Today, Ed Cone linked to a letter from Michael Usey, pastor of College Park Church.to Greensboro, NC mayor Bill Knight. It was a great letter. Much of it is not his. He took large chunks -- multiple paragraphs -- including a first person account that begins with "In France, I had seen..." from a 2005 lecture by J. Brent Walker. Other portions came from an unsigned work at the Baptists Joint Committee for Religious Liberty web site.
Also this week, Bill Randall, a Republican vying for the chance to run against Brad Miller for North Carolina's 13th congressional district admitted to Yes! Weekly's Jordan Green that large portions of his web site were copied from other sources. Randall blamed the plagiarism on "unauthorized inclusions" by a volunteer he would not name.
[Update: Usey's passage that begins with "In France, I had seen..." is actually identified as a quotation by Usey, albeit without quotation marks. Other copied portions are not identified as from other sources.]
[Update II: As Michelle notes in the comments, Usey's identification of the quotation is, itself, within the original text copied from another author.]
Re: Your update
ReplyDeleteYou're giving Usey too much credit. The two paragraphs above the quotation are also plagiarized -- it's a whole section together -- and he simply took the in-text citation and made it into a footnote, as he does two other times with content taken from that same site.
If you go through Usey's letter and highlight all the plagiarized material, you'll find that nearly half of the letter was written by unattributed others.
Good catch. Disappointing behavior. Perhaps his church's liberal ethos extends to a liberal view of Exodus 20:15: "Thou shalt not steal." ;)
Looks like the editorial-opinion staff at the N&R missed the discussion here at at Ed Cone's about Usey's plagiarism. Either that or they didn't take note until after today's paper had gone to press. Unfortunate.
ReplyDeleteYou ought to call Usey, Roch, and get his response. It's both fair (in case, somehow, he has a reasonable explanation) and an opportunity for him to take responsibility and make amends (if he's inclined).
In journalism, we refer to it as the "come to Jesus moment."
Thanks for the comment, Jordan. I just sent Pastor Usey an email inviting him to comment on this post.
ReplyDelete