Harvard Crimson says writer lifted material
Student paper expresses regret
Harvard's student newspaper says that one of its writers lifted material for her column on linguistics from a similar column posted a year earlier to Slate, an online magazine.
The Harvard Crimson published an editor's note expressing regret for failing reference the Slate column as a source for quotes from "The Great Gatsby" and "Little Women" used in the Crimson column. The Crimson editors plan to publish another note today saying that they will discontinue the biweekly column by Victoria Ilyinsky, and will remove the problematic column from the Crimson website.
Ilyinsky, a senior, could not be reached for comment yesterday.
Julia Turner , a senior editor at Slate, said the magazine did not plan to take action against the Crimson or Ilyinsky.
"It seems like the note from editors of the Crimson is sufficient," Turner said.
The episode occurs months after the Crimson was first to report multiple instances of plagiarism in a highly publicized first novel by a Harvard student, Kaavya Viswanathan . The story set off a firestorm in the publishing world and resulted in the removal of the novel from bookstores, and the cancellation of her two-book contract.
The Crimson column incident highlights the inherent risks of publishing, said the Crimson's president, William Marra, a senior. "Any publication that prints has to look out for plagiarism or allegations of plagiarism," Marra said in an interview yesterday.
The Crimson is independent from the university and students control all editorial content; an alumni board advises on some financial matters, Marra said.
Ilyinsky, like other regular Crimson columnists, submitted an application and was chosen by editors to write a regular column, "On Our Language," Marra said. Last year, Ilyinsky wrote a column on campus trends.
The column in question , "The Word Is Killing Me, Literally," was published Oct. 16. In it, Ilyinsky wrote about the morphed use of the word "literally." The word, she wrote, traditionally meant " 'word for word' or 'without exaggeration,' " but is now used to dramatize a point. She gives this example: " 'I was literally so tired that I turned on Grey's [Anatomy] and fell asleep.' (Translation: shuteye in front of Dr. Shepard? She must be absolutely exhausted.)"
At one point, Ilyinsky cites earlier alternative uses of "literally." She wrote: " '[T]he land literally flowed with milk and honey' comes straight from Louisa May Alcott's 1868 novel 'Little Women.' And who doesn't remember Fitzgerald's description of Jay Gatsby: 'He literally glowed?' But neither was the town of Plumfield overrun with food-stuffs nor our favorite social climber actually luminescent."
The Slate column, written by Jesse Sheidlower , an editor-at-large at the Oxford English Dictionary and a freelancer for Slate, ran Nov. 1, 2005, and also asked: "How the did word literally come to mean the opposite of what it originally meant?"
Sheidlower includes the quotes from "The Great Gatsby" and "Little Women" that Ilyinsky cites.
Marra said editors learned of the similarities last week through an e-mail from an individual whom he declined to identify.
Bob Mitchell , a spokesman for Harvard College, said the school does not comment on the conduct of individual students. He said the student handbook expressly prohibits plagiarism in student coursework, and the college "expects students to conduct themselves with integrity and honesty at all times."
Lou Ureneck , a journalism professor at Boston University, said that student newspapers should be laboratories for experimentation and at times, mistakes. But he said school newspapers must draw a bright line at plagiarism.
"Plagiarism should be forbidden," said Ureneck. "There might be a conversation about the appropriate penalty, but plagiarism is one of those things that people need to avoid and we shouldn't tolerate it because it occurred at a student newspaper."
Last February, The Daily Free Press, the student-run Boston University newspaper, reported that one of its writers had lifted material, without attribution, from the 