I’m followed very closely by a small but quite dedicated cadre of anonymous critics — some of them people whose malice, impelled by motivations that I honestly don’t understand, apparently never sleeps — who comment constantly on what I do, say, write, think, and don’t think, on where I travel, what I read, what music I like. One or two of them have even gone to the extreme of inventing idiotic or self-incriminating statements that they’ve then attributed to me online, of claiming falsely to have traveled with me to the Middle East and/or knowing me well (thus positioning them to disclose the sordid or ludicrous reality of my life), of creating false facts about my biography, and so forth.
This has continued for years. Day in, day out. Week after week, month after month. To me, it’s bizarre beyond words. Genuinely unfathomable.
Much of what they say about me is mere hostile spin, misguided but antagonistic clairvoyance, and, surprisingly often (especially given the fact that some of them are reasonably intelligent), sheer wild misreading.
I really dislike it, though, when I supply them even an inch of the rope with which they would very much like to hang me.
And, unfortunately, I’ve done that a few times. Including just a short while ago.
I concluded my recent post “Some dispatches from the front lines of my unceasing war against science” with what I describe as “Raw and largely unprocessed notes from a manuscript.”
Those notes are, it turns out, a very close paraphrase of a passage in an article published back in 2005 by Allen Buskirk — then teaching at BYU, now at Johns Hopkins University — in the FARMS Review, which I edited. (I commend the article to your attention.) I was genuinely surprised to see that.
I’ve explained in another post the nature of the manuscript — or, much better, the file — from which I drew those notes. Presumably, I entered the material from Allen Buskirk’s article into that file back around 2005, when (or even before) the article was published.
Why didn’t I enter his name? I have no idea. It’s been nearly thirteen years. Perhaps it was something as simple as being interrupted by a telephone call and forgetting to do so. When I copied and pasted the material into a blog entry, it never entered my mind that it came, substantially unchanged, from somebody else.
I can say this: I have never intentionally plagiarized anybody or anything. I’m more than happy to credit others for thoughts and for references and am, I think, quite generous in that regard. (Even on this blog, I try to remember always to thank the people who have brought interesting items to my notice.) Moreover, given the way in which I write, that passage from Professor Buskirk would almost certainly never have been incorporated intact into the final product. It was there as a reminder to me of an argument or a point that I wished to make, and as direction to a reference that I would have consulted before sending anything off for publication.
Over the years, I’ve seen prominent writers whom I greatly respect (such as Doris Kearns Goodwin, Alex Haley, and Stephen Ambrose) condemned for plagiarism and, candidly, it has worried me. I can easily understand how they might, without intending it, have fallen into that problem. In each case, they are (or were) popular historical writers who cover large topics for a broad general audience, necessarily (because nobody can be an expert in everything) consulting a wide range of sources and taking notes as rapidly as they can (if they’re going to accomplish what they hope to do) from multitudes of articles and books. It’s not difficult at all for me to imagine how even a good, decent, honest person could take notes from a source and then, for whatever specific reason, eventually incorporate those notes into a final text in a form that’s too close to the language of the original source.
This has worried me because I, too, am trying to write on very large topics for a broad audience. (My weekly newspaper columns are just the tip of that iceberg; I have more than a dozen book manuscripts underway, at various stages ranging from near-completion to mere rough notes.) Not being a specialist on all of the subjects that these manuscripts cover or will cover (but being interested and, I hope, an intelligent consumer of specialized expertise), I consult many writers. I jot down lots and lots of notes. And I expose myself, thereby, to exactly the same risk that eventually caused trouble for Stephen Ambrose, Alex Haley, and Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Painstakingly writing a narrowly-focused academic monograph on a subject in which one might well be the world’s reigning expert, or, at least, one of the small handful of those who pay it serious attention — so focused are such scholarly works — poses little danger of unintentional plagiarism. The bigger and broader one’s canvas and the more and the faster one writes, though, the higher the risk.
And yet, while I’m grateful for narrowly-focused academic monographs, I’m also grateful for writers like Stephen Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Alex Haley, and (my absolute favorite) Paul Johnson — for whose sake, in my judgment, the academic monographs really exist in the first place. If it weren’t for the big, daring, risky syntheses, speaking to a larger audience, we would be left only with relatively dull and boring treatises engaging the attention of only a relative handful of academics.
My critics quite definitely don’t intend to do me good. And most of what they have to say about me — daily, weekly, monthly, year after year — is malicious and false, as well as very often absurd. But on this matter, while they hope to embarrass me (and, in this specific instance, have succeeded in doing so), they provide an unintended service and a reminder. They’re armed with online programs that will enable them to detect verbal resemblances and influences of which I, their target, may be quite unaware. I need to be careful. “Here be dragons.”
Of course, if anyone among these critics ever wants to contact me on this or any other issue, she’s entirely free to do so directly. I’m quite open, forthright, and transparent on just about everything, and I would be in this regard, as well. My email address is [email protected].
“Great minds,” Eleanor Roosevelt is reputed to have said, “discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”
I’m attempting to argue for important ideas. It disappoints me that, all too often, those ideas are grossly misunderstood by certain critics and, even more so, that I myself become the topic of conversation instead. I’m just not all that interesting. But the ideas are. And it distresses me most of all when I myself provide any justification for my becoming the focus.
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