It’s not easy being a Republican at Brown these days. Dessert-tossing anarchists and child pornographers abound. Brigades of Speedo-clad men roam the campus with impunity. Residence hall kitchens, once reserved for late-night snacking and polite conversation about Reagan’s legacy, are pioneered for unspeakable X-rated acts. Surely, then, it was only a matter of time before the small but now very angry cabal that is the Brown conservative movement took to the Internets with something like this.

Proudly awarding “demerits” to their liberal enemies for their recent debauchery (and, of course, “merits” to themselves), a spunky group of traditionalists calling themselves the Nathanael Greene Society make it clear that they have had enough. On the Web site, the mysterious group writes (in verse!) about the campus’ loss of “Faith” and “Reason” (capitalizing plenty of nouns along the way) and goes batshit over opinion columns in the Brown Daily Herald and other outrages no one else quite, um, noticed.

Taking few hints from political correctness, the society (named for the dashing Revolutionary War general pictured above) even bestows the “Order of Robert Mugabe” (this already can’t be good, right?) on a black columnist for the BDH. Clever, indeed.

The secret e-society does have some sense of humor (those seeking pecuniary grants form NGS must compose rhymed couplets), but whoever is behind the site apparently wants to remain anonymous, going so far as to register the domain name through a special “private registration” company — whose existence indicates that, apparently, that’s something you can do.

Click through the site, and find out why a pro-choice activist gets a demerit named for Adolf Eichmann, and serial plagiarist and hero Zachary Townsend is likened to Rasputin.

The BDH’s modus operandi is sort of up in the air these days: what’s a newspaper to do when it discovers that three plagiarists in the last three months have infested its pages? On Friday a veritable scandal erupted, as two “student journalists” stand accused of stealing sources and ideas from the Yale Daily News and the Harvard Crimson. And for what? The glory?

From Friday’s BDH:

Last week, as part of its usual fact-checking process, The Herald discovered that two news articles scheduled for publication contained material taken from other sources’ reporting without quotation or attribution. The articles were never printed. The Herald began a thorough review of the writers’ published work, as it does whenever inauthentic content is found.

During that review, two published articles were found that contained passages similar or identical to those in other publications. “Common App now has rival in Universal App,” (Sept. 26, 2007) contains text similar or identical to writing in an article in the Yale Daily News (“Common App faces new online rival,” Sept. 7, 2007). The article also contains information from an interview not attributed to the News’ reporting.

“James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA structure, resigns after racist remarks,” (Oct. 31, 2007) contained quotations not attributed to reporting for an article in the Harvard Crimson (“Watson Apologizes Amid Uproar Over His Comments on Race,” Oct. 19, 2007).”

This follows up on Zac Townsend’s winning BDH plagiarist-of-the-year award in November. And this scandal from 2006. Which leads us to the million dollar question: what exactly is the BDH’s “usual fact-checking process”? And why don’t these students-plagiarists take the truly easy way out: never volunteering to write for their college dailies to begin with?

After the jump: the not-so-startling similarities between the articles. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine our surprise to open the Brown Daily Herald this morning to find a nice feature on Prof. Felicia Nimue Ackerman, the prolific New York Times letter-writer, and not even a courtesy nod to the item we ran two weeks ago. This email from a BDH staffer made us feel better:

From: [redacted]@gmail.com
Date: Dec 6, 2006
Subject: Ackerman in BDH

“To the editor: Ackerman shows knack for being published.” Hmmm, haven’t I seen this article before…say on IvyGate? Well, I’m sure the reporter credited the idea to IvyGate….really, no? Huh. Well at least it’s newsworthy and timely…wait, it’s not? Well at least it avoids a snide comment in the lede about sports….well fuck. I give up.

Sorry about this one. We’ll try to not be such huge tools in the future.

We don’t blame the freshman reporter so much as the editors, seeing as they’re the ones who assign stories and then rewrite them in the office. Not cool, guys. Not cool. We’re like a family, you and us, and family doesn’t not give credit when writing about Felicia Nimue Ack–

God damn it.

Here’s an amusing lede from Wednesday’s Brown Daily Herald piece on roller derbies:

“It’s a Friday night in Providence, and techno music plays in the background as scantily clad girls are getting smashed. Nearby …”

Get it? Smashed? ‘Cause it’s a roller derby? Well, somewhere at the Herald is a way-too-literal copy editor who didn’t get the joke.

“Due to an editing error, an article in yesterday’s Herald (’Providence Roller Derby part of sport’s national revival,’ Sept. 27) incorrectly stated that a Herald reporter witnessed attendees at a recent Providence Roller Derby event ‘consume copious amounts of alcohol.’ The Herald reporter did not witness such activity.”

Join us next time, when the copy desk informs us there were no actual bears on the football field this weekend.

Robbie Corey-Boulet
Editor-in-Chief
The Brown Daily Herald, Inc.
P.O. Box 2538
Providence, RI 02906 

Dear Mr. Corey-Boulet:

Please. We’re begging you. Update browndailyherald.com. We don’t live in Providence. Brown Orientation starts today, and we don’t have a stoner’s clue what’s happening up there. This, while funny and admirably ahead of schedule, was not enough. Brown’s new web site scares us. All we have to go on is these deans’ boring letter to new students, and while we haven’t actually read the whole thing (something about “developing Advising Partnerships” and “how to live and learn as individuals while respecting others”) we’re pretty sure it doesn’t include the word “shitfaced” at any point, so it can’t be too relevant.

All those thousands of Brown-nosers pouring into Providence … us, sitting here in the dark … Have a heart, Mr. Corey-Boulet. Update your goddamn newspaper from July 17th.

Beseechingly,
IvyGate