Man, Republicans really don’t care about honesty, integrity, or basic goddamned competence as long as you’re one of them, do they? Take Monica Crowley, who Donald Trump has named as senior director of strategic communications for the National Security Council. It seems you have only to glance through something she’s “written” to find plagiarism. Reports of Crowley’s plagiarism start in 1999, with a Wall Street Journal column, and continue through a 2012 book called What the (Bleep) Just Happened. But the dissertation that got her a PhD at Columbia is something special:
In her dissertation on America's China policy under Truman and Nixon, entitled "Clearer Than Truth," Crowley, whose Ph.D. is in international relations, lifted multiple passages from Eric Larson's 1996 book, "Casualties and Consensus: The Historical Role of Casualties in Domestic Support for U.S. Military Operations." She also repeatedly plagiarized James Chace's 1998 book, "Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World," as well as a 1982 book by Yale's John Lewis Gaddis called "Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War." Crowley's dissertation also contains passages taken from a 1996 book by Thomas Christensen of Princeton, Useful Adversaries: Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and Sino-American Conflict, 1947-1958.
Crowley cited these and other sources in footnotes at various points in her dissertation, but often failed to include citations or to properly cite sources in sections where she copied their wording verbatim or closely paraphrased it.
Crowley's dissertation includes plagiarized paragraphs from commentary in a 1998 collection of transcripts of Henry Kissinger's declassified conversations with other diplomats and world leaders. She also lifted material from Henry Kissinger's 1979 memoirs, using Kissinger's language to summarize Kissinger's descriptions of the Nixon administration's thought processes without quoting him.
That’s not all, but frankly I’d be abusing fair use of this CNN report to even quote the full list of sources Crowley plagiarized, and if there’s one time to be scrupulous about fair use it would seem to be while writing about plagiarism.
Slow clap for Crowley’s dissertation committee. Because, look, you expect a certain percentage of undergraduate students to plagiarize, and they usually get caught when turning in papers that are just a little too good. With graduate students, who are expected to have mastery of their topics and to write acceptably well, it’s a little harder. You’re more likely to have to actually recognize the source to catch on to plagiarism. But that said, she plagiarized Henry Kissinger’s memoirs! Along with at least nine other sources. And no one caught anything? As for Crowley, at least we know she did her research, based on the sheer volume of works she plagiarized.
Columbia University is saying only that its review process is confidential, but surely there must be some sort of review going on. That said, “degree revoked by snooty liberals at Columbia” might be an additional credential for a Trump administration post, as might the breathtakingly shameless scope of Crowley’s plagiarism.