What makes this even sadder is that Parkash takes a clever speech and makes it dull. She overworks the prose and then fails to deliver it with the sparkle Abushaar brings to the material. It you’re going to steal, plus it up!
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I wasn’t talking about the speech and neither is the article I linked to, but the plagiarizing he did while in law school. He claims he just didn’t understand that he had to cite the source, but that’s … more than a little hard to believe. Regardless, the rest of his law school time was without incident. He’s not a serial killer, but it was a pretty clear case of plagiarism.
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Fun story: supposedly when Duke University (that is, Trinity College) was founded, the Dukes wanted it to be the Harvard of the South. To the extent of closely emulating the design of several Harvard buildings on their campus. To add to the effect, the story goes, the founders sourced low-quality sedimentary stone for their buildings, in order that they might wear faster and give the campus an ancient, storied look, without necessitating all that waitin’ around that’s usually required.
Incidentally I also blame Duke for the massively invasive, unkillable English ivy that covers every inch of Durham and smothers the native forest substory – after all, what’s a would-be Southern Ivy without ivy?
Anyway, long story short, the tale that @pesco reports here just strikes me as a continuation of a long tradition.
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“I didn’t know I had to use my own words”
I had a visceral shock when I found one of my resident colleagues plagiarizing an article during a slide presentation. Not just quoting, every slide was word for word verbatim-- the intro, the conclusion, everything.
Nothing happened.
Pretty reliably there’d be at least 1-2 (out of 15) every year that would take the softball “review this article” assignment and just turn it into a cut and paste read-aloud. The best was a guy who did an independent study month and capped it off with a 2 page paper (guess what?). By that time I was an attending and we tried to remediate this guy and I was the one tasked with supervising his re-write. It was painful how ill-equipped he was to actually write at the level of academic medicine (or even an entry level college course, TBH).
Nothing happened.
Correction: Something did happen: I was told to stop looking into it.
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Valedictorians will not replace us!/s
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I wonder if there is a good translation of this somewhere:
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There you go again, plagiarizing Dolly! 
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Patsy Parton. What a mashup that would be.
[and now I have to listen to “Here You Come Again” before the earworm takes hold]
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Good one! Kinda funny tho how that “speech” also plagiarizes.
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Pretty sure that’s actually a Benjamin Franklin quote. Or maybe it was Einstein…
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Our colleagues over the Nursing College recently started a Doctorate of Nursing Practice. Soon after they began admitting students, the faculty from the college began coming to our departmental meetings to ask us to help “teach their students how to write a dissertation.”
WTF. As if we don’t have our hands full with our own students.
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I’ve heard similar stories from liberal arts profs I know who teach at different schools. There are apparently a lot of students who arrive in undergrad without the ability to write a bog-standard 5-paragraph essay*, let alone a doctoral dissertation. This is one of the major failures of American K-12 education.
[* the kind you’re supposed to learn to get beyond in college.]
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Mea culpa. It was paywalled, and I just assumed. I should have read more into the “school” in the headline.
Yeah, same. The Nursing thing is especially galling because what the Humanities and Liberal Arts profs are being told is that if we don’t help, the program could fail, and if that happens, it’ll really hurt the university, and then there could be budget cuts.
Same old story.
Galling on top of galling is that Nursing Colleges are notorious for not cooperating with anything. They don’t want their students to have to take the usual Gen Ed classes, because they need to have more Nursing classes. If you go to the Nursing College and say "hey, we have a Spanish Prof who can teach “Spanish for Health Care, and this will help your Nurses get better, higher-paying jobs” we get turned down with “Oh, they already get jobs, and besides, our programs are so tightly-built that students don’t have room for even one more thing. It’s life and death, you know.”
So, when their DNP students can’t write coherently, and I get asked to help fix that, outside of my normal teaching/research/service load, I’m less than sympathetic.
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I didn’t realize it was paywalled. Sometimes I forget I have a cheap NYT subscription through school and assume it’s a free article.
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Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown Duke modern American academia.
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Dunno how good this is, but I think I get the point across, if not the finer nuances of Tulcholsky’s satire.
Advice for a Poor Speaker
By Kurt Tucholsky
Never start at the beginning, rather always start three miles ‘before’ the beginning! Like this:
“Ladies and Gentlemen! Before I address tonight’s topic, allow me to briefly …”
Here you have pretty much everything that makes up a nice beginning: a firm address, the beginning before the beginning, that and what you intend to speak about, and the little word ‘briefly.’ That is how you immediately win the hearts and ears of your listeners.
Because the listener likes this: that he will open up to your speech like a heavy school assignment; that with this beginning you threaten what you will say, are saying and have already said. Always nicely tortuous.
Do not speak off the cuff – that makes for such an uneasy impression. The best is: you read your speech. That is safe, reliable, and also everyone enjoys it when the speaker reading his speech looks up suspiciously after every fourth sentence to see if the audience is still there.
If you just can’t take this friendly advice, and you absolutely want to extemporize … you layman! You laughable Cicero! Take as an example our professional orators, the Reichstag representatives—have you ever heard them extemporize? They surely write out at home when they will call out “Hear, hear!” … therefore if you must extemporize:
Speak how you write. And I know how you write.
Speak using long, long sentences – ones that you have prepared at home, where you have the peace and quiet that you need so very much, your children notwithstanding, that you know exactly how they should end, how the subordinate clauses nest beautifully together, so that the listener, impatiently daydreaming around in his seat, mistakenly believes himself to be back in a collegiate lecture course that he used to happily doze through, waiting for the end that kind of period … see now, I just gave you an example. This is how you must speak.
Always begin with Ancient Rome and always give, regardless of what you are talking about, the historical background of the subject. That is not just a German thing—all intellectuals do this. Once at the Sorbonne I heard a Chinese student who spoke flawless French speak, but he began to the general delight as follows:
“Allow me to very briefly begin with the developmental history of my Chinese homeland starting 2000 years before the birth of Christ…”
He looked up in astonishment because the people were laughing so hard.
This is how you must do it as well. You are quite right: one doesn’t understand it otherwise, who can understand everything without the historical backstory … quite right! People did not come to your presentation to listen to spirited animation, but rather that which they could look up in a book … quite right! Always present the history, always present it.
Do not worry yourself if the waves that flow from you into the audience also come back – those are trifles. Speak without concern for the effect, the people, the air in the auditorium; keep talking, my good friend. God will reward you.
You must put everything in subclauses. Never say: “Taxes are too high.” That is too simple. Say: “I would like briefly comment on that about which I have already spoken, that to me taxes are vastly …” That is how it should be done.
Drink a glass of water every now and then during your presentation - people like that.
If you tell a joke, laugh first, so that people know where the punchline is.
A speech is a monologue; how could it be otherwise. Because of course only one person is talking. After fourteen years of public speaking you still do not need to recognize that a speech is not only a dialogue but also an orchestral piece: a silent mass is speaking uninterruptedly with you. And you must hear that. No, you do not need to hear that. Only speak, only read, only thunder, only lecture.
To that which I have just said about the methods of speaking, I would additionally like to quickly note that lots of statistics always elevate a speech greatly. It is tremendously calming, and since everyone is capable of effortlessly retaining ten different figures, it is a lot of fun.
Announce the end of your speech well ahead of time, so that the listeners do not have a stroke from joy. Paul Lindau once began one of these dreaded wedding toasts with: “In conclusion…” Announce the end, and then begin your speech all over again and speak for another half hour. You can repeat this multiple times.
Not only must you make yourself a character, you must also perform it for the audience – that spices up the speech.
Never speak for less than an hour and half, otherwise it is not worth it to even begin.
When someone is speaking, the others must listen—that is your opportunity! Abuse it.
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