's retellings is to expect the impossible.

Regrettably. the academy has failed to establish formal quantitative indices of derivation, i.e., the ratio of derivativeness to original exposition. Obviously, original paragraphs should be protected and sentences also when they are discursive and propositional in nature. Ah, but what of phrases? Or even phrases in sequence? Should these also merit appropriate degrees of attribution? Lacking a properly sampled referendum from writers, authors and readers, why has our literate aggregation failed to legislate a fair and equitable common domain? Unless we legislate all phrases to be in the common domain, as well as all short sentences, the grounds for complaints will become infinite and as they proliferate we will no longer read for content but only for attributional compliance.

So here we are again, being worried by newly accused Ambrose and Goodwin. What were their alleged offenses? Replicating phrases from earlier models describing people, basic ideas, values, of or on the subject. etc. And per Cicero, all history must be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. (Sound familiar? I trust that trinary is in the common domain.) In history there is no poetic license. Despite the constraints, they were prodigious expositors. Worse, from the world of envy, were the due rewards of great popularity, royalty in status and. royalties fiscal, reducing all of us underachievers to pitiful objects. Goodwin even managed to be charming and lovable! Some souls are without mercy.

And how was all of this treated in our local press? A senior writer assigned the reporting task. Did he inspect and analyze the alleged plagiarisms of either author? No, instead he calls chairs of the three local university History Departments for their impressions, as if these would be expert opinions on the subject. Of course, their opinions are as good as anyone else's. As good as is not good enough.

Predictably, those called reached conclusions about plagiarism without any reference to the evidence. It is, in their words,"a scandal" and" a"stain on their reputations," with guilt presumed. On this intellectually shallow basis the commentators go bravely ahead. The problem is, they solemnly assure the inquiring party, a" cleavage" between professional historians and"popular" historians. This paradox is never resolved. It is ad hoc reasoning at its worst.

But what a headline resulted:

A FEW SCHOLARS SNICKER WHEN SUPERSTARS FALTER

Historians are awarded both advanced and honorary degrees. No external national professional agency certifies and credentials history's scholars, as many other professional societies do. The parent professional body, the American Historical Association, unless it has recently instituted a certification program, does not intrude into the technical competencies of historians, although it is concerned with ethics and historical validity. Its ventures into policing professional ethics, including plagiarism, have tended to be painful experiences, and it now looks for other agencies, the American Association of University Professors, for example, to assume responsibility for academic ethics. The AHA did claim jurisdiction for all of history under its Federal Charter but that presumption was rejected by expert legal opinion. So much for the hubris of history. The moral seems to be that if you write on matters historical, you are on your own.

Were Ambrose and/or Goodwin guilty as charged? Only if a rational scholar is willing to accept charges in the absence of proof. In the realm of plagiarism complaints we must distinguish between the substantial and the marginal as we do in copyright. Anything less than original complex sentences cannot command our intellectual respect. On these coherent grounds, and in this judicious court, the charges against Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin are dismissed."

Illustration by Curtiss Calleo