News-Record.com

There is a long, strange tradition in this country of poor judgment among people who should know better.

In a previous life as a Cincinnati city councilman, trash-talk host Jerry Springer resigned in 1974 after a police vice investigation revealed he had enlisted the services of a prostitute -- and paid her with a check.

Closer to home, former school board member Keith Green threw a chair, former County Commissioner Robert Moores threw fits and a current commissioner, Linda Shaw, threw a cup of water.

Even amid all that, the recent case of a school board chairman in another county still stands out.

Keith Cook recently admitted delivering a commencement speech at Orange County High School that he had copied from the Internet as his own. When a reporter first asked him about the speech's origin, Cook flatly denied he plagiarized it. He confessed only when a reporter showed him positive proof that the vast majority of the words belonged to someone else.

The speech originally was presented by Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala in 1998 and used the movie "Titanic" as its theme. Now Cook, who has since resigned under pressure as chair but still plans to run for re-election, is slowly sinking in his own sea of irony.

A Duke University ethics expert, Diane M. Waryold, says Cook's actions clearly constituted plagiarism. "If it is not your own thoughts, you ought to attribute the information. " says Waryold, director of the Center for Academic Integrity, "And if you don't know who wrote it, you say, 'author unknown.' "

Yet Waryold agrees with Cook's contention that he shouldn't be held to the same standard as the students in his school district, who could be suspended for a similar offense. She says he should be held to a tougher standard. "There's a higher standard for leadership positions," Waryold says. "There's a higher standard for role models."

Which, ironically (that word again), brings us to a Duke mechanical engineering professor, Charles Harman, who has written op-ed columns for newspapers across the state, including the News & Record. Problem is, at least a pair of Harman's columns repeat passages and phrases, some word-for-word, that have appeared in similar columns by others across the country.

For example, in a 1994 column endorsing a low-level nuclear waste facility in Wake County, he wrote, "What we do not need is more gridlock and more of the same old hollow rhetoric about assumed dangers of low-level radioactive waste disposal."

University of Texas professor Margaret Maxey wrote in a 1996 column in the Dallas Morning News: "What Texans don't need is more of the same old hollow rhetoric about the dangers of low-level waste disposal."

Frank R. Bruce, retired associate director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in the Chicago Tribune in 1997, added: "What we do not
need is more of the same hollow rhetoric on the assumed dangers of storing nuclear waste in southeastern Nevada."

Not to be outdone, a letter to the editor in the Seattle Times chimed in: "What we do not need is more gridlock, more of the same hollow rhetoric ....," and, well, you know the rest.

Similar phrases from Harman's columns (or slight variations thereof) are comparably popular in columns from coast to coast.

Asked to comment on the ethics of her colleague's pieces, Waryold did not hesitate: If he does not cite a source of thoughts other than his own, it is plagiarism.

When recently contacted about the phrases, Harman said he was merely incorporating "talking points" supplied to him by the nuclear industry. "I happen to agree with their position on things," he said.

And he conceded, "It's quite possible I picked up a sentence or two, particularly on words like you're talking about because we use those words."

So, what if one of his students did the same?

"As a brute matter of fact," he said, "I don't know what I'd do."

Meanwhile, more sad tidings from the academic front last week: Word surfaced that the 2004-05 Lexington Teacher of the Year was fired from a previous job as a lawyer and had his license suspended for three years for lying in court and counseling clients to give false testimony, among other things. He also apparently omitted those small details, and a DWI conviction, on his teaching application.

Somehow, the Titanic as a speech theme seems eerily appropriate these days. Women and children first.