Also paid, that doesn’t mean I like it. If politicians and celebrities had to write their own books, we’d have a lot fewer shitty books on the shelves.
Or at least shorter with more pictures…
I think the reason there’s no procedure for it is that it’s basically not a thing that is done. The whole idea of a speech is that you’re speaking, as yourself, to a group of people, communicating some idea of yours to them that’s appropriate for the occasion or at least that’s important to you. Of course, the problem is that in many instances the real content of such a speech would be, “I have no idea who you people are, except you’ve been paying fees here for a number of years. Thanks for that! Anyway, please remember who we are when we send you begging letters every year for the rest of your life… bye!” And that would be it. The atmosphere of ceremony might be hampered a little by such an outburst of honesty, hence the usual cavalcade of cliches.
He told stories from his life that weren’t actually from his life. It’s not just a quote here, a quote there.
Just so people are completely aware, it was a 15 min speech copied word for word…verbatim, even the pauses…except he left out the things about US medical health system and I change from personal health issue of the authors to his.
Whats worse is that his response to the speech (can see on the Edmonton journal’s website) he says the speech was inspired and sadly he is still trying to defend himself.
Sad!
Sincerely,
An attendee at the banquet
For some reason I have this niggling thought that it might have been something that was done (with explicit attribution!) in the verbose, speech-loving 19th century. But I wouldn’t swear to it.
And it certainly isn’t any sort of defence for this clown.
Okay, that’s just weird.
He couldn’t even have said “I know a guy…”?
Really, he fails plagiarism 101, which is to always make very minor cosmetic changes to the original so you have some level of deniability.
He took out one part referring to US medical system and did change whatever medical ailment affected his spouse.
Look, he is an ass, and you could probably see his assness spillover into the rest of the work, but immediately jumping to “he should be fired” is an overreaction. Lifting a speech you’re too bored/uninterested/busy/lazy to write is an order of magnitude different from fudging data and faking experiments.
I think in this instance it reflects more on his professionalism than anything else. People may now look twice at anything he puts out for fear it isn’t his work. Firing him may be overkill, admonishing him though would probably fit.
If you are working in medical research and you aren’t actually plagiarizing you have nothing to worry about from this. It’s not like someone will have coincidentally written the same 30 page research paper as you.
He should definitely be admonished. I’m sure he’s already had one sheepish visit to the President’s office, at least.
They’re both plagiarism, and any academic scientist knows this or ought to know it. I’m sure he’s a smart guy, and knew what he was doing was wrong. He did it anyway.
It was a speech he was giving as part of his official and professional duties. This wasn’t a toast given at his daughter’s wedding or some informal gathering of friends. He was speaking as a dean of medicine, a physician, and a scientist. When you are wearing that hat, you have to play by the rules. If he had made sexist or racist comments he wouldn’t be given a pass, and plagiarism needs to be treated with equal severity.
Yes, full disclosure, I have an axe to grind about this. I’m an academic physician that is not happy with the amount of plagiarism that occurs both in published works in my own field as well as within my own university. The root cause is because there is a huge amount of indifference to it, and unwillingness to see it as corrupting to academia.
The fact that a dean of medicine would lift entire paragraphs from another contemporary and widely known physician is appalling. At the very least, I would expect some fear that he might get caught but he didn’t even do the bare minimum to camouflage his theft. That type of recklessness itself should be disciplined, if not the plagiarist act itself.
I’d also bet a month’s pay that this isn’t his first offense. I’ve sat on enough academic discipline boards (for both under/grad students and faculty) to know that plagiarists are almost always serial offenders.
The Dean of Medicine needs to have a sterling academic reputation. He is in charge of instructing medical students and needs to be a superlative role model. He isn’t anymore. I wouldn’t fire him – he could remain as a faculty professor of medicine, but you can’t call yourself a Dean of Medicine and steal Gawande’s work and think your audience is too stupid to notice.
One of the problems with academia is that they tend not to accept anything that isn’t footnoted into complete shit. Rules against plagiarism suffer in a climate where individuals of middling intelligence force students to attribute their own original concepts and arguments to shoddily paraphrased quotes from those individuals who had the dilligence or endeavor to proceed them chronologically. Rigor and the correct answer are arguably more important than originality and creativity. I say this as someone who has to be creative at work and regularly sees my ideas stolen. This does not bother me, because I know that creativity comes in fact from rigor. When someone steals from me, I simply invent anew because I can and they cannot.
In academic medicine, copyright is usually worth very little. In fact, the first thing academic physicians usually do after writing something is to give away the copyright. Sometimes they give it away for free. Often, they actually pay someone to take their copyright away.
The reason is that most of them are rewarded for their ideas, not for the expression of their ideas. And you can’t copyright an idea. So the main purpose of “© 2011” is to mark the year one came up with the idea. Actually writing out the idea is generally the job of underlings.
For example, Stanley Prusiner is rewarded for his ideas on prions regardless of how elegantly he writes. And I’m not picking on him. I’ve never read his work, and I’ll never need to. He might even be a great writer. But even if he were, it wouldn’t much change his reputation. Oddly enough, the only time writing skill really makes a difference is when writing grants, and those documents are never made public.
Atul Gawande is obviously an exception, a rare academic physician who actually writes well about stuff others want to read. And don’t get me wrong, I know that the UoA Dean of Medicine made a mistake. But I can understand the collective eye-rolling in response.
Can you expand on this magnet? I’m not sure I understand your emphasis on copyright being important or not important. In most of academics copyright isn’t the issue so much as publication and authorship. In fact, I can’t recall the issue of copyright having come up at all.
Is getting your name on lots of refereed conference papers and journal pubs important in academic medicine, same as it is in other parts of academia, or do you guys use a different standard?
Getting your name on papers is very important. But it’s important because papers document when you came up with an idea. They also document your productivity (i.e. the work you’ve done to support your idea).
Copyright is different, it protects the specific expression of an idea. For other writers, that’s very important - there’s a big difference between “A plague on both your houses” and “Screw y’all”. In academic medicine, not so much. Once a study is done, a senior professor will often let a graduate student or postdoc write the paper. It just needs to be minimally readable to get the point across and stake your claim. Since the wording is not so important, most academic physicians don’t mind giving up the copyright. Which they generally do, because journals generally demand it.
In contrast, grant applications have to do a lot more than document your work. They have to persuade. Specifically, they have to persuade a stranger to give you money. So senior professors are much less likely to delegate grant-writing to someone else, and they spend a lot of time perfecting the art of writing grants. I’m sure there are some grant applications out there that read like Shakespeare. Too bad nobody is allowed to read them.
Again, Atul Gawande is a special case. His speech is special not because of the ideas (which amount to “Congratulations, doctors. Good luck, and don’t forget that medicine is really complex!”) but because of the way he expresses them.
Thanks Magnet. So are poorly written papers routinely accepted for publication? Or is the point partly that as long as you’ve submitted the work somewhere, you’ve clearly identified yourself as the originator of the idea, even if it doesn’t get accepted by a particular conference or journal?
I have a feeling that poorly-written papers documenting valuable research should be accepted for publication.
If a paper is rejected, it doesn’t count at all. But the writing standard for publication is very low, so poorly written papers are common. As long as the reader can figure out what you did and how you did it, your paper will pass the English test. Copy-editors will fix the inevitable grammar errors and typos.
Nevertheless, some papers (mainly from other countries) have to be rejected because they are totally incomprehensible. I’m talking Palin-level gibberish.
That seems to set a rather poor standard, since it would lead to a situation where many of the papers in the field are badly written. I have seen articles conditionally accepted with re-writes required, so perhaps that’s the way to go.
I just feel bad for any grad students trying to learn a field that hasn’t required at least some level of basic writing competency in conference and journal publications.
Besides poorly written papers might lead to misinterpretation or other problems.