A Week of Literary Kidnappings
May 1st, 2006 • Posted in: CommentaryA plagiarist, says my 1926 Webster’s, is “an artistic or literary thief.” The word comes from plagium, Latin for “kidnapping.” To plagiarize, then, is not simply to steal, but to steal something as important as someone else’s child. This past week, sadly, we’ve seen two high-profile literary kidnappings.
The less important (though more widely reported) happened at Harvard, where sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan saw her first novel withdrawn from bookstores by publisher Little, Brown. The reason? As many as 40 passages of her popular book copied language and situations from two earlier books by novelist Megan McCafferty. Ms. Viswanathan has claimed that she unintentionally “internalized” McCafferty’s words and that “any phrasing similarities between her works and mine were completely unintentional and unconscious.” The parallels were first reported by the Harvard Crimson.
That sounds suspiciously like the excuse given by Raytheon CEO William Swanson, the week’s other kidnapper. His 76-page booklet, “Swanson’s Unwritten Rules of Management,” had catapulted him to guru-dom for its pithy, common-sense maxims about management. Now, thanks to the sleuthing of a California chemical engineer, some 17 of his 33 rules can be traced to The Unwritten Laws of Engineering, a 1944 book by W. J. King, an engineering professor at UCLA. Not only is the language identical, but the rules even appear in the same order.
Of the two, his is the worse offense. Not only as CEO but now as management doyen, his example stands to influence future Kaavya Viswanathans by the thousands. Surveys by the Center for Academic Integrity find that undergraduates may be particularly susceptible to the temptations of plagiarism: Some 40 percent of them already plagiarize, and about two-thirds don’t see anything wrong with doing so. Unfortunately, Mr. Swanson’s eight-sentence statement, issued after his outing, seems to agree. It provides ammunition for sophomore plagiarists to argue that, in fact, plagiarism isn’t a very important crime.
“The lessons that lie at the heart of the ‘Unwritten Rules,’ ” Swanson begins, “were gathered over a lifetime of experience, reading and listening.” Student translation: As long as I have important things to say about my own life, what’s a little kidnapping got to do with it?
“The result,” he continues, “is an unpublished work that is available free of charge to any interested reader.” Translation: I’m not publishing this student paper for profit, so what’s the fuss?
While that sentence doesn’t apply to Ms. Viswanathan, who signed a half-million-dollar deal with her publisher, the next one should give her comfort. “I sought to provide credit at the front of the ‘Unwritten Rules,’ ” Mr. Swanson explains, “to all those unnamed sources who had, over the course of my life, contributed a thought or an idea relevant to the compiled work.” Translation: Any amount of plagiarism can be covered by a blanket statement crediting unnamed sources, with no need for the annoyance of having to credit exact sources.
Only then, four sentences deep, comes the acknowledgement that should have been the lead sentence: “The similarity of the language between Professor King’s 1944 book and some of the rules within the ‘Unwritten Rules’ is beyond dispute.” But the tone of this admission doesn’t even hint at chagrin, regret, or apology. The next sentence, in fact, brushes off the core of the kidnapping charge — “the similarity of the language” — with an extraordinary assertion that “the originality of the material was never the rules themselves, but my expression of them in terms of my experience over the years.” Translation: Take whatever you want, and as long as you apply it to your own experience, you’ll never have to fess up to its source.
Finally, he notes that “I regret that over the course of the years and in the process of compiling the ‘Unwritten Rules,’ any reference to Professor King’s work was not properly credited.” Good. But what action will he take? Will he withdraw the booklet? Revise it? Admit that his earlier explanation — that his rules were scrawled at different times on slips of paper that he then happened to assemble into the same order as King did — was disingenuous?
No, nothing of the sort. Instead, he ends dismissively, trying to make light of the whole affair. “This experience has taught me a valuable lesson — new Rule #34: ‘Regarding the truisms of human behavior, there are no original rules.’” Translation: Since nothing is original, there’s no need to honor human creativity — and, therefore, there’s no such thing as plagiarism.
What lies ahead for these two kidnappers? Ms. Viswanathan, after editing and reissuing her book, could become a celebrity author, widely known but forever tainted. Or, after some soul-searching, she could become a recognized exponent against kidnapping, speaking out powerfully against plagiarism.
Mr. Swanson already has public recognition, which he’s using to send a deeply confused signal to today’s youth. But his story is not over. Might he also, on deep reflection, realize that last week changed his life forever and take to the bully pulpit as a reformed kidnapper?
©2006 Institute for Global Ethics
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