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Wednesday, July 01, 1998 By Sally Kalson, Post-Gazette Columnist
For a long time, I've wondered whether I did the right thing as a writing instructor at Chatham College by flunking two students who committed plagiarism and got caught red-handed.
The first young woman copied a magazine article word for word and signed her name to it. The piece was so good, I passed out copies to the class. As it happened, one of her classmates remembered reading it and steered me to the source.
The student cried buckets all the way up the chain of command. Her boyfriend even called me at home to extol her many virtues. But the department chairman backed me and the failing grade stood.
The second student turned in work so far above her level, the alarms were deafening. It wasn't hard to trace the source.
Her mother called several times, appealing to my sense of compassion. Her daughter was young and naive, she said; she didn't realize the difference between research and plagiarism. Couldn't I just lower her grade without failing her? I didn't see how I could, after the first case.
With 15 years of hindsight, I realize I made plenty of mistakes as a teacher. But now I'm certain that flunking those students was not among them.
Two high-profile writers in recent weeks have been brought low by their own fabrications. First came Stephen Glass, the young hotshot at The New Republic, whose meteoric rise was fueled with so much brazen invention, it almost takes your breath away. Then came Boston Globe columnist Patricia Smith, who resigned after admitting that she occasionally made up people and quotes -- but only, in her words, to "drive home" salient points.
I'll leave it to the shrinks to analyze what drives people to take such foolish risks. But in the matter of what-makes-them think-they-can-get-away-with-it, I offer this little story.
My sister-in-law once worked as a fact-checker at a glossy New York magazine. It didn't take her long to discover that one of the more prominent writers was not to be trusted.
Apparently, the guy was too lazy to bother with basic things like dates and prices. Whether he made them up or just screwed them up, she never knew. But she did make sure to check every assertion in every piece he wrote, right down to whether such-and-such a beach was really sandy. Too often, it was not.
The editors would see the corrections, roll their eyes, tell her to fix the copy and keep quiet about it. To her knowledge, no one ever called him on it, and his career never suffered one whit.
Behind every successful faker, it seems, there is a series of enablers -- parents and friends who make excuses, schools that don't want a messy scene, bosses who look the other way in deference to "talent."
But here's a postscript. The student who cried buckets came back the next year and asked to take the course again. I checked her notes and drafts on every story. This time she earned, and received, an A.
I don't know where she is today, or whether the lesson stuck. But I bet somewhere in Glass' past there are a few teachers who wish they'd stopped him when they had the chance.
And unless Glass is irredeemable, he's wishing the same thing.
Sally Kalson's column appears Wednesdays on The Region page. Her e-mail address is skalson@post-gazette.com
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