Shultz speech sets off plagiarism debate
The former Secretary of State says he had no idea. The man who collaborated on the speech says the passages were lifted from a journal article he had written himself, so what's the problem?
On the Stanford University campus, though, some students and scholars contend that the lecture violated one of the sacred canons of academia: Never use someone else's words without citing the source. Wasn't this plagiarism? And if not, students say, then isn't it a double-standard -- why can senior professors, but not students, use unnamed contributors to write their work?
The case sheds light on the murky gray area between original thought and rhetorical theft.
Several students doing research earlier this year came across the overlap. About 22 sentences of Shultz's 2004 lecture -- including vivid phrases such as ``The war in Iraq has eliminated a rogue state,'' and ``Our enemies will not simply sit back,'' even calling the war in Iraq ``a long and bitter war'' -- duplicate a 2003 article by Yale lecturer Charles Hill, who has collaborated with Shultz for two decades and who contributed to the Kissinger Lecture.
Shultz, 85, called the incident a mistake, saying that the sentences had been inadvertently inserted during revisions of the lecture. In an effort to identify what happened, he has re-read the speech and studied notes given to him by Hill during an exchange of drafts of the lecture.
If he had known the material had been published, he said, he would not have used it. ``I have been trying to figure out what might have happened,'' he said.