[Marxism] Summers exonerates Harvard's Lawrence Tribe on plagiarism charge- Crimson 04-15-05

[Ralph Johansen <michele@xxxxxxxx>]

[Further Note on Ward Churchill]

Originally published on Friday, April 15, 2005 in the News section of 
The Harvard Crimson.

School Won't Punish Tribe
By DANIEL J. HEMEL Crimson Staff Writer

Harvard will not formally discipline constitutional expert Laurence H. 
Tribe ’62 in response to revelations that his 1985 book, “God Save This 
Honorable Court,” contained passages copied word-for-word without 
attribution from another scholar’s work.

University President Lawrence H. Summers and Law School Dean Elena 
Kagan, in a joint statement issued early yesterday afternoon, 
acknowledged that Tribe committed “a significant lapse in proper 
academic practice” in the composition of the 1985 book. But Summers and 
Kagan said they are “firmly convinced that the error was the product of 
inadvertence rather than intentionality.”

The statement from Summers and Kagan comes more than six months after 
the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, reported that Tribe’s book 
included several sentences that closely mirrored sections of University 
of Virginia political scientist Henry J. Abraham’s 1974 “Justices and 
Presidents,” which is widely recognized to be the authoritative work on 
Supreme Court appointments.

The Weekly Standard exposé came just weeks after Climenko Professor of 
Law Charles J. Ogletree Jr. admitted that his book on racial 
segregation, “All Deliberate Speed,” released last April, had copied six 
paragraphs almost verbatim from another scholar’s essays. Ogletree told 
The Crimson at the time that he would be disciplined by the 
University—an assertion that Harvard officials would neither confirm or 
deny. Ogletree declined to elaborate further.

The Standard’s Oct. 4 story prompted Summers and Kagan to convene a 
three-member task force to investigate the plagiarism allegations 
against Tribe. One member, former University President Derek C. Bok, 
said yesterday that the task force met approximately a half dozen times 
last fall and issued a report to Summers and Kagan in December.

“Our role was simply as factfinder,” Bok said yesterday. He declined to 
comment further on the task force’s proceedings.

The other two members of the task force, former Dean of the Faculty 
Jeremy R. Knowles and Pforzheimer University Professor Sidney Verba ’53, 
could not be reached for comment yesterday.

After reviewing the task force report, Summers and Kagan concluded that 
Tribe’s book “contained various brief passages and phrases that echo or 
overlap with material in the Abraham book.”

At one point, Tribe’s book lifted a 19-word passage verbatim from 
Abraham’s text.

According to Summers and Kagan, “the unattributed material related more 
to matters of phrasing than to fundamental ideas.”

But they added that “the failure of an author to attribute sources 
properly, however inadvertent the error, is a matter of serious concern 
in an academic community.”

Tribe’s book, geared toward non-academic readers, contains no footnotes, 
although it does mention Abraham’s work in a single sentence in an 
appendix on background literature.

Tribe apologized—both publicly and in a letter to Abraham—after the 
Weekly Standard first published its findings in September.

“No statement can erase the fact of my having been less careful than I 
should have been in my 1985 book, and today I want to reiterate my 
apology for that error and my assumption of responsibility for it,” 
Tribe wrote in a letter e-mailed to reporters yesterday.

Tribe added that he was “gratified that the University’s inquiry found 
no basis for accusations of dishonesty or of intellectual theft.”

The statement from Summers and Kagan yesterday did not divulge whether 
Tribe would face any disciplinary action in connection with the 
incident. “In line with usual University practice, we intend no further 
comment on the matter,” Summers and Kagan said. But Tribe’s assistant 
said yesterday that “there was no sanction or reprimand beyond the 
[University] statement.”

Tribe, who traveled to New York Wednesday night to provide legal counsel 
to the owners of the Plaza Hotel, could not be reached for comment 
yesterday, according to his assistant.

Tribe, who holds the title of University professor—a prestigious honor 
bestowed on just 17 Harvard faculty members—is one of the nation’s most 
respected appellate attorneys and served as a legal adviser to Al Gore 
’69 during the 2000 post-presidential election battle.

Hobbes Professor of Cognition and Education Howard Gardner yesterday 
called for greater transparency from top Harvard officials, writing in 
an e-mail that the University statement on Tribe “leaves observers as 
well as those within the institution confused about what is and is not 
proper behavior, and what consequences follow from behavior deemed 
inappropriate.” In a brief phone conversation yesterday, Gardner 
declined to comment further.

The controversy over “God Save This Honorable Court” emerged from a 
Sept. 14 message that Tribe posted on the weblog of Massachusetts Law 
School Dean Lawrence R. Velvel, in which Tribe said the misattribution 
of sources by “writers, political office-seekers [and] judges” 
constituted “a phenomenon of some significance.”

That blog post prompted one reader to send an anonymous tip to the 
Standard drawing attention to the similarities between Tribe’s book and 
Abraham’s.

Velvel yesterday blasted Harvard’s response to the allegations against 
Tribe.

“I have enormous respect for [Tribe],” Velvel said in an interview 
yesterday. “I think he has done fine work for American society and I 
think he acted with great propriety in immediately fessing up to what 
happened instead of trying to dodge it.”

“Nonetheless, based on what I can gather from just hearing [the 
University’s statement] quickly once, I think Harvard’s action is 
shameful,” Velvel said.

“I think that both [Summers] and Kagan should be fired. To think that 
there is no punishment for an obvious serious admitted intellectual 
transgression is just terrible.”

He predicted that right-wing pundits “will have an absolute field day 
with this one.”

“The right wing’s attitude is not a reason to punish Tribe, however. The 
reason to punish Tribe is that what he did is horribly wrong,” Velvel said.

The number listed for Abraham in the University of Virginia Faculty 
Directory was not in service yesterday.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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