Beyond plagiarism: “Class warfare” and warped college admissions
***May 3, 2006, update***
Opal Mehta is history, and and Kaavya Viswanathan’s contract with Little, Brown & Co. has been cancelled according to the Harvard Crimson.
***end update***
In today’s installment on things that may have something to do with the scandal surrounding Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan’s debut book How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got A Life, we start off in the gutter, with a wild assertion by Malcolm Gladwell (who presumably didn’t even give himself time to blink before he tossed it out):
“This is teen-literature. It’s genre fiction…
My question is whether it is possible to write a teen-lit novel without these sentences:
From page 7 of McCafferty’s first novel: “Bridget is my age and lives across the street. For the first twelve years of my life, these qualifications were all I needed in a best friend. But that was before Bridget’s braces came off and her boyfriend Burke got on, before Hope and I met in our seventh-grade honors classes.
From page 14 of Viswanathan’s novel: “Priscilla was my age and lived two blocks away. For the first fifteen years of my life, those were the only qualifications I needed in a best friend. We had first bonded over our mutual fascination with the abacus in a playgroup for gifted kids. But that was before freshman year, when Priscilla’s glasses came off, and the first in a long string of boyfriends got on.”
I’m not a reader of chick-lit but that seems like a grossly unfair attack.
Mark Liberman at Language Log shows Gladwell that it’s not only easy to write chick-lit without those sentences, but, in all likelihood, check-lit has never before contained those sentences. Liberman continues:
In fairness to Mr. Gladwell, he doesn’t actually assert that all teen-lit novels necessarily contain the sentences copied by Ms. Viswanathan, he merely uses a rhetorical question to imply it. However, the implication is essential to his overall argument, and it’s spectacularly and obviously false. I’m sure that he’s not as dense as this argument makes him seem, so the real puzzle is why he went down this rhetorical road.
Yes, I am asking you to read the whole thing.
I suppose one could argue that all fiction literature is just an endless recycling of the tired, old “time passes as things happen” genre, the creative possibilities of which were exhausted some time prior to Homer’s pathetic rip-off hack work.
Liberman’s colleague Bill Poser continues his bizarre defense of Ms. Viswanathan’s plagiarism, if only by asserting that nobody has “taken up [Poser's] challenge of providing a plausible scenario for the alleged plagiarism.”
That line of arguing reminds me of when I officiated a football game many years ago. I had flagged one of the teams for a block below the waist during a kick-off return. It was a flagrant violation and an easy call, yet one of the captains on the penalized team came up to me and asked what his teammate could possibly have gained from making an illegal block. The implication was that there was no such potential gain, hence the player could not have made such a block, and hence my flag had been thrown in error. It mattered not to me why the player would have done it, only that he, in fact, had done it. If I were to speculate on his motives my list would have been something like this: 1) The player was tired and simply executed his block poorly. 2) The player was poorly trained and simply executed his block poorly (not an implausible scenario when you’re talking football in Sweden). 3) The player simply hoped he’d get away with it (you’ll see a few of those every game - heck, I pulled a few of those in my playing days, like the old tackle-the-pass-rusher-by-his-feet-while-making-it-look-like-he-pancaked-you (I successfully pulled that one off on back-to-back plays in one game)). 4) At that point in the game, late in the fourth quarter with a lop-sided score, the player just half-assed it.
But, like I said, what difference did motive make? It was an illegal block below the waist just, just like Ms. Viswanathan’s plagiarism was plagiarism, regardless of whether she did it because of ambition gone mad, unrealistic time pressures, a feeling of literary inadequacy or what not.
I don’t know why Poser insists on defending Ms. Viswanathan by putting up an abstract theory about how she snuck in several plagiarized passages in her book without realizing it, when the far more straight-forward explanation is that she, to put it bluntly, cheated. Especially since there is no actual evidence that supports Poser’s claim.
The movie based on Opal Mehta has reportedly been grounded:
A source close to DreamWorks, which had optioned Opal Mehta, said Friday that work on the movie, which was in the early stages of development, has been halted.
Additional plagiarism? The Harvard Crimson reports:
A recently-released novel by Kaavya Viswanathan ’08, which has come under scrutiny for containing passages lifted from two books by Megan F. McCafferty, also includes three passages strikingly similar to those found in two other books.
..
[S]he appears to have borrowed passages from Salman Rushdie’s “Haroun and the Sea of Stories,” and Meg Cabot’s “The Princess Diaries.” In each of the cases, the passages in question contain similar rhymes and descriptions.
Kaavya, Kaavya, Kaavya. The solution to this problem is not to plagiarize some more. It is to write your own book. And if your own book is not good enough, if your parents cannot buy you another college consultant, if your college consultant cannot buy you another agent, then you do what the rest of us do. You deal with it, and you move on. Perhaps, like me, you will start a blog and hope to get discovered. Perhaps, like several of my friends, you will get an MFA and admit that your natural talent could actually be improved. Perhaps, like all good Indian girls, you will realize that you should have majored in medicine or economics.
I’ve seen that “focus on Indian/Indian-American core competencies” sentiment expressed quite a bit by bloggers of subcontinental origin, presumably in some measure of jest.
The Harvard Independent takes a look at the role IvyWise played in getting Ms. Viswanathan accepted to Harvard University and published by Little, Brown & Co in what it calls the “class warfare” angle of the story:
While journalists and publishing executives struggle to discover which parts of Opal Mehta belong to the “true self” of Kaavya Viswanathan, the spotlight placed on her former college counselor reveal an anxious upper- and upper-middle-class seemingly employing new tactics against the egalitarian principles behind such measures as Harvard’s recent financial aid initiatives. Indeed, whatever IvyWise calls them, services such as internship referrals — which rely on the same networking prowess that first brought Viswanathan to the attention of the William Morris Agency — appear in hot demand among certain parents, and for understandable reasons.
As the aptly named Luxury magazine noted in a 2003 article: “Children of wealthy and well-connected parents might have once enjoyed an advantage in gaining admission to America’s elite universities, but much has changed…. Tutors such as Cohen capitalize on their ability to tip the balance back in their clients’ favor - once their hefty fees have been settled. In Cohen’s case that might mean calling admissions offices to pitch for individual students, or boosting a student’s CV by fixing up internships through Cohen’s network of well-connected friends.”
If IvyWise felt that such characterizations were unflattering or misrepresentative, it made no effort to correct the record on its website. In fact, appealing color photos of magazine covers accompany links to their respective articles. But perhaps the company’s founder feels a special affinity to today’s upper-crust youth: “Katherine Cohen, like most of her clients,” wrote Ralph Gardner Jr. in the April 16, 2001, issue of New York, “appears to have enjoyed the benefits of a playing field tilted in her favor. She grew up in Brentwood; her father, an investment banker, started Bear Stearns’s L.A. office, she says, and she attended the prestigious Harvard-Westlake School. Nonetheless, her college-guidance counselor tried to dissuade her from applying to Brown, her first choice. ‘I was not the No. 1 student in my class,’ she remembers. ‘I had a 4.0, but other kids had higher GPAs than I did. She was really discouraging, and I said, ‘Screw it. I’m going to do it on my own.’”
As I suggested last week, this is where I think part of the real story is, but it’s not limited to high-income parents trying to re-tip the scale in favor of their off-spring, it’s also about what Harvard and other elite colleges look for in the students they accept.
The Wall Street Journal has a spot-on report on the book, written by Naomi Schaefer Riley (Bookmarks, April 28, 2006):
[T]he novel should not be entirely dismissed…
[T]here is one original conceit in this novel — original as far as we know. Opal takes the hardest high-school classes, earns the highest marks, participates in student government, volunteers for community service, plays the cello and aces her SATs, but when she goes for her early-decision interview at Harvard, she is asked by the admissions officer: “What do you like to do for fun?”
…
That elite colleges want brain power in their student body is all too well known. But they want much else besides: racial diversity, athleticism, economic hardship, alumni genes. And now, apparently, they’ve added a kind of “leisure” credential (fun, parties) that is supposed to show that your life isn’t merely about toting up Harvard credentials. But of course it still is. Everything is part of the résumé.
Thus students must master ever more carefully the subtle art of self-presentation, conveying rare gifts and also a studied, “normal” well-roundedness. Is this what college admissions have come to? Increasingly so. But by demanding that admissions candidates know how to “experience life,” universities just move further away from the meritocracies they should try to be. This move is particularly unfortunate for immigrants who see higher education as their ticket to the American dream. Objective academic standards help them to leapfrog over established groups that might otherwise enjoy settled privileges.
As the Harvard Independent notes, the search for students who bring more than just top-notch academic bility has created an opportunity for the wealthy to out-angle the less resourceful but equally brainy.
