How many more Ivy League columnists will plagiarize from other writers before they realize that maybe it’s better to miss a deadline for your crappy-ass daily rather than destroy your reputation and good name for the rest of your life?

I’d say at least a couple of dozen.

The Brown Daily Herald is the latest newspaper to be hit by the plagiarism epidemic (at least it’s not institutional, like at my favorite paper, the Cornell Sun). In the terse, tense, professional prose of major newspapers’ correction pages, today’s Herald repents for the crimes of columnist Zachary Townsend ‘09:

The Herald has discovered that six opinions columns by Zachary Townsend ‘09 published between 2005 and 2007 contained passages that are similar or identical to text that previously appeared in other published work. Such misrepresentation is a fundamental violation of Herald policy, and Townsend has consequently been dismissed as a Herald columnist.”

The columns really are ripped off; in the only Townsend/other people’s work match I bothered to google  (the process is both boring and exhausting), Townsend more or less repeated verbatim a political anecdote that appeared in an article from 2000 in the YDN.  He even cited the same Socrates quote, proving yet again the axiom that plagiarized articles are inevitably as boring as their original sources!

To their credit, the fine folks at the Herald handled this as well as they possibly could have. What I’m still puzzling over is why you’d bother going to these lengths for a campus newspaper.

Writing something on your own would be be far easier than googling old Crimson and YDN articles and changing a few words here and there. I mean, I’d rather watch Titanic on loop than pore through old columns from Ivy League dailies. Why, Zach? What made you do it?

After the jump: the Herald’s apology note in full.

The Herald has discovered that six opinions columns by Zachary Townsend ‘09 published between 2005 and 2007 contained passages that are similar or identical to text that previously appeared in other published work. Such misrepresentation is a fundamental violation of Herald policy, and Townsend has consequently been dismissed as a Herald columnist.

On Oct. 24, in the routine fact-checking process used for all Herald news and opinions content, a Herald copy editor discovered that a portion of a column by Townsend that was slated for publication was nearly identical to a passage in “The Curricular Revolution,” an academic paper written by Katie Kinsey ‘09 and posted on the University Library Web site.

The column was not published. The Herald then began a thorough review of Townsend’s 15 past columns, which revealed that six of his published columns contained material similar or identical to material in previously published works. When questioned about this discovery, Townsend admitted that several columns contained unoriginal work.

“Divestment campaign offers the community nothing” (March 16, 2005) contained material similar to text in a speech by then-Harvard President Lawrence Summers that was posted on the Hillel Web site (”Anti-Semitism on Campus,” Sept. 24, 2002). That column also contained material similar to text that appeared in a Yale Daily News opinions column (”Divestment backers must be fully rejected,” Dec. 2, 2002).

“The disaster and the damage done” (Sept. 7, 2005) contained material similar to text in an article by Matthew Yglesias on TPM Cafe (”Predicted and Predictable,” Sept. 3, 2005). That column also contained material similar to text in a letter to the editor of the New York Times (”In the Wake of Hurricane Katrina,” Aug. 31, 2005).

“No more SAT requirement” (Oct. 5, 2005) contained material similar to text in an article by William Hiss, vice president for external and alumni affairs at Bates College, published in the Chronicle Review (”Optional SAT’s at Bates: 17 Years and Not Counting,” Oct. 26, 2001).

“Time to rethink Brown’s legacy admission policy” (Dec. 1, 2005) contained material similar to text in an editorial in the Harvard Crimson (”Is Harvard Really Innocent?” Oct. 10, 1990). That column also contained material similar to text in a question-and-answer piece with Yale President Richard Levin published in the Yale Alumni Magazine (”Why Yale Favors Its Own,” November/December 2004), as well as to text in a Daily Princetonian opinions column (”Admissions should be blind to legacy status,” March 4, 2005).

“Our politicians stress arrogance over substance” (Sept. 13, 2006) contained material similar to text that appeared in a Harvard Crimson opinions column (”Groaning Our Way to the Polls,” Oct. 11, 2000).

“In support of Simmons and academic freedom” (Sept. 27, 2007) contained phrases identical to text that appeared in a 1994 article by Richard Rorty entitled “John Searle on realism and relativism.” That column also contained material similar to text in a 2006 Stanford University commencement address by former Brown President Vartan Gregorian.

The Herald expects columnists and other contributors to represent the authorship of their work honestly and to cite all sources accurately. As part of The Herald’s commitment to journalistic integrity, editors on staff maintain a rigorous fact-checking process to verify as much content as possible under daily deadlines. We apologize to our readers for publishing these columns and to the authors whose work was copied.