A local Christian college president has resigned after news that he plagiarized a chapter of his book. The Board of Directors did not ask him to step down. He took that on himself. Perhaps it’s an honorable move, but his explanation leaves me with doubt. He said he did not understand copyright laws at the time, and that it was “a major academic mistake.” The minister whose work was copied is quoted saying, “He told me that he had read my book in college, liked it, and was under the impression that I had passed away or that it was no longer in print when he used it.”

The former president said he tried to give proper credit to the minister in most recent editions by adding the minister’s photo and contact information to the front of the book. “There was not a cover up,” he said, “and I was planning on re-writing that section of the book anyway.”

How does any of this justify taking someone else’s published words as your own?

From The Paris Review interview last year with author Ray Bradbury:

Q: There was a time, though, wasn’t there, when you wanted recognition across the board from critics and intellectuals?

BRADBURY: Of course. But not anymore. If I’d found out that Norman Mailer liked me, I’d have killed myself. I think he was too hung up. I’m glad Kurt Vonnegut didn’t like me either. He had problems, terrible problems. He couldn’t see the world the way I see it. I suppose I’m too much Pollyanna, he was too much Cassandra. Actually I prefer to see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna and half Cassandra, warning of the future and perhaps living too much in the past—a combination of both. But I don’t think I’m too overoptimistic. … It’s the terrible creative negativism, admired by New York critics, that caused [Vonnegut’s] celebrity. New Yorkers love to dupe themselves, as well as doom themselves. I haven’t had to live like that. I’m a California boy. I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.