IS JOHN WALSH A NAUGHTY BOY?

General John Walsh

Every now and then, in the chaos of our shifting and inventing world, some issue comes to the top and bites dignified people in the ass.  Most recently it was plagiarizing and the victim was Senator Walsh of Montana who had done military service (in the National Guard but including “combat” in Iraq).  With a brush cut and good posture, he looks military in uniform.  Two cultural norms are in collision.  Maybe three.  Or four.

One is that a person ought to “own” their own creativity: whatever writing, inventions, art, and so on they have originated.  Copyright, trademark, patent are three legal theories for ownership of valuable stuff from best-selling books to the image of Ronald MacDonald.

Medieval cult of the book

Another is the product of academic practices that go back to medieval times.  A student works with a professor and with respected written materials (that book worship thing) until they feel they have mastery of the material.  Then the student writes a massive thesis demonstrating their learning and goes before a panel who questions them closely while they “defend” their thesis.  When this thesis is accepted, the result is the awarding of a degree.  This is described in monetary terms: one “earns” the credential (BS, BA, MS, MA, Ph.D.) and it is worth money in terms of hiring.  The predominant goal is the continuation of the body of knowledge, which is assumed to be definitive and unchanging.

A third is very modern and partly the result of the internet.  Knowledge is seen as a shared “cloud”, as a body of material held in common.  This also applies to something like the cultural heritage of a tribe.  Then the highest virtue is not knowing more than anyone else -- competing -- but rather sharing for the greater good.  Entitlement may go to the group, not individuals, even to all of human beings.  In the highly respected “Euro”-style Encyclopedia Britannica, each essay included is signed and justified by the prestige of the writer.  But the global "folk" Wikipedia is written by whoever gets interested in the project, unedited and unsupervised but possibly with references, unfortunately often citations of sources just as vague.

People who know degrees are not impressed by initials: they want to know specifics.  The MA in Religious Studies at the U of C is a filter for the Ph.D. level work, but was included as part of the Meadville/Lombard D.Min. as a marker for "learned" ministry.  The Ph.D. thesis in any part of the U of C is notoriously difficult and takes years.  Many people never complete it; those who do often see it published as a major contribution to the field.  Such rarified intellectual work is not relevant for congregational ministry.

Meadville/Lombard (now moved downtown)

U of Chicago Divinity School

At that point in the history of M/L (’78-’82) the school was moving from the BD (Bachelor of Divinity), which had been the standard degree for ministers, to an MA and a D. Min. which would require a thesis.  My MA in Religious Studies is from the U of Chicago Div School but my doctoral thesis could not pass at M/L. On this blog now you are seeing the result of my work on my thesis, at least where I began.  I could not get my thesis past my committee of three, each of the three demanding that I conform to their conflicting ideas.  

Others had similar dilemmas.  The school was barraged with objections to the MA foreign language requirement (I passed a French exam and am glad I did) and ML students were piling up like cattle at a fence in a blizzard.  Potential new students went elsewhere.  Finally, M/L just gave everyone in the pile-up an M.Div. -- no thesis needed.  By now their D.Min has disappeared.  At one point before I left Chicago, I went into the stacks and read a dozen theses.  IMHO they were not useful or even interesting.  Just recapitulations.    

What I’m saying is that degrees are negotiable, variable, and political.

Walsh’s 33-year career in service was being burnished with a Master’s degree.  In an unnamed class he submitted a paper on American Middle East policy.  The class was a part of the work for the school’s master’s degree.  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/us/politics/montana-ex-guardsman-now-must-fight-to-keep-senate-seat-given-to-him.html action=click&contentCollection=Politics&module=RelatedCoverage&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article  This issue has brought up other issues as described in the above article.  That may have been the goal.

To really judge Senator Walsh’s behavior in this instance means judging the War College.  How do their shining and glorious goals play out in the actual courses, the requirements of each course, the KINDS of qualification for the professors (war experience?), the care for those students suffering from PTSD or any other compromising state?  REALLY judging Walsh means judging the War College.  Closely following the missile silo exam scandal and the veteran’s administration hospital scandal, taking the lid off the War College is probably pretty dangerous.

As for the actual plagiarism, there’s a huge difference between a failure of editing that missed quotation marks and citations and what is described as “up to forty per cent” (2%?  20%?) of a fifteen page paper for a specific class (how much of the grade did it count for -- were there other papers and perhaps tests?) to outright cheating like a covertly downloaded paper from a website provider, deliberate deception.

“Mr. Walsh completed the paper, what the War College calls a “strategy research project,” to earn his degree in 2007, when he was 46. The sources of the material he presents as his own include academic papers, policy journal essays and books that are almost all available online.”  This is from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/us/politics/montana-senator-john-walsh-plagiarized-thesis.html?_r=0  I don’t know what the Times reporter was using for sources.  Times reporters in the past have flunked the truth test.  Of course, some informants to journalists are protected by anonymity.  I’d like to see the bibliography of that paper, particularly since I could read them online.

We are drowning in information, much of it controversial and contradictory, hard for a nonspecialist to interpret.  I’m very bad about “sourcing” (always echoes sorcery to me) because ideas just stick in my head like cockleburs and I don’t always take notes.  My solution is to stay away from traditional academic contexts.  These blogs of mine are speculative.  But if a professor has assigned a 15 page paper (which might be a plan for a thesis but is not much more) in a narrow field, in which part of the quotes are noted and part are not, at the very least he or she ought to be able to recognize that and return it to the student for the missing indicators to be added.  

Low value, unascribed, ephemeral print abounds.

When I taught at the local community college (BCC), we were instructed to automatically flunk every plagiarism.  As it happened, the problem came up in a speech class.  We discussed it at length.  It became clear that to the students print was "print" -- not WRITING.  It had never registered with them that someone had to write all that print.  It was just there. And speaking was not talking on a subject they knew, but rather reading out loud some print.  This is what they had known through their whole public school career.  

It was the very CONCEPT of plagiarism that they didn’t get.  To them “copying” was leaning over to see what some other student put on a multiple-choice answer sheet.  Print rains down on us all the time.  The notion that someone struggled to compose it, to get it to that mysterious level of slick and cute -- much less insight -- just never entered their minds.  It was not cultural difference -- it was small-town inexperience and ignorance.

So we did idea-webbing, brain-stormed lists of possible details, chose a thesis and supported it with evidence -- not as individual assignments but as a group with me doing the “writing” on the blackboard (which was a whiteboard).  The thing that turned the tide was my statement: “We want to know what YOU think -- not someone we don’t know.”  It appears this point was not made to Senator Walsh.

The famous "before and after" of Carlyle education.  This is not Photoshop.

I googled Army War College and was startled to see that it is located in Carlyle, PA, the place where a school for Native Americans was charged with “killing” their old culture and installing the new one: obedience, cleanliness, conformity.  It backfired when the NA’s who attended learned how to present themselves as an assimilated and loyal workforce, but then went back home and used what they had learned to further the goals of their own people.

http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/about/aboutUs.cfm sets the definition of the Army War College.   http://home.epix.net/~landis/histry.html  describes the history of the Carlyle Indian Industrial School, which was founded on military ideas of how to produce soldiers obedient to the goals of the leaders. 

A Scot and a Brit

Examples.  I had one classmate at Div School whom we teased because his footnotes on a page sometimes almost exceeded the actual content.  He was Princeton-educated and successfully earned the D.Min.   He was exemplary at conformity and has prospered.  He was born in England but raised in the US.  I, on the other hand, am Irish/Scots in origin (that should tell you something), female, twice his age in seminary, with a BS (’61) in theatre from Northwestern University which at the time was famed for teaching “Method” acting, emotion-based.  I was at M/L and U of C to develop my “other side.” When I got back to Montana, like a Carlyle Indian, I reverted to type.  At that point, I felt free to use my thesis material my own way.

Butte, Montana

Walsh grew up in Butte.  Think about it.  I'm surprised he wasn't a flat-out, full-bore Marine like my brothers.