Story here - It’s pretty much direct quotes. It’s pretty balls out, he barely even tried to re-write.
Sheriff David Clarke plagiarized portions of his master’s thesis on homeland security
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David Clarke is a huge douche and I don’t like a thing about him, but this is ridiculous.
“Clarke lifts language from sources and credits them with a footnote, but does not indicate with quotation marks that he is taking the words verbatim.”
It looks like he was trying to attribute the quotes and but just did it incorrectly. Also where the hell was his thesis advisor in all this. Even other members of his committee could have pointed out this error. Lots of people missed this minor and easily correctable error.
There’s nothing to see here.
Great. Your excuse is that he had incompetent teachers? That’s reassuring.
I second the previous poster. I think Clarke is an asshole and a disastrous choice for DHS and should stick to being a cowboy in Milwaukee, but this isn’t necessarily academic fraud we’re talking about here – it’s improper use of citation but it also slipped past the advisors and the committee that presumably gave him the degree. There’s software that catches this sort of thing and many institutions actually require that students submit documents into a database so that plagiarism can be flagged. Even so, accidental or incidental plagiarism happens – if it is discovered post-graduation, most institutions I know tend to give graduates time to fix the errors. It’s no doubt embarrassing for Clark and the NPS but they’ll probably find a way to resolve it diplomatically.
By the time you’re writing your master’s thesis, you’ve done a crapload of academic writing.
This was no accident.
I disagree. If he was trying to pass off other people’s work as his own he wouldn’t have footnoted each of the 47 passages. This isn’t dishonesty. It’s an error or at worst laziness.
Also, my dissertation (mathematics PhD) was my first academic paper where I was sole author. I was very reliant on my advisor, who had written over a hundred papers, to help me be sure that I was doing things correctly. In my experience that is extremely common, but it may be different in disciplines apart from mathematics.
That’s amazing. I was aware of the basic rules and what was considered plagiarism the first semester in junior college.
Apparently it’s someone else’s fault if he did not cite works properly.
So much for the Party of personal responsibility…
This is how it works: Some other person is responsible.
So was I and so was David Clarke I’m guessing. He took a passage from another source and put a footnote at the end of the passage that led the reader to the source of the passage. That’s not plagiarism.
From the quote in the OP.
It’s the verbatim without indicating that was so is where he screwed up.
Or cheated.
ETA: In case you didn’t notice, the mods here will delete the relevant portion if you quote an article without indicating it’s not your own writing.
I’d have to know precisely what the extent of the suspected plagiarism is before passing final judgment. He obviously included his sources in the footnotes, so he actually did give credit to his sources. He just didn’t do it in the citation. Again, I’m not excusing his apparent sloppiness – had it been caught prior to publication he could have (might well have) failed the assignment. Universities have dealt with situations like this in the past ex post facto and, short of academic fraud, they more often than not confront the suspected offender, give them a timeline to fix it, and threaten to revoke their degree if they don’t. The assumption is that they acted in good faith. Now if the volume of evidence suggests something more serious like fabrication of data or substantial plagiarism by failing to identify authors and sources in text and in the reference section, that could lead to more permanent consequences.
Again, though, I’m not reading his thesis – maybe I should. NPS theses are online, I believe.
He also didn’t enclose the verbatim sections with quote marks thus making it appear that those passages were his own words and not a quote from the sources.
(a) Concur fully with the assessment of Sherriff Clarke on the basis of his record.
(b) Yes, rather than something hugely scandalous this is more the sort of sloppiness that does not speak well of the program’s rigor and shows Clarke as lazy. The counselor should have looked at it and realized it was quoted wrong and asked for a correction, saving everyone the later aggravation, and Clarke is being a noxious ass for lashing out about the reporting. However…
(c) …and I’m going speculative on this, it may be related to one of my pet peeves, Degree Inflation due to proliferation of ticket-punching by requiring academic degrees where a certificate of advanced training would have done fine.
Law Enforcement is a notable example, c. 1990 as a degree started being more universally required for promotion where previously you were promoted on the basis of experience and/or passing a job-specific examination (and grad degrees for senior appointments), there was a boom in “Criminal Justice” majors and graduate programs, many sprung out of virtually thin air, but for which there were funding grants made available to cover costs so police departments and colleges queued right up. After 9/11 then came a blossoming of “National Security” majors, under similar auspices.
At NPS, civilian LEOs attend the Center for Homeland Defense Studies, a program developed and paid for by FEMA (notice: FEMA develops the program and foots the bill, not the Navy) whose purpose is to enable LEOs across the nation to be on the same page about terrorism and disaster response issues and policies and to work on evolving these (Why at the Naval Postgraduate School, I got no idea. Maybe they made the low bid.). Which is a fine thing to have for our chiefs of police but I question if it is really graduate academics or if it is more like an advanced training certificate that gets configured as a Masters’ because those officers need a Masters’ to be promoted to chiefs. And then we wind up with things like this, making NPS look like their academics are sloppy but Og knows if it was some FEMA-paid contract adjunct who has been advised his/her job is to make sure the students get their checkbox marked in time to be back on their jobs in August.
David Clarke made a mistake. In no way am I trying to make an argument that he didn’t fuck up. However, the mistake he made is minor and easily correctable.
He didn’t attempt to pass off other people’s work as his own. He failed to properly cite his sources according to the guidelines of his institution, but he did make an effort to show where those passages came from.
As a former academic, in my mind, this is an error that needs to be fixed, not an example of academic fraud.
This wouldn’t have been acceptable in sixth grade, and it’s not acceptable, now. You are obviously a lot more lenient than some other people.
I’m with Lance Turbo on this one.
I’ve written a bunch of academic papers. There are very frequently footnotes at the end of sentences that are backing up what you are saying in that sentence, but without quotation marks, the understanding is that the sentence itself is 100% yours.
I don’t think you’ll find any argument about this. It is definitely a mistake to leave out the quotation marks. An easily correctable mistake. In fact, that’s the exact easily correctable mistake that David Clarke made.
The last 5 years of my first career were under Clarke. I can see him purposely doing this and setting it up so when caught he can claim it’s just a minor mistake. Yet if any of his employees made such a “minor mistake” they’d be in front of an IA board.
I have posted numerous times on [post=17635841]these boards[/post] about him. I’m disappointed that my fellow conservatives can’t see through his bullshit and routinely sing his praises while he is all talk and no action.
Interesting that he’s skinning out now during another scandal coming out of his office.
It’s rare that I agree with Gwen Moore or the Milwaukee Journal, but Clarke is not fit for either office.
But I’m happy to get him out of Milwaukee County. Hopefully his successor will return the office to one of honor and action. And now the rest of the country can learn what I’ve known since 2002: David Clarke is so full of shit it’s surprising he doesn’t explode!