As an author and a journalist I have been watching the stories about plagiarism quite intently. I’ve had a hard time understanding how Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard sophomore and novelist becomes a national pariah, even though the likes of the William Morris Agency and Alloy Entertainment, her book packager, helped her develop the book, for pagers. While, at the same, time the CEO of Raytheon, Bill Swenson gets a slap on the wrist from his board by getting his compensation package reduced. The idea of anyone stealing credit for intellectual work it seems to set an especially bad cultural precedent for a CEO to plagiarize, and then lie about it. When a CEO is stealing by taking credit for other’s work what does it say to the company’s customers? How can they believe that the company acts with integrity and can be trusted?
In my search for understanding, I really liked David Leonhardt’s analysis.
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