Serving 15 years for Aggravated Plagiarism

In his characteristically psychotic novel, Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog, author Mark Leyner describes a visit to a former professor who’s “serving 15 years for aggravated plagiarism.” Our public school officials are a little more lenient with themselves when they’re caught stealing other people’s work. Just ask Orange County (NC) school-board chairman Keith Cook:

Orange School Board Chairman Admits Using Someone Else's Speech

By Associated Press

Students at Orange County High School can be suspended if they present someone else's words or ideas as their own.

Some departing seniors and school board members were surprised to learn that the graduation speech delivered by county school board Chairman Keith Cook was lifted from a 1998 address given by someone else.

"I wrote that," Cook initially said when a reporter from the Herald-Sun asked him about the speech he gave Friday night.

But later, when a reporter e-mailed him an Internet address containing the speech, he admitted that he found it on a Web site.

The speech, which sought to draw life lessons from the 1997 movie "Titanic," was virtually identical to one given by Donna Shalala when she was U.S. secretary of health and human services in the Clinton administration.

Cook said he found the speech when he did an Internet search on the term "graduation speeches." He said he thought the remarks were a "generic speech," and didn't realize Shalala had originally delivered it.

"I would've never done it, if I knew," Cook said. "It didn't have a name on it."

It sounds as if nothing is going to happen to Cook as a result of his casual disregard for intellectual property rights.

Just for the heck of it, imagine you could easily choose from among several schools for your kids, and a senior manager at one of those choices was found guilty of aggravated plagiarism. Wouldja maybe put that school a little bit lower on your list as a result?

Don’t bother to think too hard about that question. Under our reigning education monopoly you haven't got much choice anyway.