On the Jason Arday Saga

Jason Arday, 1985-2026

Curmie is a little late to the feeding frenzy around the case of Jason Arday.  Arday is, or rather was, a Cambridge University professor of sociology of education (whatever that means), and a lightning rod for allegations of plagiarism and misrepresentation in one direction and racism in the other.  He resigned from Cambridge under a cloud of suspicion on August 5 after the university re-opened the plagiarism investigation, and he was found dead in his apartment on the 14th.  As of this writing, no cause of death has been released, but of course there is the unspoken likelihood of suicide.

Back in 2023, when Cambridge made Arday the youngest black professor to be hired in that venerable institution’s over 800-year history, a couple of things became clear.  First, the university was really interested in bragging about their new hire as an effort “to do everything it can to address this [“the barriers faced by many under-represented groups across higher education and especially at leading universities”] by creating academic spaces where everyone feels they belong.”

Second, even usually responsible news outlets bought Arday’s tales of perseverance and extraordinary accomplishments without the slightest hint of skepticism.  The Guardian, for example, breathlessly exclaimed that “he did not learn to speak until he was 11” and that he was “unable to read or write until the age of 18.”  (Both of these assertions have subsequently been at least challenged if not outright disproven.)  Shortly before Arday’s resignation, The Guardian was calling him a “superstar academic.”

But, as they say in the infomercials, That’s Not All! 

Tyler Austin Harper, a former academic currently writing for The Atlantic, describes a pattern of “systemic, ritualized, dishonesty.”  In an interview with NPR’s Michel Martin, Harper says, 

He lied about a number of elements of his background, his medical history.  He plagiarized a number of his various academic works.  On the athletic achievements front, he claims to have run 600 miles in six days, which would put him 50 miles shy of the world record, which would make him a really world-class endurance athlete.  He claims to have been mute until age eleven and then had a miraculous turn-around, an illiterate until age 18….  So, any one of these things may have perhaps been believable, but the sheer accumulation of implausibilities made it pretty apparent that he was a serial fabulist.

“Fabulist” has got to be the classiest term for “liar” that Curmie has heard in a long time.  There are, by the way, a host of other claims that rather strain credulity, enumerated in the Times of London, and the New York Times, as well as The Guardian.  Asked by that newspaper about some of his more outrageous assertions, Arday responded, “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me.  Why would I lie?” 

The answer to that question is rather obvious; Occam’s Razor would seem to apply.  He wanted the adulation and the benefits of someone who had actually done those great things.  If, Gentle Reader, you think that sounds rather like an obese octogenarian currently living in this country’s most expensive public housing, you are not alone.

Harper notes that the initial accusations regarding the alleged plagiarism in Arday’s doctoral dissertation were set in motion someone whom Harper says “is fairly described as a racist.”  That would be Nathan Cofnas, whose comment that in a true meritocracy, “Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment” would seem to provide sufficient evidence for that assertion. 

Cofnas, who was fired by Cambridge’s Emmanuel College in 2024, has now been suspended from his research position at Ghent University, who must, of course, have known of his views when they hired him.  But Arday’s death somehow changes things in the minds of cowardly university administrators.  (Curmie offers the usual apologies for redundancy).

Importantly, however, whatever motivated Cofnas’s allegations, he seems to have had a case.  Just as Mark Fuhrman may have been a bad cop but that didn’t make OJ innocent (as opposed to “not guilty”), the allegations against Arday cannot be ignored just because he’s black and the accuser is a racist.  Viewed with skepticism, yes; automatically rejected, no. 

It is true that Arday’s PhD school, Liverpool John Moores University, cleared him of plagiarism charges, but if the New York Times is correct that “Dr. Arday’s published papers and his thesis had dozens of grammatical errors, along with identical quotes attributed to different people,” then anything that university says should be disregarded in its entirety.  The thesis is available here; you’re welcome to check it out for yourself, Gentle Reader.  Curmie has neither the disciplinary expertise to evaluate the originality or validity of Arday’s arguments nor the time to search out those grammatical errors.

What Curmie can tell you is that when he submitted his dissertation, the committee did their jobs.  In a study of late 20th-century Irish adaptations of Greek tragedies, Curmie had made a passing reference to a play by a Nigerian playwright, and seemed to imply that it was written by someone other than the actual dramatist.  A committee member pointed out the error. 

Curmie had also quoted one of the classical Greek tragedians.  He provided the English translation for the entire passage he wanted to cite, but inadvertently left out a few words of the original Greek.  The classicist on the committee caught that one.  Needless to say, the corrections were made before the document was printed and bound.  That dissertation represented not just Curmie, but the department and the university.  It was going to be accurate.  Apparently, the standards at Liverpool John Moores are a little more… erm… lax.

Fact is, no one looks good here.  Not Arday, not Liverpool John Moores, and certainly not Cambridge, who chose Arday over more senior scholars, including other “global majority” finalists with apparently better credentials, both qualitatively and quantitatively.  Arday was, in the words of the New York Times article linked above, “underqualified, by the school’s own standards.”  Ah, but hiring any old black scholar wouldn’t make headlines the way The Youngest Ever would.  The search committee included someone whose research into autism and related conditions should have set off alarms about just how unlikely Arday’s claims about his medical history truly were.

Plus, of course, the university immediately rushed to his defense even after they themselves re-opened the investigation into his alleged transgressions.  It’s understandable that a university of Cambridge’s stature wouldn’t want to admit they’d been taken in, but that sure looks like what happened.  Jason Arday may indeed have been a brilliant man, an outstanding lecturer, and a researcher capable of cutting-edge work.  He may have had colleagues, students, and friends who liked and admired him.  But, beyond the proverbial reasonable doubt, he was also a fraud, a liar, and a plagiarist.

In that NPR interview, Harper also argues that recent efforts to achieve a more inclusive professoriate “in some cases has led to a lowering of standards, but also has led to the sense that black and brown folks are on campuses to be black and brown first and foremost, and scholars and educators second.”  He then describes “what is often being described as cancel culture is actually a culture of cowardice…. No one has the stomach to say something that’s going to get them yelled at.” He’s referring here to hiring Arday, to the George Santos affair, and to his own experience as the “token black professor” at Bates College.

Curmie has occasionally mentioned that his views are not uniformly “liberal.”  He tends towards a Confucian belief that every case is different, and towards what is often regarded as a traditional conservative view that people are individuals first and representatives of a group second.  From this perspective, the situation Harper describes is doubly problematic in that it tends to isolate black scholars, making them akin to mascots, uncomfortable in their roles in the academy, and that a single incident like Arday’s apparent unfitness is taken as representative of other members of his demographic, thereby questioning the credentials of hundreds (at least) other black academics who got their positions simply by excelling.

This latter phenomenon, suggesting that most if not all black (or brown, or female, or LGBTQ+, or…) scholars got ahead simply by DEI or some variation on the theme, has been propagated not merely by racist idiots like Cofnas (or, in a different area, by buffoons like Pete Hegseth), but by far too many everyday conservatives.  (Curmie antiphrastically does not mention that most of the whiners had no objections when those who got unearned benefits were straight white males.) 

Let’s be real for a moment.  If Curmie were to identify the three academics he has known whose example he hoped to follow, people whose scholarship, integrity, and interest in helping those lower on the proverbial totem pole were all exemplary, there would be a black man on the list.  If he were to identify three academics he least wanted to emulate, there’d be a black man on that list, too.  And, of course, there are others at about every point along the continuum.  Something similar could be said for any other demographic.  None of this ought to surprise anyone.  Individuals are individuals.

Arday’s misrepresentation of himself in terms of medical history and athleticism tells us something about him as a person, not as an academic per se.  But other than serious abuse of students, there is no greater offense committed by a professor qua professor than serial plagiarism.  There is no excuse.  None.

Shaun Harper (not to be confused with Tyler Austin Harper) writes in Inside Higher Ed, “Even if he plagiarized his work, how can we best extend support to him as the investigation carries on and his reputation is being ruined across continents?”  Sorry, that’s utter nonsense.  It’s pretty clear that Arday did indeed plagiarize, and it’s more than a little smug to say that “Death should not be the price of academic celebrity” as if not everyone believed that.  Give me a damned break.

The whataboutism argument that white academics have gotten away with plagiarism in the past is simultaneously (often) true and irrelevant.  There’s at least one well-known white scholar in Curmie’s field whose career did indeed blow up after a plagiarism charge, but Curmie also knows about some pretty unethical behavior that went largely unpunished.  That said, what should happen is that there are serious consequences for all plagiarists regardless of race.

And don’t get Curmie started on arguments like “there are things he himself may have felt under pressure to exaggerate. But you have to remember always that he was trying to say, ‘Look what we can achieve. Look what black people can achieve and do.’”  Sorry, to talk legitimately about what you can accomplish requires you to actually accomplish something, not just say you did.  Such excuses do more to de-legitimize Arday than to defend him.

There are, in fact, plenty of reasons to suggest that Cambridge has a lot to answer for.  They were certainly lazy, craven, and predictably hypocritical.  But the more profound problem for Jason Arday was… Jason Arday.  It may be a bit much to call him a “turbo-fraudulent serial fabulist whose crime spree has discredited one of the world’s oldest academic institutions, as Tyler Austin Harper  does, but, frankly, not by much.

The coda to all this is that there’s apparently software that says that the chances Arday’s resignation letter was AI generated are 100%.  You may recall, Gentle Reader, that last year Curmie asked ChatGPT to write an essay about Elon Musk in Curmie’s own style.  It did so rather frighteningly well.  Some time later, Curmie fed that composition to one of those programs that purports to determine whether an actual person wrote something.  He was assured that it was 100% certain that it was written by a human.  Oops.  Maybe we ought not to be too trusting of computers’ conclusions?

Another program says that it’s only 3.5% likely that Arday’s resignation was computer-generated.  That’s a pretty wide range!  If the allegation is correct, it provides a sadly ironic conclusion to the whole affair.  If not, it serves as a reminder that whatever his faults, Dr. Arday was also an injured party.

Actually, he’s both perp and victim, however that letter was created.

On the (ahem) Acting Career of Tilly Norwood

To say that Curmie is rather ignorant of popular culture is to err more on the side of understatement than of hyperbole.  That wasn’t always true, or at least as true, but especially since retirement, he’s been more tempted to concentrate on things he likes rather than things he should know.  Yeah, he’s that crusty old fart who shouts “WHO?” a lot when watching a parade or a televised holiday celebration featuring “stars.”

But he’s definitely following the… ahem… career of Tilly Norwood, the attractive young woman pictured above.  She’s featured in a newly released two-minute film titled “AI Commissioner.”  She also, of course, doesn’t exist in any unmediated, three-dimensional, sense.  “She” (“it”?) is completely AI generated, and the folks at Particle6 seem pretty damned proud of their creation.

There has been a huge uproar from actors, SAG/AFTRA, and other predictable sources, and of course an equally predictable defense by Particle6 founder Eline Van der Velden.  In fact, about every media outlet you can name has covered the story, and several have published opinion pieces.  The British newspaper The Guardian has already published five different articles about Tilly and the attendant ramifications. 

Curmie finds himself agreeing with Stuart Heritage (why isn’t this guy a historian of the Jacobean period?) that “Sure, it should also be pointed out that her existence alone is enough to fill the pit of your stomach with a sense of untameable dread for the entire future of humanity, but that’s Hollywood for you,” but also that “even if it means that the market will soon be flooded by absolute slop, the betting is that she’s here to stay.”  Heritage also points out that other new ideas that were expected to revolutionize the industry—3D, for instance—turned out to be duds, so perhaps the degree of weeping and wailing is unwarranted. 

The Guardian article that interested Curmie the most, though, was a collection of comments by readers of the first couple of articles to appear.  Virtually all the commenters have a point: no, the threat, such as it is, isn’t immediate; yes, one can presume that “ostlers and bridlemakers were furious with Gottlieb Daimler and Henry Ford.”  But Curmie wants to highlight the commentary of AshMordant:

It’s too late to be scared.

Hollywood is not about making art, it’s about making money.

Give us one good reason why studios should pay for cameramen, makeup artists, set designers, lighting, catering and of course actors when AI can do the job and make money.

Films made with real people – actors as well as all the other innumerable people listed in the end credits – will soon be something like ballet or opera: enjoyed by a few cinéastes who are willing to pay all the money for this art form.

But why would a fan of the, say, Fast and Furious franchise or the Marvel universe or whatever it is called do that? All they care about are visual and aural stimuli, and AI can deliver that perfectly. 

Well, as Curmie used to say a lot in his Asian Theatre class, yes and no.  Certainly there is little interest in Hollywood in making art; mediocrity sells, after all.  Whether films featuring human actors will go the way of ballet and opera is speculative.  But the idea that movies that rely on “visual and aural stimuli” would not be seriously affected by replacing a couple of humans with AI-generated versions is, well, simply a statement of fact.

Regular readers here know that Curmie and Beloved Spouse are fans of TV whodunnits.  Not infrequently, the stars of such shows clearly got their jobs more for being conventionally attractive than for their acting ability.  Almost always, they’re fine most of the time: no one will confuse them with Ian McKellen or Emma Thompson, but they can handle the vast majority of what they’re required to do.  Inevitably, however, they’re called upon to show a spontaneous reaction or display a real emotion… and Curmie finds himself shouting at the TV, “don’t make [insert gender-appropriate pronoun here] act!”  AI is all about processing the past, which makes it a paean to conventionality and mediocrity.  But if what it replaces is already, well, conventional and mediocre, then the loss is negligible.

Well, sort of.  A number of ultimately excellent actors weren’t necessarily brilliant from the get-go.  Whether they were learning their trade in full view of millions of people, or whether they were relegated to eye-candy roles that didn’t allow for actual acting doesn’t matter.  Talent can’t be taught; skill can.  And AI poses a threat in that it stands to short-circuit the career of those with the former but not yet the latter.

Moreover, the actors who will be affected by this aren’t the ones making eight figures for every film or seven figures for every TV episode.  Rather, it will be the ones whose names are unfamiliar to everyone but their family and friends.  As of two years ago, only about one in seven members of SAG/AFTRA earned even the $26,470 in film and TV work required to receive insurance through the union.  It may be easy to scoff at the not-really-so-hard lives of the millionaires and billionaires, but the overwhelming majority of actors in the trenches are struggling to make ends meet while living in the extremely expensive area around Los Angeles.  These, not the stars, are the folks whose jobs Tilly and her manipulators want to put out of work.

“AI Commissioner” is remarkably unfunny for what is advertised as a comedy.  Tilly is not required to do much, and what she does do requires neither significant talent nor skill.  But, just as other variations on the theme of AI have improved significantly over even the last few months, we can reasonably expect that future Tilly clones will be qualitatively better than what we’ve seen so far.  And we can reasonably suspect that some future project might actually hire some decent writers.

It strikes Curmie that there are three areas of contestation here: the technological, the ethical, and the pragmatic.  Let’s tease those out a little.

We start with the technological.  Clearly, Tilly isn’t ready to play a major role yet, and probably won’t be by the time the current SAG/AFTRA contract expires roughly nine months from now.  But progress will be made, and everyone concerned had better be ready for the negotiations.  Actors, the real ones, still have enough clout that the threat of another strike will mean something.  But the studios and producers aren’t without power, either.

One of the principal disputes that led to the SAG/AFTRA strike two years ago was what Curmie called an “obscene” proposal by producers that background actors be paid a single day’s wage for the rights to use their image in perpetuity without consent or remuneration.  Obviously, variations on the theme of CGI were intended to replace background actors, whose images could be manipulated to fill in for a presumably slightly different group of actual humans. 

We know, of course, that CGI has been employed in manifold ways both before and after the latest SAG/AFTRA contract was finalized.  But, and here’s the transition to ethical consideration, CGI is different to the extent that a CGI-generated is generally employed to make a character do something a human actor can’t do (think superhero movies, for example) or to create a character that isn’t, in fact, human (e.g., Gollum, or Thing in the Addams Family franchise).  Curmie isn’t sure how the negotiations ended up on replacing background actors, so there may be an exception there, but some of the commentary he’s reading suggests that there is at least some protection for human background actors.

The unions’ claim that AI is “trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation” is both true and ethically ambivalent.  Where is the line between studying and de facto plagiarism?  When Curmie was 17, he did a show with an experienced comic actor who consistently got laughs by separating line and gesture.  Curmie adopted a similar strategy in future shows, and indeed taught it to younger actors when he began his teaching and directing career.  Was that stealing?  Or just learning?

Still, there is a line there that should not be crossed, especially when we’re talking about an AI “actor” doing literally the same thing as the source rather than simply employing a general concept.  In scholarly writing, even a two- or three-word description (something like “farcical tragedy”) sometimes shouldn’t be repeated without attribution, but at other times a much longer passage, even word-for-word (significant person X was born on this date in this place to this couple, whose occupations were… etc.), won’t cause much concern.  (Curmie, being Curmie, still wanted students to cite sources, even for that generic stuff.)  One supposes that some rules could be put in place to allow some uses of AI but nor others, but it’s difficult to imagine how. 

So now we turn to the pragmatic.  This is a genie that isn’t going back into the bottle, at least until everyone is satisfied that there neither are nor will be further advances in the technology (unlikely), or studios start thinking of rewarding actual artists instead of corporate suits (even more unlikely).  Hollywood is the very crystallization of late-stage capitalism, uninterested in anything but making more money for those in power. 

Tilly Norwood is being touted as the next Scarlett Johansson.  That’s not gonna happen, at least as long as the real one draws movie-goers in large numbers.  Tilly won’t do that, except perhaps very briefly as a variation on the theme of a freak show.  But she is a helluva lot cheaper, even after you figure in the salaries of the geeks who manipulate her, and we can expect studio heads to start circling around Tilly and her successors like sharks around a wounded seal if given half a chance.

Curmie isn’t seeing much of an upside here.  Perhaps, though, the citizenry is more interested in good work than in profits for overpaid capitalist hacks.  Or they’ll just get bored with the gimmick.  ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.  On the other hand, theatre, fiction, and film have all warned us of the dangers of allowing any form of artificial intelligence too much scope: think R.U.R. (which is over a century old!), 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the first Star Trek movie, for example.  That doesn’t mean the prospects are necessarily dire; they are just extremely unlikely to be positive unless, Gentle Reader, you own stock in Netflix or Amazon or Disney or whoever.

We shall see.

Further Musings on "Context"

Claudine Gay at the Congressional hearing

The recent resignations of Liz Magill and Claudine Gay as presidents at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University are, of course, of interest to Curmie, both as a career academic and as an observer of American society.  They tell us more about the business of higher education than, perhaps, we would like to know.

It is widely believed that their testimony before a Congressional committee last month was evasive, even mendacious and/or anti-Semitic.  Curmie, you may recall, disagreed with those conclusions, and noted that both Eugene Volokh and FIRE’s legal director, Will Creeley, agree with his assessment.  Context does matter. 

The specific circumstances surrounding a demonstration by supporters of the Palestinian cause chanting “from the river to the sea” are central to determining the appropriate response.  That phrase has been interpreted by some to mean the extermination of Israel, or even of Jews in general.  Others claim the slogan suggests merely an aspiration to be liberated from what Palestinians perceive, not altogether inaccurately, as Israeli oppression, with no inherent suggestion of violence.  

Analogously: a swastika—the word is derived from the Sanskrit for “may all be well with you”—is a positive emblem in several Eastern religions (especially, but not exclusively, Hindu), but that’s not the first association 21st-century Americans, especially Jews, will make.  Should Hindus be prevented from using a time-honored symbol of their faith because the Nazis appropriated the image?  No, but circumspection would certainly be in order.  Context!

Back in the Dark Ages of the late 20th century, Curmie taught courses in public speaking and persuasion.  Those courses required examining the relationship between the sender and the receiver of a message.  More specifically, communication theory suggests that there are innumerable ways in which the process can go wrong.  All of us have experienced more than one episode in which what one person intended to say was not what the other person heard.  These situations, though clearly unintentional, often lead to tension… or worse.

Volokh, Creeley, and Curmie agree that context matters, that whether or not demonstrators were engaging in protected (even if objectionable) speech is a matter of context.  If the chants constitute an actual threat against specific individuals or group, if there is an incitement to criminality, then First Amendment protections (and their equivalents at private universities purporting to uphold free speech values) do not apply.  Barring that threat, however, even offensive speech must be permitted, provided it does not directly violate the rights (as opposed to the sensibilities) of others.

Curmie has long believed in the “reasonable person” approach.  That is, in this particular matter, the question is not whether Jewish students at those universities felt personally threatened, but whether a reasonable person would have interpreted the actions of the protestors in that way.  And now we’re back at context.  Curmie wasn’t there.  Neither, probably, were you, Gentle Reader.  Ultimately, we’re going to have to trust the people on the ground to make the call.  That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily right, only that we have no other reasonable alternative.

The concept of context takes on another meaning, too, of course.  Here, the issue is not free speech, but consistency.  And here is where those critical of the responses by various university administrations across the country have their most persuasive point: what if it were a different group of students who were offended or felt threatened by the actions of others?

Curmie has been dismissive here and elsewhere of, for example, the black student at the University of Michigan who felt “unsafe” when a professor showed the Laurence Olivier film version of Othello in class, or the Muslim student at Hamline University who purported to feel “unwanted” and “disrespected” when she passed up clearly stated opportunities to avoid seeing an image of the prophet Muhammad in a global art history class and would have us believe she was scarred for life.

Curmie mentions these incidents not because they’re silly, although they are, but because university administrations sided with the students and their fragile sensibilities: in the former case, a Distinguished University Professor (note the capital letters: this is an official title) was humiliated and removed from teaching his course; in the latter case, an adjunct professor (with a PhD) was de facto fired.  

It is not too big a stretch to suggest that had some group other than Jewish students considered themselves threatened on the Penn or Harvard campuses, the administrations’ actions might almost certainly would have been different.  In other words, whereas allowing the pro-Palestinian protests was arguably the correct call when considered in isolation, in context (there’s that word again!) it could reasonably be considered a hypocritical violation of the university’s precedents in order to favor one side of a contentious issue.  Are these examples of anti-Semitism?  Curmie isn’t saying “yes,” but he isn’t saying “no,” either.

This critique is especially true at Harvard, where Claudine Gray’s resignation letter includes this tidbit: “it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor – two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am – and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”

Yeah, right.  Curmie may agree that responses to campus demonstrations should be based on context, but she failed to make that case in her appearance before that committee, when either she knew what questions were coming or was remarkably unprepared.  If that performance was “confronting hate,” Curmie is Miss America.  Still, Curmie is reasonably convinced that Gay would have survived the brouhaha arising from the congressional testimony had she not been outed as a plagiarist. 

As for “scholarly rigor,” well, even her supporters at the Harvard Crimson admit that “Gay’s behavior constitutes plagiarism” and that “sloppiness of this kind is unbefitting of a Harvard president.”  Yes, it is true that plagiarism cases are on a continuum, and some examples are worse than others.  But whereas the lack of intention to deceive is at least a partial excuse for an undergraduate (Curmie has seen scores of such cases), such a lack of… wait for it… rigor is unacceptable in a graduate student, let alone the president of Harvard. 

If, as many folks who know the specifics of Harvard’s honor code better than I have asserted, Gay’s plagiarism was quantitatively and qualitatively significant enough that a Harvard undergrad would have been suspended for similar offenses, Gay should be fired, not simply from the presidency but also as a faculty member.  Nor should anyone else hire her.

Predictably, Gay accepts literally no responsibility for her actions, resorting instead to claims of racial victimhood.  They are bullshit.  It may not be true that Gay got the job to begin with not because she was the best available candidate, but because she was considered the best available black female candidate (Curmie doubts that even that description is likely to be true), but it’s difficult to believe otherwise.  And her self-righteous bluster about “racial animus” only weakens what little case she had.

Dr. Gay, you were de facto removed from the presidency of the nation’s oldest and most famous university because you were proven to be a fraud, even to the satisfaction of many of your supporters.  You get to remain in a cushy faculty position, and according to one report will still bring in a salary about a dozen times as high as Curmie’s was when he retired as a full professor.  You caught a break, and it’s far more likely that your demographic profile lightened your punishment than that it precipitated it.  The wise thing to do would be to STFU.  But, of course, if you were actually wise, you wouldn’t be in this position to begin with.

Oops... one more yearbook story

Stephen Strachan: Curmie Contender

Within an hour of posting my last piece on the quartet of yearbook controversies, one of the more faithful readers of this blog posted a comment on the Facebook page that she was surprised I hadn’t talked about the New York principal who plagiarized his yearbook message to students… he even congratulated the wrong class! (Side note: Curmie attended a university commencement ceremony a few years back in which the speaker—the state comptroller—repeatedly invoked the name of our arch-rival when presumably attempting to congratulate our graduates.)

The fact is, I didn’t know about this one. It hit the papers while I was out of the country, and whereas I had an internet connection of a sort, I frankly had a lot better things to do than spend a lot of time web-surfing. Even had I known about Roosevelt High School’s Stephen Strachan, I might have saved it for a separate post. It’s the outlier in the group in the sense that all the other stories were at least loosely about photographs and sometimes their accompanying cutlines: those that were excluded, those that probably should have been excluded, those that were altered without permission. (Not to mention the fact that my last post was over 2700 words already.)

But now I feel the need to say yes, this guy is an utter idiot, and ought not to be allowed on school property except with a ticket to the basketball game or band concert. What Strachan did, apparently, was to gain “permission” from a friend—the principal of a California high school—to use his remarks as the basis for Strachan’s own what-a-swell-group-of-kids-you-are message. He then made a few edits—replacing the names of California students with those of his own, but failing to change the name of the high school (!)—and mistakenly sent the wrong file off to the publisher.

Curmie has done this. Well, sort of. Once I’ve written a recommendation for a student, for example, I generally start with what I’ve already written if I’m asked to write another one. I edit it, and I try to highlight qualities in the student that would seem to make him or her a particularly good fit with a given program. But the fact is, if Mary Smith is applying to a half dozen grad schools, she’s going to get one letter, slightly revised. And I confess that I once missed editing one place in the letter and therefore told University X that Mary would be a great fit at University Y. (For the record, she was accepted at both schools.) So, yeah, I empathize.

Except that I don’t. For one thing, I wrote the original document, and I’m talking about precisely the same person. For another, no one—not Mary, not any place she’s applying—expects that I’ll craft a completely original document every time she applies someplace new. By contrast, every time I write my semi-annual state-of-the-organization speech to the honor society I advise, I start with a completely blank screen. Why? Because the circumstances are different, and the students in the room have a right to know what I think right now. Sometimes, to be sure, I’ll quote something I wrote the previous semester or the previous year: but I always do so for purposes of comparison—I said I wanted to see something happen, let’s see how we did—and I always make it clear that I’m quoting an earlier document.

Not so, Mr. Strachan. If he “got permission” from me to quote something I said, I’d grant it—but I’d expect my work to be attributed to me. I can’t grant someone the right to plagiarize from me, because the system only works if everyone involved in the communicative process is fully aware of who said what—that applies to the listener/reader, as well: in this case the students of Roosevelt High School, who were unfortunate enough to have been subjected to what we shall euphemistically refer to as his “leadership.”

A bit of the Newsday article:

Strachan, in a statement released through the Zimmerman/Edelson public relations firm, said: “I sincerely apologize to the Roosevelt community and to the class of 2014 for the inadvertent clerical error causing mistakes to be printed in the 2014 yearbook. An unedited draft of my remarks was accidentally published rather than the final version, and I take full responsibility for the oversight.”

An edited version of that page currently is being printed, and each student should receive a corrected yearbook by Friday, the statement said.

Jake Mendlinger of Zimmerman/Edelson said the total cost to replace that page of the yearbook is about $800, which will come out of the principal’s “discretionary fund.”

Curmie responds: 1). Why do you need to release your statement through a public relations firm?  2). One presumes that the term “inadvertent clerical error” is to differentiate this example from the intentional clerical errors made elsewhere. 3). The term “clerical error” sure makes it sound like you’re trying to shift the blame away from yourself, there, Ace. 4). If you “take full responsibility,” why is the money to reprint the books coming from a discretionary fund instead from your own pocket?

One is also tempted to wonder why the yearbook editor and/or advisor didn’t catch the error before it embarrassed everyone associated with the school. But what Curmie really wants to know is where the hell they found one Alfred T. Taylor, the vice president of the local school board. He’s quoted as describing the matter as an “unfortunate mistake,” a charitable but marginally accurate description. But then he said, “It’s unfortunate that somebody thought it was newsworthy.”

Really? Have we in fact found the one person in Roosevelt who understands less about education than the principal of the local high school? Yo, Dude, the high school principal just got busted for plagiarism. Don’t you care about original thought, basic honesty, or really accepting responsibility for one’s own actions? If a 15-year-old kid plagiarizes, it’s an unfortunate event, but it’s a fact of life. (It’s also, according to your own Code of Conduct, a Level 7 offense, carrying a minimum five-day suspension.) When a principal does it, it damned well better be newsworthy, or all is truly lost.

Yeah, there’s some definite Curmie consideration happening here.