From across the room Sheila flashed her a thumbs-up sign.
“He can be fixed.”
(You bought this. Damaged goods. It’s yours to return.)
Rachel broke the contact and glanced at Martin. But he was grinning and returning Sheila the hand sign.
When the applause died, the host turned to the second part of the program. He made some brief congratulatory remarks about Professor Watts, the segue being a celebration of new scholars to a professional who was a model for the younger generation to emulate. He then introduced Vanessa’s editor who commented briefly on how impressed he was with the manuscript and how he knew instantly that it was an important work which would be appreciated by an audience beyond academia.
The host returned to the microphone. Before introducing Vanessa, he announced a special surprise congratulation. When the lights dimmed, the huge TV monitor was turned on. To instant applause, the screen lit up with the face of the governor of the commonwealth, who congratulated Vanessa on a fine book. Following the applause, the picture shifted to the department chairman and the president of Middlesex who also added their congratulations and best wishes. Then a group shot of her colleagues in the department all saying “Congratulations” in unison and waving and blowing kisses.
Across the room Rachel could see Vanessa beaming and thanking people.
A scrambled void filled the monitor with snow as if the tape had been roughly edited. The screen went black for a moment, and somebody said “Is that it?” when the monitor again lit up, this time on the face of a serious-looking man about forty with a VanDyke beard. Nobody seemed to recognize him. And Rachel glanced at Vanessa who looked frozen in place.
“My name is Joshua Blake, and I was a graduate student of Vanessa Watts fifteen years ago at Middlesex University. At the time I was pursuing my doctorate in English, and Professor Watts was my advisor. My thesis, which was completed in 1988 and published in monograph form two years later, was entitled In Defense of the Defensible: An Intertextual Study of the Dystopian Politics of George Orwell.
“Some weeks ago, a reviewer for The Modern Novel Quarterly sent me an advance copy of Professor Watts’s book to inform me that she had plagiarized my dissertation.”
A murmur rose up from the crowd. Rachel looked over to Vanessa who appeared stunned.
“At first I was incredulous, since I remember Professor Watts as a brilliant and honorable scholar. Yet, after reviewing her book, I can only conclude with shock and great disappointment that she had engaged herself in massive and deliberate theft of my research, my conclusions, and my words. In fact, there are pages of identical or parallel passages, including whole paragraphs lifted word for word.”
Across the room, Vanessa slumped into herself. Amazingly she did not protest but stood glaring at the screen in strange resignation. A stunned hush fell on the crowd, which stood transfixed at the split screen with pages from Blake’s dissertation juxtaposed with those from Vanessa Watts’s book.
“Aside from a few feeble attempts at rewording, large passages are nearly identical, as you can see,” Blake continued. “I don’t know what your motives were, Professor Watts. Perhaps you had just assumed that because I was a lowly grad student you could help yourself to my material while I disappeared into the world and my dissertation molded away in the basement of Middlesex Library. What amazes and saddens me even more is that nowhere in your book am I acknowledged—not a single word of attribution. It pains me, but I accuse you of gross theft of intellectual property, and a violation of trust.”
Vanessa put her hand over her eyes, while her husband tried to comfort her. Meanwhile, the tape continued. “I have informed my attorneys to file suit against—”
“Turn the goddamn thing off,” Brad Watts shouted. “Turn it off!”
The picture went dead.
While the crowd looked on in disbelief, Vanessa pulled herself free of her husband and walked out of the room without a word. Brad began to follow, but she waved him back and left.
“My God,” whispered Rachel to Martin. “That poor woman.”
Vanessa rode around for nearly two hours hoping to find her center again. She had no place to go, nor did she want to drive home and face her family. Although Lisa was sleeping over at a girlfriend’s house and Julian would be doing his silent-troll routine (he couldn’t care less about her), Brad would want a full explanation.
In one stunning moment, she had been totally and permanently destroyed. And tomorrow, to forestall litigation, her publisher would publicly express embarrassment and apologize for the gross act of plagiarism and announce that it was halting distribution of her book, and that all fifty thousand copies would be taken off the market and destroyed—and that the twenty thousand scheduled for release in the UK and Europe next month would also be junked. The press would crackle with scathing indictments, contempt, and ridicule from colleagues and associates at Middlesex and other institutions around the country. Some would speculate on reasons—arrogance, entitlement, and academic pressure. Others would offer up the “death wish” theory, since this was such a careless, wholesale case of plagiarism.
The president would apologize while expressing concern for the kind of example this set for students and faculty alike, declaring something to the effect: “Originality like free expression is sacred in the academic world. This is an utter abuse of our trust as well as an affront to the academy and an example of intellectual corrosion.”
For the next several days, her telephone would ring off the hook with reporters scrambling for a statement—for the scoop on her ruination. There would be an inquiry at the university; and in a few weeks she’d be relieved from her teaching post. Meanwhile, her publisher would demand reimbursement of the $70,000 advance and present a bill for another few hundred thousand dollars to cover the cost of the worldwide withdrawal and destruction of her books.
By this time next week, she, like her book, would be pulped.
As she drove around in the thick of the night, the reality of it all had hit her, rising up from that warm protected recess of her mind where she had packed it away for all these years. Joshua Blake was right: She was a plagiarist. She had stolen his work. And in the world of academic publications, that was the highest crime—tantamount to murder and suicide.
murder and suicide
She had taken his material not because it was so much better than hers, but because she was desperate to get the book into production and out in time for the 2003 George Orwell centennial. Adding to the pressure was her publisher’s insistence that the book had high sales potential—a promise, which realized, could reduce the enormous debt incurred by Julian’s enhancement and pricey education.
She had done it for him, she told herself. For Julian. She’d been on an unpaid leave of absence, racing to meet deadlines so he could nurture his genius. For her son. A mother’s sacrifice.
As for the actual plagiarism, she was certain she could have come up with Blake’s very insights. He had not made any conclusions of which she was incapable. In fact, she had felt entitled to them—more so for being his former advisor. And, yes, she had assumed he had disappeared and would never know.
Deniaclass="underline" the curse of the species.
And she had done it before. At Littleton College in New York where she had plagiarized a paper on Jonathan Swift in a graduate eighteenth-century course. At the time she was a doctoral student and a TA, and under tremendous pressure to excel at both. But she was young and foolish and for twenty dollars bought a paper on Jonathan Swift from one of those term-paper houses. Unfortunately, the same paper had been turned in the year before to the same professor. She had done stuff like that in undergraduate school, but this time she was given a term’s suspension—a permanent note on her transcript.