Ah, summertime. No more teachers, no more books, no more college football crooks.
Uh oh. Better nix that last one.
Across the country, recently graduated high school seniors are enjoying their final summer of freedom before heading off to college. There are many helpful tips to survive these next four-plus years, starting with “always have a friend watch your shoes.” (You’ll understand why soon enough.)
Included in that list, if it’s not patently obvious, is “don’t plagiarize.” North Carolina defensive end Michael McAdoo reportedly may have whiffed on that one.
Plagiarism alone would qualify McAdoo as a knucklehead, but while all plagiarism is foolish and useless, some is plain dumb. McAdoo qualifies for the latter after apparently plagiarizing a 1911 essay on Africa for a Swahili class last year.
Heck, what could change over the course of a century?
One of the tip-offs, according to Sports Illustrated, is that McAdoo’s paper put Africa’s population at “about 160 million,” only slightly below the estimated 2010 population of 1.03 billion. Give or take a few hundred million people, McAdoo wasn’t far off.
The Great Googlers of the world identified the 1911 essay The Future of Africa as the source of the content, SI reports. It’s a good read, as anyone who read McAdoo’s paper could probably attest.
This case gets more fun, though. According to the News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., the plagiarism was discovered thanks to McAdoo’s own legal team, which alleges in a lawsuit that the NCAA wrongfully banned McAdoo for alleged academic fraud and receiving improper benefits. One of the alleged instances of academic fraud included an accusation that a tutor re-formatted citations on his Swahili paper.
As part of the evidence submitted by McAdoo’s lawyers was the what SI.com’s Andy Staples sensitively calls “the paper in question.”
Oops.
As soon as it was made public, bloggers everywhere announced, “Gentlemen, start your keyboards!” and identified the original 1911 work. North Carolina is NASCAR country, after all.
OK kids, here’s a tip: Don’t plagiarize, but if you’re intent on breaking the rules, plagiarize something a little more current, like the Glass Steagall Act of 1933 or anything else that was published in the last 100 years. There’s got to be at least a couple.
PHOTO OF THE DAY
McAdoo, right, goes for a sack in a spring scrimmage. He may have sacked himself academically.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Mr. Jeter deserved it. I’m not going to take it away from him. Money’s cool and all, but I’m 23 years old. I’ve got a lot of time to make that. It was never about the money. It was about the milestone.”
–Yankees fan Christian Lopez on refusing to ask for compensation after catching the home run that was Derek Jeter’s 3,000th hit.
TWEET OF THE DAY
Be careful what you wish for…
