In all seriousness, what’s USC gonna do about its plagiarizing professor? – Beragampengetahuan

His plagiarism unambiguously violates the USC Integrity and Accountability Code:

Our Integrity and Accountability Code is anchored to USC’s Unifying Values and aligns our everyday decisions with the institution’s mission and compliance obligations. The Code is a vital resource for all faculty and staff throughout USC, including those at Keck Medicine at USC and the Keck School of Medicine.

The university policy continues:

To protect our reputation and promote our mission, every Trojan must do their part and act with integrity in our learning, teaching and research activities. This includes . . .

Never tolerating acts of plagiarism, falsification or fabrication of data, or other forms of academic and research misconduct.

I guess his defense would be that he didn’t “tolerate” these acts of plagiarism, because he didn’t know that they happened. But that would imply that he did not read his own book, which violates another part of that policy:

Making sure that all documentation and published findings are accurate, complete and unbiased.

Also it implies he was not telling the truth when he said the following in his book: “I went out and spoke to the amazing scientists around the world who do these kinds of experiments, and what I uncovered was astonishing.” Unless of course he never said this and his ghostwriter made it up, in which case he didn’t read that part either.

At some point you have to take responsibility for what is written under your name, right? I understand that in collaborative work it’s possible for coauthors to include errors or even fabrications without the other authors knowing, but he was the sole author of this book.

As the official USC document says:

Plagiarism is the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit.

Here’s what the USC medical school professor said:

I am grateful that my collaborator has confirmed that I did not contribute to, nor was I aware of, any of the plagiarized or non-attributed passages in my books . . . I followed standard protocols and my attorney and I received several verbal [sic] and written assurances from this highly respected individual that she had run the book through multiple software checks to ensure proper attributions.

Ummmm . . . what about the “long sections of a chapter on the cardiac health of giraffes [that] appear to have been lifted from a 2016 blog post on the website of a South African safari company titled, ‘The Ten Craziest Facts You Should Know About A Giraffe’”? That didn’t look odd at all??

My “I have run the book through multiple software checks” T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.

Also weird that the ghostwriter gave an assurance that she had run “multiple software checks.” This sounds like the author of record and his attorney (!) already had their suspicions. Who goes around asking for “several verbal and written assurances”? I get it: the author of record didn’t just pay for the words in the book; he also paid for an assurance that any plagiarism wouldn’t get caught.

I’m completely serious about this question:

What if a student at the USC medical school (oh, sorry, the “Keck School of Medicine”) were to hand in a plagiarized final paper? Would that student be kicked out of the program? What if the student said that he didn’t know about the plagiarism because he’d hired a ghostwriter to write the paper? And the ghostwriter supplied several verbal and written assurances that she had run the book through multiple software checks. Then would it be ok?

I have no personal interest in this one; I’m not going to file a formal complaint with USC or whatever. I just think it’s funny that USC doesn’t seem to care. What ever happened to “To protect our reputation and promote our mission . . .”? “Every Trojan,” indeed. To paraphrase Leona Helmsley, only the little people have to follow the rules, huh?

Why this matters

Junk science pollutes our discourse, Greshamly overwhelming the real stuff out there. Confident bullshitters suck up attention, along with TV, radio (NPR, of course), and space on airport bookshelves across the nation. When this regurgitated crap gets endorsements by Jane Goodall, Al Gore, Murray Gell-Mann, and other celebrities, it crowds out whatever is really being learned about the world.

There’s room for pop science writing and general health advice, for sure. This giraffe crap ain’t it.

On the other hand

Let’s get real. All this is much better than professors who engage in actual dangerous behavior such as conspiracy theorizing, election denial, medical hype, etc. I guess what bothers me about this USC case is the smugness of it all. The professors who push baseless conspiracy theories or dubious cures typically have an air of desperation to them. OK, not all of them. But often. Even Wansink at the height of his fame had a sort of overkinetic nervous aspect. And presumably they believe their own hype. Even those business school professors who made up data think they’re doing it in support of some true theory, right? But USC dude had to have known he was contracting out his reputation, just so he could get one more burst of fame with “The Ten Craziest Facts You Should Know About A Giraffe” or whatever. In any case, yeah, Alex Jones is a zillion times worse so let’s keep our perspective here.

Also, the USC doc is a strong supporter of vaccines, so he’s using his reputation for good rather than trying to use political polarization to score political points. I guess he can forget about moving to Stanford.