Eugen(e) brings him down

My son Woelke pointed me to a piece in Slate on the resignation of Tim Goeglein, who resigned recently as the White House liaison to religious groups, after it was revealed that he had stolen material for published columns over the past several years. What tipped off Nancy Nall Derringer, the reporter to broke the story, was an allusion to Rosenstock-Huessy, which Goeglein took, complete with a misspelled first name, from an essay by Jeffrey Hart.

Derringer writes:

” I spent much of last Friday being congratulated for ‘brilliant reporting’ that consisted of a minute’s worth of typing on my laptop. That’s how long it took for me to notice what seemed to be merely a case of egregiously obscure name-dropping (’ A notable professor of philosophy at Dartmouth College in the last century, Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey, expressed the matter succinctly. . . . ‘), paste the name into Google, and discover the entire sentence, Rosenstock-Hussey and all, had been lifted from a previously published essay by Jeffrey Hart in the Dartmouth Review .”

And concludes: “The story was new media, but, ironically, at its core was a very old-media concern—getting the little things right. Friday night, I got an e-mail from a fan of that notable Dartmouth professor of philosophy whose name started this whole thing. And guess what? Jeffrey Hart misspelled his name. It’s Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, not Eugene , not Hussey . When I entered the misspelled name into Google, it only turned up a couple pages of hits, and Hart’s essay was on the first page, so I spotted it right away. But if Hart had spelled the name correctly and Goeglein had pasted it as such in his own column, Hart’s decade-old Dartmouth Review essay, which mentioned the professor only in passing, would probably have been far back in the queue in the 20,000 Google hits his real name gets. And I probably would not have seen it—after all, I was just trying to find out how ‘notable’ he was.”

The whole story at http://www.slate.com/id/2185657/nav/tap3.