Principle Stenner giving David McCullough’s speech. You can’t see that his pants are on fire from this angle…
[NOTE: the original post’s headline ended with the creative word, “defeinitely,” I know not why. My demon proofer caught it yesterday, but I just read his alert. I’m sorry.]
Principal Mark Stenner delivered the commencement address for the May 22 graduation ceremonies for West Boca High School. It may have sounded faintly familiar to some of the those in the audience; after all, Massachusetts’ English teacher David McCullough gave virtually the same speech to the class of 2012 at Wellesley High School. That speech went viral on YouTube with more than 2.5 million views. Known as the “You Are Not Special” speech, it got McCullough, the son of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough, a book deal. Principal Stenner repeated this famous, extensively circulated speech almost word for word, never mentioning McCullough. He did make slight word changes and altered locations examples when necessary, but it was the same speech, and the plagiarism was noticed almost immediately.
Stenner still insisted that he didn’t plagiarize the address . “I liked his idea. I should have said this was in part taken from him, ” he said. “In part,” in this case, means cutting some of the original, but including details like referencing ‘batty Aunt Sylvia” and the “maternal caped crusader,” and citing the same philosophers as McCullough, like Sophocles and Thoreau, but not crediting the man who wrote almost every word of the speech.
Of course this is plagiarism. This would get a student expelled from any respectable college, and earn a term paper an F in any decent high school. And this is plagiarism modeled by the head of the school at a class graduation: a more blatant endorsement of dishonesty, sloth and theft by an official whose job it is to reject them would be hard to imagine. That’s not all. His speech scarred what should have been a memorable day of pride and inspiration for the graduates and their families, and transformed it into a shameful debacle that calls into question the quality of the students’ education. It showed that the school’s principal didn’t care enough about them, his job, or the ideals of scholarship that he was responsible for conveying to devote time and thought to composing his own speech.
Here’s the capper: Stenner couldn’t even do plagiarism well. Plagiarizing the most famous commencement speech in years is like stealing from the Gettysburg Address, or Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech. It is incredibly stupid in addition to being unethical.
This fool can’t even plagiarize as well as his students.
There is an ongoing investigation by the Palm Beach County School District, though I don’t see why it should take more than 20 minutes. The video of the original 2012 speech is a click away, and several news organizations have done the comparison. What’s left to investigate? Stenner is also a liar, or doesn’t know what “plagiarism means.”
He has to be fired.
For the record, here is the speech Stenner says he didn’t plagiarize, followed by his “original” speech.
McCullough:
Contrary to what your U9 soccer trophy suggests, your glowing seventh grade report card, despite every assurance of a certain corpulent purple dinosaur, that nice Mister Rogers and your batty Aunt Sylvia, no matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to save you… you’re nothing special.
Absolutely, smiles ignite when you walk into a room, and hundreds gasp with delight at your every tweet. Why, maybe you’ve even had your picture in the Townsman! And now you’ve conquered high school.
If you’ve learned anything in your years here I hope it’s that education should be for, rather than material advantage, the exhilaration of learning. You’ve learned, too, I hope, as Sophocles assured us, that wisdom is the chief element of happiness. (Second is ice cream… just an fyi)
Think for yourself. Love everything you love, everyone you love, with all your might. And do so, please, with a sense of urgency, for every tick of the clock subtracts from fewer and fewer; and as surely as there are commencements there are cessations, and you’ll be in no condition to enjoy the ceremony attendant to that eventuality no matter how delightful the afternoon.
Stenner:
Contrary to what your Boca Hoops or SABR Soccer trophy suggests, your glowing seventh grade report card, despite every assurance of a certain plump purple dinosaur, that nice Mister Rogers and your batty Aunt Sylvia, no matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to save you… you’re nothing special.
Absolutely, smiles ignite when you walk into a room, and hundreds gasp with delight at every tweet. Maybe you’ve even had your picture in the Sun-Sentinel, or the Palm Beach Post. And now you’ve conquered high school.
If you’ve learned anything in your years here I hope it’s that education should be for the exhilaration of learning rather than material advantage. You’ve learned, too, I hope, as Sophocles assured us, that wisdom is the chief element of happiness. (By the way the second element of happiness is chocolate)
Think for yourself. Love everything you love, everyone you love, with all your might. And do so, please, with a sense of urgency, for every tick of the clock subtracts from your time here on Earth; and as surely as there are commencements there are cessations.
Nah, that’s not plagiarism! That’s a homage! For Stenner to deny that this is plagiarism meets the “Elephant? What elephant?” standard for a Jumbo.
What a disgrace.
_________________________
Pointer: Fark
Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts, and seek written permission when appropriate. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work or property was used in any way without proper attribution, credit or permission, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at jamproethics@verizon.net.
Ethics Alarms 
My undergrad school, Hamilton College took months, maybe years, to let go its then president for plagiarism. With a very generous package, of course. And I think he was allowed to stay on for an entire academic year. Embarrassing. Don’t expect the Palm Beach County School Board to move very quickly. The guy will lawyer up, get a severance package and make sure his pension will begin immediately but be calculated as if he’d stayed on until full retirement age. Or they might just roll over and let him stay on. Or maybe he’ll run for Congress. He might even be in Debbie Wasserman’s district. They’ll elect anyone.
What a dope. Why didn’t he just read it and attribute it? I don’t think anyone would have thought poorly of him for doing so. It’s a great little speech. I didn’t realize it was so brief. Tremendous.
A dope, and dope about being a dope. In fact, a dope about being a dope about being a dope!
Lawyer up for what? I’d fire him and let him sue. If I were a parent, I’d lead a boycott of the school. Are you kidding me? With plagiarism and cheating rampant, how could any student ever be punished? I might direct my son to cheat just to force the issue.
Obviously, you weren’t on the bored of trustees at Hamilton a few years ago. Actually, I think it’s been over ten years. Yikes. I’ll bet you he either stays or if he’s terminated he sues for wrongful termination or gets some sort of negotiated exit, a low grade golden parachute.
And the whole could have been avoided by a single sentence. “I’m going to deliver a speech that has been delivered before, by David McCullough, an English teacher from Massachusetts.” Then say “It is especially appropriate today.” How hard would that have been?
Well, you have to take into consideration the fact that the man is a friggin’ moron.
Hey, if Rand Paul can get away with it and still run for President, what’s the problem????
Great…a sighting of Ratioanalization 32!!
1) Anyone can RUN for President. Even this idiot principal.
2) Much more on point is Joe Biden…who also lifted a speech and just changed a few details. And it was just as stupid, too, because Kinnock’s speech was autobiographical. Paul just plagiarized Wikipedia.
3) I think both episodes were disqualifying, and I wouldn’t trust either Paul or Biden as school principals either.
32. The Unethical Role Model: “He/She would have done the same thing”
This is a fantasy rationalization, and therefore a wonderfully versatile one. Just pick the great, famous and admired man or woman who you think would be most likely to engage in the wrongful conduct you are considering, and you will immediately feel good about it. If you are doing no worse than Churchill, of Gandhi, or Lincoln, or Martin Luther King or Princess Diana, after all, how bad can you be? This is a clever rationalization, but a transparent one. Andrew Jackson was a racist and a killer, but he isn’t admired for being a racist and a killer. FDR was vindictive and ruthless, but those aren’t the qualities that made him a great President. Lincoln, Jefferson, Oprah—it’s easy to cherry-pick flaws among the great and famous, but absurd to use those aspects of their personalities as objects of emulation. It is true: Clarence Darrow would have bribed a jury (and did); Arthur Miller would have neglected a disabled son; Jackie Kennedy would have lived a lie. The fact that we can find someone objectively remarkable who engaged in just about any crime or unethical act we can imagine merely proves that even the best of us fail to negotiate the challenges of life perfectly. It isn’t an excuse to stop trying to do the best we can in our own lives.
Comment of the Week material.
I honestly read Beth’s comment as a joke, largely because I know she knows better. Unless it’s a different Beth, that seems the safe way to bet.
Now, if it was someone like art hawley I would have made no such assumption…
Philinn — that’s exactly right. I thought the joke was pretty obvious myself.
Jack — are you crazy? That was an obvious joke.
And I thought my reply was obviously tongue in cheek—I knew you were joking. I did want to mention #32, though. Wouldn’t you assume that I was joking on the same basis Phlinn knew YOU were joking? Huh? HUH??
Poe’s law strikes again…
No — I didn’t think yours was written tongue in cheek. Was it? I’m on vacation and not reading your posts as carefully as I normally do.
That was, yes. But tongues rae sometimes hard to detect in print. I just hate you for being on vacation.
“Stenner couldn’t even do plagiarism well.”
They usually can’t. When I was working for a college, I used to help some of the Computer Science instructors look at programming assignments for signs of plagiarism. It was always really obvious. They never tried to change anything significant. If they were intelligent and creative, they wouldn’t have to cheat.
If they were intelligent and creative, they wouldn’t have to cheat.
Exactly, Mark.
Once you change it enough to make it non-obvious plagiarism, is it still actually plagiarism or are you just using the original material for inspiration?
If it’s not recognizable, then it isn’t plagiarism. That doesn’t apply to this, though, as the comparison makes obvious.
Oh, I knew this didn’t qualify. I was just wondering how you draw the line for the intelligent plagarists. If you take the exact same ideas you read in a single paper, and re-organize them so that there isn’t any smoking gun, how do you qualify it?
For computer science in particular, different variable names all around but nearly identical structure COULD be simple copy and rename, or it could be different people coming to the same conclusions about the best way to do things.
That was a concern of ours. Most of them were way more obvious than that, though. One of the things we’d look for was oddities, where both students used the same strange approach to a problem instead of a more obvious and conventional technique. (Of course, in the case of really hard-working plagiarists, we probably missed them.)
In any case, once we noticed similar programs, the next step was to figure out who had done the original and who had cheated. I’m not sure it would work with ordinary text, but with a program all it took was having the students visit the instructor’s office and explain in detail how their program worked. The original author had spend many hours crafting the code and could easily describe how it worked and why they made the choices they did. The cheater…lots of excuses and forgetfulness. Or a confession.
Did you ever find that both students had a pretty good grasp of the program when they turned it in?
I wasn’t the instructor, so I didn’t do the code reviews, but I don’t think they ever failed to resolve the issue for her.
Exactly. There’s only so many ways to do things. When I was writing code (it was COBOL, so that should tell you something) we even went so far as to write up a library of standard routines. When we compiled the program, at the appropriate place, inserted the appropriate routine. Saved a bit of work.
You nailed it. Very nice analysis. He’s a bully, and a mandatory reporter who failed to report abuse of a non verbal student by his staff that was reported directly to him. He covered it up, making sure, in the process, that video of the incident was destroyed. The abuse incident was confirmed by two investigations: the school police and the US Dept of Justice. The school district paid thousands of dollars as a result, yet allowed Stenner to keep his job, without even a public reprimand. If you’re interested in writing about this, drop me an email. I’ve got documentation, and plenty of it. His plagiarism pales in comparison.
Hey there, I saw your post. I’m with the local paper. Would you be willing to send me what you have? Thanks,
Karen
kyi@tribpub.com