Is Harvard’s Milli Vanilli a plagiarizing ghost writer?
A Harvard student - a sophomore - who was fortunate enough to land a $500,000 book deal has been exposed as a plagiarist. Side by side comparisons* strongly suggests that the young author, or “typist,” as Dan Kennedy, visiting assistant professor at Northeastern University and Boston’s ranking media critic, calls her on his blog, has lifted portions of a book written by another author and peddled it as her own work. The Crimson Copy Copper has apologized for including text that is remarkably similar to her better’s, but defends herself by claiming that she didn’t really plagiarize, she had merely “internalized” the other author’s work.
That defense is seemingly pathetic, but actually brilliant, in a cool, ironic way.
When professors are caught plagiarizing, they don’t hesitate to throw their poor student-assistants under the proverbial bus, blaming them for having taken notes from other authors’ works without sufficiently labeling them as such, thus tricking Professor Brilliance into thinking that he himself had written that kick-ass 46-page chapter on the connection between the demise of eskimo whale hunting in the North Atlantic and the use of slave labor in Virginia.
While our young plagiarist probably can’t reasonably even pretend to blame her professors for the plagiarism, she can use the psycho-fraudical framework of contemporary Academia to try to wash off the mud she rolled in. Hence, no plagiarism, just “internalizing.” To poorly paraphrase an old “Wiseguy” episode: “I can see Harvard was good for you.”
There are additional twists to the story, as reported by the Boston Globe:
Born in Chennai, India, Viswanathan lived in England for about a decade before moving to the United States. Her high school college counselor, also a published author, recognized her budding literary talent and helped her get an agent. The agent steered Viswanathan toward a company that helps young writers package book ideas; editors there helped her conceptualize the novel.
”There was more shaping to this book than we usually do,” Asya Muchnick, Viswanathan’s editor, told the Globe in the February interview.
To put it in vulgar and hyperbolic terms: She plagiarized while ghost writing her own book.
* I internalized that phrase from Kennedy’s blog, but removing the dashes was my own original thinking and creative writing.
