Penn can't seem to extricate itself from the center of recent controversies over plagiarism.
Last month, of course, it was revealed that popular historian Stephen Ambrose, in his latest work, The Wild Blue, used language strikingly similar to that in Penn History Professor Thomas Childers' The Wings of Morning.
A disappointed Childers -- who was aware of the textual similarities since the end of last summer -- decided to keep Band of Brothers on the reading list for his "World at War" class this semester. But after learning of more cases of phrase-lifting in Ambrose's works, and of the author's disturbing explanation for the practice, Childers finally chose to remove the book from future classes.
The professor should have left Band of Brothers off the list from the start. Ambrose, after all, is no longer a credible historian.
And now, the University itself has the chance to close its doors on another writer -- this time a potential speaker -- who lacks credibility.
As The Weekly Standard continues to fulfill its new mission of uncovering instances of plagiarism, the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who is scheduled to speak on Feb. 20 as part of Penn's Fox Leadership Series, has come into question.
Among the books she's been accused of stealing from for her 1987 effort The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys is Lynne McTaggart's Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times.
Although Goodwin in Time magazine last week acknowledged the similarities, she denied in an Associated Press article that they constituted plagiarism. Instead, she cited carelessness in managing the longhand notes she took from McTaggart's book -- notes she then mistook as her own writing.
The message that neglect should shield Goodwin's actions from the label of "plagiarism" is disturbing enough. For no student or scholar is it acceptable to forget to put quotation marks around direct quotations -- no matter how time-consuming the operation.
And it only gets worse. Since the original revelations, news outlets have reported on a private deal between McTaggart and Goodwin shortly after Goodwin's book first appeared, in which McTaggart received a cash settlement. Also, reported the AP, Goodwin "added footnotes to her book and expanded the preface in a later edition" to acknowledge the influence of McTaggart's earlier book.
Until recently, all this escaped the public eye.
And it's not hard to see why.
Readers should be able to expect that authors are both careful in claiming that what they write is their own and honest about how they credit their sources.
As a comparison of the 1987 version of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys and the 2001 edition reveals, Goodwin was neither.
The 2001 edition's preface is still dated 1986, but the added paragraph amounts to an admission of plagiarism.
Goodwin writes that she was "grateful" for McTaggart's book, calls it "the definitive biography of Kathleen Kennedy" and shamelessly notes that she "used [it] as a primary source for information on Kathleen Kennedy, both in my research and in my writing."
Unfortunately, it's only now clear to the casual reader what Goodwin meant by calling another book a "primary source... in my writing."
Moreover, the supposed footnotes are actually only well-hidden endnotes -- the body of the 2001 text itself lacks direct references to McTaggart's Kathleen Kennedy biography. To find the stolen passages, one would have to actually be familiar with the McTaggart work or read, say, a Weekly Standard article on the questionable sections, and then go to the Goodwin index to search for additions.
To make matters difficult, however, there are no quotation marks in the questionable parts of the updated text or the index.
That way, no one but Goodwin and those immediately involved in the situation -- and certainly not her readers -- would know that some passages are not her own.
Hardly true, then, is Goodwin's claim in her Time piece that in the case of a mistake, "all I can do, as I did 14 years ago, is to correct it as soon as I possibly can, for my own sake and the sake of history."
McTaggart, unfortunately, didn't mind the resolution too much, telling The Weekly Standard that citing everything thoroughly and properly "would have taken hours and hours...."
Hours -- along with an admission of plagiarism -- that would have been worth it.
The cost now, after all, is Goodwin's integrity.
By keeping Goodwin on the slate for a talk on the "essence of leadership" this month, the University would be sanctioning dishonesty.
And if it allows Goodwin to speak at all, it will be as guilty as the author herself.
Matthew Mugmon is a junior Classical Studies major from Columbia, Md., and executive editor of The Daily Pennnsylvanian .
