CELS Fellow, Senior Admission Fellow and four-year tour guide, alumnus Peter St. John embodied the Connecticut College image. And so his was an image they used; his face appeared on promotional materials, Admissions encouraged him to give speeches to prospective students and College Relations filmed him giving a tour of his room for YouTube, which immediately became the most popular video on their page. St. John was one of his few classmates, mid-recession, to have a job and apartment lined up for that summer: the job for a boutique PR firm in Manhattan, the apartment furnished and waiting in Brooklyn. But his last formal action before receiving his diploma was to give a speech comprised substantially of someone else’s words.
In March of 2009, St. John and a group of his peers were nominated to submit outlines for student commencement speeches. In the second round, a full draft of his speech was selected by a senior speaker selection committee comprised of the Director of the Office of Events and Catering, the Director of Arts Programming, the 2009 Class President and the Dean of Student Life. It was missing a faculty member, as their usual committee member, Ann Devlin of the psychology department, was on sabbatical and went unreplaced.
St. John gave his speech alongside Class President Nick Downing, President Lee Higdon and the keynote speaker, philosopher Martha Nussbaum. St. John’s speech was by far the most well-received of Commencement – more relatable and persuasive than even Nussbaum’s.
“The hardest part will be to convince ourselves of the possibilities, and hang on,” he told the crowd on Tempel Green. “If you run out of hope at the end of the day, you must rise in the morning and put it on again with your shoes. Hope is the only reason we won’t give in, burn what’s left of the ship and go down with it. You have to love that so earnestly – you, who were born into the Age of Irony.
“Imagine getting caught with your optimism hanging out in today’s day and age. It feels so risky.”
Tristan Husby was one of the five final candidates. “I just remember sitting there and thinking, ‘Mine didn’t get chosen, but this is a great speech and I’m glad someone like Peter is marking this,’” he said. “I was glad to be able to associate that with my graduation.”
Said friend Kiefer Roberts ’11, who was in attendance that morning, “I’ll always remember him saying, just like that: ‘it feels so risky.’”
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In November, according to Vice President of College Relations Patricia Carey, a member of the Administration received an anonymous note suggesting that St. John’s speech was plagiarized. Upon closer inspection, they found that extensive passages and many phrases were not St. John’s but writer Barbara Kingsolver’s, from her 2008 commencement address to Duke University. Roughly a third of his speech, including the most noteworthy lines and general theme, clearly derive from Kingsolver’s writing. Her speech became the skeleton for his.
Kingsolver’s address, entitled “How to be Hopeful,” is one of Education Portal’s 10 Famous and Noteworthy College Commencement Speeches, listed alongside speeches by Winston Churchill, Jon Stewart and Steve Jobs. It has been reprinted on various websites in its entirety.
“The hardest part will be to convince yourself of the possibilities, and hang on,” her address said. “If you run out of hope at the end of the day, to rise in the morning and put it on again with your shoes. Hope is the only reason you won’t give in, burn what’s left of the ship and go down with it. The ship of your natural life and your children’s only shot. You have to love that so earnestly – you, who were born into the Age of Irony. Imagine getting caught with your Optimism hanging out. It feels so risky.”
According to St. John, his nomination was concurrent with the nomination of a close friend from another college, and they decided to work with each other to produce something memorable for their respective schools. When his friend was eliminated from the running, he emailed St. John his preparatory notes, and suggested he use them. St. John described it as a document full of disjointed paragraphs and sentences, which he implemented in writing the speech to emphasize the points he knew he wanted to make.
“I felt an expectation to produce something amazing,” he said. “And that’s not to say that what I did was justified, because it absolutely wasn’t. But everything I said, I meant. There was absolutely no malicious intent, no Googling ‘ten best commencement speeches.’ I was not trying to make people believe I had written her words, and would have cited her had I known. I used things suggested by a person I trusted that I felt would help me push forward a sentiment I strongly believed.”
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After the affair was brought to light, President Higdon wrote a personal note to Barbara Kingsolver apologizing on behalf of the school. She wrote back accepting the apology.
The school then made a nearly unprecedented move: putting an alumnus through the college’s judiciary process for actions committed as a student. Dean of Student Life Jocelyn Briddell called St. John in late November requesting he return to campus to appear in front of J-Board. Although the proceedings are kept confidential by the Honor Code and Federal law, St. John’s is unassailably a case of plagiarism. The Student Rights and Responsibilities handbook states that plagiarism consists of using the language and/or “the ideas, arguments, or organization of another writer without proper acknowledgment” with no mention to a difference between writing and speech. Moreover, it states that “ignorance or negligence is not considered an excuse for plagiarism.”
Dean Sarah Cardwell, who oversees all hearings, spoke generally of how a process like this occurs. She explained that despite their status, alumni are still subjected to the standard proceedings of the judiciary process.
“The only way that you would re-encounter the judiciary process after graduating is if we learned that you did something particularly egregious while you were a student,” she said. “Then we reserve the right to bring you back.”
However, the issue of how to appropriately punish alumni, specifically in a case as serious as plagiarism, seems complicated when the college has minimal leverage.
“I would venture to say we’ve never revoked a diploma,” Cardwell said, “A diploma is a diploma. You can’t really do anything to change that.”
According to Peter, the members of J-Board asked him a list of questions, such as whether he believed he deserved the diploma given to him that day (he believed he did). He added that they officially ruled he be banned from the campus and all alumni functions for several years.
St. John made clear that he believed in the college’s values, and wished this incident hadn’t alienated him from a place he cared about after four years of hard and honorable work.
“I fucked up,” he said. “I did.”
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Beyond the walls of J-Board, college administrators chose not to reveal St. John’s public display of fraud. Instead, they chose to make his public image go away. His YouTube room tour can no longer be found online, nor can CC Magazine’s archived copy of both the commencement speech and a speech he gave at an open house in October ’08 called “Taking aim at ‘whatever’”.
“Taking the speech off the website was an obligation,” said Carey. “Taking it off was a response of integrity.”
The only public response by the college was an eight-point-font correction in the “Letters, etc.” section of CC Magazine’s Spring 2010 issue that deemed their reference to his speech a misquotation.
“Correction:” it read. “In the Commencement article in the Sumer 2009 issue of CC: Connecticut College Magazine, a quote on page 41 attributed to a student speaker was later found to have been a citation from a previously published speech by the writer Barbara Kingsolver. The College has extended apologies to Ms. Kingsolver for the misappropriation of her work.”
Additionally, the 2010 commencement planners have removed the student speaker position from this year’s program for the first time in at least ten years.
Briddell made clear that while the Class of 2010’s lack of a selected senior speaker appears to be related, it was a discussion that began before the incident. It will be reinstituted next year in lieu of the Class President speech.
According to the Honor Code, a general academic violation is dealt with by the student, the professor who received the material and J-Board. In this case, the material was received by the Connecticut College community, and was videotaped by a professional service for graduates’ friends and families. The tape can still be bought online.
Legally, however, the Administration’s hands are tied by FERPA, the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act, which prevents them from disclosing a student’s education record without their consent.
FERPA is one of the reasons that the college dealt with this incident differently from that of dance professor Lan-Lan Wang last September, who falsified two of her claimed academic degrees. Once the college confirmed an email tip-off, Wang was forced to resign immediately, and Dean of Faculty Roger Brooks sent out a campus-wide email that week detailing the events of the incident.
“Because she was not a student, we were able to make that public,” explained Dean Briddell. She also made clear that the faculty and Administration do not sign the Honor Code.
In last April’s Jane Addams arson incident, the student at fault was required to send out a school wide email in apology. Because St. John is an alumnus, the college judicial system cannot require him to do the same.
Though it appears as if the Administration tried to cover up the incident, Briddell explained how these FERPA laws of confidentiality complicate matters.
“What might be perceived as suspicious is not always that,” she said. “You do it because you have to protect something or somebody.”
Concerning the extent to which these privacy laws can protect a student who commits plagiarism publicly, Briddell was not able to make a clear distinction.
“I would talk to a lawyer,” she said. “It was clarified for us legally.”
//
Peers of St. John have so far reacted with disappointment. From many student perspectives, the case is simple: a well-known icon of Connecticut College plagiarized the most public, symbolic benchmark of their academic career on the last day of college.
Brian Wilson graduated along with St. John. Like Husby, he submitted his own speech for the commencement speaker contest and was selected as a finalist.
“I was livid,” he said. “I was a finalist but Peter got it by cheating.”
Wilson was also disappointed by the school’s response.
“I was stunned to find that the sole mention of the incident was in the form of a euphemistic and inconspicuous correction that failed to mention Peter St. John, the commencement speech or the issue of plagiarism. It makes it seem as though the school doesn’t take the Honor Code seriously,” he said. “Peter’s last action before leaving was to cheat.”
Husby believed that the selection process itself reflected poorly upon the school.
“It’s a lengthy, four-week process,” he said. “The fact that the review process of the speech didn’t catch this certainly doesn’t speak well of the college itself.”
English Professor Simon Hay believes that St. John’s rights as a student cannot be taken straightforwardly.
“Part of the problem with thinking about anything to do with rights is that they come into conflict with other rights,” he said. “There are rights the family should have in relation to their members’ education, but there are also rights that the public has in relation to things like speeches made to them.”
While this creates a nearly impossible maze for the school to navigate through, Hay believes the Administration should have found another avenue. “You can make a brave face of this and publicly put money into education workshops on plagiarism and its contexts, or you can try and cover it up. The latter makes you complicit with it, which makes the school actually a part of the infraction.”
However, the Administration stands by their decisions.
When asked if, in retrospect, they would do anything differently, Dean Briddell said, “Absolutely not.”
Philosophy professor Simon Feldman specializes in ethics and moral psychology. He also acknowledged the complicated nature of individual rights.
“On the one hand, we are bound by the Honor Code to protect our public image,” he said. “We don’t want to dishonor ourselves with respect to the way the world sees us. But on the other hand, in order to maintain honor, there has to be some way of publicly regulating and criticizing those we think have done things that are importantly in violation of our values. These things come into conflict sometimes.”
Despite the legal and ethical reasons for keeping this incident private, community responses have shown a collective desire for public discourse.
“This desire extends from the fact that most of us share the values of the Honor Code,” said Feldman. “And when that code’s publicly disrespected, we want some shared activity to engage in. Apart from the punitive, are there ways of collectively reasserting our commitment to the values that were violated?”
//
In the words of Barbara Kingsolver, “Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.” J-Board has already rendered its verdict against Peter St. John, but it remains to be seen how his actions and the questions they raise will settle in the eyes of the campus community.
—
Read President Leo Higdon’s response from April 19, 2010 here.
Read Barbara Kingsolver’s response in an interview with Samantha Herndon ’10, published April 26, 2010, here.
[…] alleged plagiarism of the 2009 student Commencement speech was clearly within the scope of Connecticut College’s […]
[…] well-written, even well-titled article about a case of plagiarism at Connecticut College. A popular and high-profile senior, chosen to deliver one of the commencement addresses last year, […]
Excellent article. Well written and unbiased. The student/alumnus speaker is in good company — Doris Kearns Goodwin and our own Vice President of the United States, to name only two. Read the Day column by David Collins for more blowback.
Great article. What St. John did was for his own glory, trying to leapfrog over others, plagerizing (stealing) from a great speach so that he would be honored.
Another glory seaker is Vice President Joe Biden who lied about his resume.
The liberal part of the press never made it an issue during the 2008 Campaign.
They were going to do anything for the Obama-Biden team to win.
What is wrong with the notion of “may the best person win” .
What a shameful reflection on an institution which contends to pride itself on academic strength and the integrity of our Honor Code. It appears that as part of the public relations flurry to bury all traces of St. John and his speech, the cry of “FERPA!” is a distraction from the matter. Does FERPA make an exception for public announcements only if they are made in quiet 8-point font?
Plagiarism is an offense specifically because it is so very public. This is a matter that should have been addressed as more than just a PR fiasco. Once put out into the world this kind of appropriation of someone else’s work as one’s own does not simply disappear. Each of the audience members who were there that day had a manipulated impression of St. John, his speech, and the quality of Conn’s academics. Surely FERPA has to do with protecting a student from having his personal records disclosed, but regarding a matter as permanent and publicly humiliating as a plagiarized commencement speech? FERPA just seems to act as a convenient excuse.
I agree with Tristan Husby that the entire matter reflects poorly on the scholarly rigor of Conn. How nice if Barbara Kingsolver was a student here. However, in a direct competition with other students for the commencement speaker position how could something with the obviousness of this word-for-word plagiarism be missed? This is not simply academic laziness on the part of a student, but academic laziness on the part of those who advised this student and vetted his speech.
So while St. John has been “justly” punished, and Barba Kingsolver has absolved us in a private letter to our president, this current approach does not do right by our principle of academic integrity or the history of Conn’s academic honor code. There is as much shame in this after-the-fact behavior as there is in the lax circumstances which allowed this speech to be given. FERPA is truly irrelevant to the matter at hand. There is an entire community of faculty and students who are here to create an upstanding academic environment. Treating this outright plagiarism in such a hush hush way, when it was our institutionally-elected student speaker is a slap in all our faces and the work that we do here.
So, huzzah to our professors for re-emphasizing the weightiness of the issue and reminding us that we are here to take our scholarship seriously! And huzzah to The College Voice reporters who tracked down this information
Lobstergate got more press than this. FERPA? What a weak excuse. No one is buying it, Higdon.
I am so curious to know what could POSSIBLY be factually incorrect, given all of the sources and quotations from administrators, students, and PSJ himself. I call bluff. Unless someone from the administration wasn’t truthful.
To The Campus Community,
We commend The College Voice for starting a public conversation about last year´s Commencement plagiarism incident. As a student newspaper, The Voice is, of course, not bound by the legal obligations to protect student privacy that prevent administrators and faculty who were involved in this case from speaking openly about it.
We wish we could correct a few factual errors, especially related to the sanctions reported in The Voice story and a subsequent column in The Day, but despite Mr. St. John´s decision to speak publicly, the College continues to be bound by the confidentiality requirements of FERPA, and we will continue to honor this commitment.
Plagiarism is wrong. Any individual´s decision to plagiarize has the potential to weaken a college community built on the foundation of an Honor Code. As we enter the final exam period, we encourage students to take this opportunity to reflect on the meaning of the Honor Code in their own lives and to renew their commitment to acting with integrity.
Roger Brooks, Dean of the Faculty
Armando Bengochea, Dean of the College Community
I agree, it made me very curious as well as to what the factual errors could be. Also, I found this e-mail rather immature to send out to the entire college. It’s basically saying, “Well, it is bad, but it’s not all true. But we can’t tell you what isn’t true, because our hands are tied. Now if you’ll excuse us, we think we see a loophole that we’re going to try to escape through.”
I’m also disappointed that the Class of 2010 won’t have a senior speaker at commencement, though next year’s class will. That was one of my college dreams, to at least try out for it.
Well written article. Bravo, Voice.
I agree. Does that mean Peter himself was lying about the sanctions since he’s the one who gave the information?
“We wish we could correct a few factual errors, especially related to the sanctions reported in The Voice story and a subsequent column in The Day, but despite Mr. St. John´s decision to speak publicly, the College continues to be bound by the confidentiality requirements of FERPA, and we will continue to honor this commitment.”
Isn’t this breach of confidentiality in and of itself if mum truly is the word? Frankly, shit or get off the pot.
This was a very very well written, factual, informative and fair article that took the time
to interview St John himself as well as faculty. The college should be very proud of the Voice
and its writers. Excellent journalism.
Ben congratulations on another well written article, you are becoming quite the muckraker.
What baffles me the most about this whole ordeal is trying to understand Peter’s motivation. There was no final grade on the line, he wasn’t in danger of failing, I mean his diploma was waiting for him on the podium! Why take the risk of submitting a speech into a competition if it is not your own work? What did he really have to gain?
I know the administration is coming under some fire for the supposed cover-up, but I think they ultimately made the right choice. What should they have done, revoked his diploma, got him fired from his job, made him repeat another 4 years of undergraduate work? I think the college made the responsible choice not to try and ruin Peter’s future.
What a disgrace. They should have revoked his diploma. He got off with barely a slap on the wrist and disgraced the college and its community publicly. The administration should have (and could have) done much more in their reaction and punishment. Even if you’re bound by FERPA there are other ways to respond than a little correction blurb. As an alumni, I can say I am distraught at the school’s ability to catch this, and even more so about its reaction.
The bright side is that this was an extremely well written and reported article. Kudos to the journalists.
Why do we at Conn so often say ‘alumni’ when referring to only one person?
Maybe the moral of this whole story is that a Connecticut College education ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Yes, Latin grammar is going to be the thing that lands you your first job. Be sure to mention that in an interview.
Let’s cut through all the technicalities of FERPA, how the college has acted upon the discovery of this plagiarism, and the pathetic spin offered by the morally adrift Mr. St. John. What shocks me to the core is how CC, a school that holds its HONOR CODE as one of its distinguishing values among institutions of learning in this country, can fail to recognize this as a failure of its system, a call to revisit with vigor its commitment to ethical behavior and zero tolerance for hypocrisy.
This is a defining moment for CC.
Agreed. Similarly to the previous “shit or get off the pot” statement – MAN UP, CC!! We’ve been taught to do so, and we’ve been taught to be honest. FERPA states that the school cannot discuss Peter’s academic records. Nobody asked to see his transcript or the like, people are merely asking for reciprocal honesty about a matter that very much concerns all of us, current students or not. It seems that people are more disturbed by Conn’s reaction than they are by Peter’s actions. I hope Big Hig has a change of heart from these commentaries.
My child graduated in this class and we were there. I never attended any of my own several graduations but of course she insisted, so we went. We loved this speech, commented on it for month and plagiarized or not, and it was the ONLY HIGHLIGHT watching our child graduate on that very cold rainy morning. So let’s hear it for Barbara Kingsolver! Surely the committee could have googled a few phrases – the college professors to that all the time to keep student plagiarism in check. On a really negative note, the keynote speaker was a complete insult – prattling on (boring as well) about how wonderful it is to graduate unemployable liberal arts majors in this economy. Foisting Martha Nussbaum on this proud graduating class was inexcusable.
I agree that this article is well written and well researched, and I agree that it is important that students be aware that, despite our Honor Code, issues of plagiarism do indeed exist on this campus. And yet, this article fails to offer any hope at finding a solution to this issue. While I understand that this is a news article, this piece focuses primarily on the outrage over the situation, and not what can be done to solve these issues. Muckraking, as Mickey correctly labels this type of journalism, is one thing. Finding ways to combat this issue would bring this article to a new, and more respectable level.
We can go on forever about the role of the administration in this incident. While FERPA is a law that the institution must adhere to, there may have been ways that the school could have better handled the situation. Or there may not have been. Yet what needs to be realized is that this school does not function through the administration alone. We are a community based on highly qualified professors and bright students who are committed to making this place better. My fear is that this article will overshadow that. When a prospective student searches Connecticut College online, what will she find first? That we have a strong psychology department, a student run coffee shop and an arboretum? Or will she find that “college administrators chose not to reveal St. John’s public display of fraud” (Gitkind & Raptopoulos)?
I don’t have an answer on how to change our policies so this type of incident doesn’t happen again, but intend to propose some in the future. But there is no use getting outraged and pointing fingers if we don’t intend to do anything about it. While journalism may intend to reveal the truth, there needs to be a certain amount of accountability a responsibility to right the wrongs that have been presented to us. That, I believe, is the only way in which we rebuild the bonds of our community.
“Muckraking, as Mickey correctly labels this type of journalism, is one thing. Finding ways to combat this issue would bring this article to a new, and more respectable level.”
You have some weird ideas about journalism, of which this piece is an extremely solid example. It isn’t a newspaper’s job to provide solutions or recommendations. This piece explores what happened, how it was handled, and its effect on the campus. It does not neglect to interview all relevant parties. It properly contextualizes without passing judgment.
The term “muckraking” is not a pejorative, by the way.
A more biased article would have pointed out that St. John’s excuse is lame and hard to believe, as it attempts to lay the blame at the feet of his unnamed friend. Excuses of haste and pressure are commonly offered by plagiarists. That he is now employed by a PR firm does not surprise me at all. I’m curious whether they’ll fire him or promote him.
Yeah! I hate when The Times just REPORTS on the war in Afghanistan. Like, why don’t YOU guys go find Bin Laden? All journalists do is complain.
To be honest, it was the best part of graduation. I am glad he copied the speech because it made the boring, boring day more interesting. He did write parts of it and why is copying someone else’s inspirational words illegal? They are meant to inspire, not anything else.
As a colleague of St John since freshmen year, I would argue that everyone is looking at this the wrong way. St John found the best words he could, couldn’t say them any better, so used them as he found them. We should be happy that someone did their research about inspirational speaking even if he wasn’t 100% honest about it.
He was an intelligent student with his head in the right place. No malicious intent, CLEARLY. So let’s all forget about this and consider :
Have you yourself have ever done some copying when you weren’t supposed to? Would you, if you were going to give a speech in front of all your peers, mentors, and family? What about if your speech preparation time fell in with your senior thesis due dates and finals?
C’mon…
wow man. i know he’s a friend and all. but grow up and get a clue. it’s a shame your CC education wasn’t more than it appears to have been.
St. John could have easily used those inspirational words if he GAVE CREDIT to Barbara Kingsolver. By not giving her credit, St. John covered them up as his own thoughts and ideas. A boring graduation could have still been livened up by a speech giving credit where it is due.
The student speaker is nominated by faculty, staff, students, then has the decision to submit an outline of his/her intended speech. After this, a few candidates are selected and they have the opportunity to write out the speech and present it to a committee. This is an OPTIONAL process. If a student is more concerned about “… speech preparation time … with your senior thesis due dates and finals?” then he or she can opt out of the process.
And to think someone thought they could get away with using a 2008 commencement address from a well-known university, presenting it to a thousand individuals or so and not get caught is ridiculous.
St. John shamed the ConnColl Community. It’s sad, really.
Suggesting that Mr. St. John’s act was “normal” and “understandable” only reinforces my concern that the collegiate culture worships excellence at any cost. The historic qualities of decency, kindness, hard work, honesty and …..noble failure seem to have less cache in this culture than contrived achievement.
I’m terribly distraught by your statements. I could not disagree more and find your apology of St. John impermissible. I think from now on I’ll lump people who share your attitude in as accomplices in his plagiarism.
I couldn’t agree more! PSJ is an amazing, hard-working and intelligent person who made CC a better place all four years, and I would be hard-pressed to find someone to disagree with me on that. He was the best part of a pretty boring and cold graduation (including Pres. Higdon and Nussbaum), and a great speaker. I believe the college handled the situation in a classy and quiet manner, dealing with situation without making it a bigger deal than it need be. But I think trying to erase Peter from the college after all he has done for them is immature and inexcusable–no matter the mistake, as is creating such a fuss over a graduation speech that occurred a year ago. Put things in perspective CC! (And grow up to those 09ers who didn’t get chosen and are still complaining–they didn’t get chosen for a reason…)
Excusing this plagarism on the grounds that the plagarist is a good guy or has done good things for the college is, simply, setting differnt standards for behavior based on personal characteristics or perceived importance to an insitution. It is precisely the sort of thinking that lets white collar criminals off the hook while petty crimes are prosecuted — beacuse, as is often claimed, he/she has done so much for the community and “except for this one awful thing that we claim to have no tolerance for” he/she is great guy/gal. Furthermore, I am not as quick as you to see being quiet and classy as a positive. To downplay the story and the implication of plagarism seems to me to raise questions about way the institution values the Honor Code, the very code that is one of critical things that makes Conn stand out among its peers.
Apparently members of the Class of ’09 cannot or will not separate the Peter St. John they know as a friend from the person they now know to be a plagiarist. That they might still be willing to suggest that he was the best part of their graduation is appalling. He showed no respect for you [his classmates], those attending, and the institution you claim he served so nobly. Once people recognize what a statement that makes about his character I hope you’ll find a way to recognize Peter the Plagiarist as the same individual as Peter the Model Student (who narcissistically justified plagiarism in order to distinguish himself even when he should have been sitting with the rest of his class watching someone else speak). Making the Two-Face into one should help you think about him in a more appropriate way.
I understand your desire to defend your friend – and though people are jumping on you for doing so – I can see what you mean in that yes, Peter St. John did do many great things for the school as Lilah and Ben pointed out in their article in the first line. Part of life, is that you can spend your whole life building your reputation, paying your dues, working your ass off – and still, if you do ONE thing wrong, especially one with the magnitude of this speech, all of that pretty much can go to shit. As far as what the punishment on St. John is – to revoke the diploma is not only impractical but that’s pretty fucking unfair too. And for those of you who said the kid’s getting nothing but a “slap on the wrist” – then you aren’t seeing the big picture. For the rest of his life, he will look back on what can be the best four years of your life with the biggest, most irreversible stain – and he put a lot of people to shame – I don’t condone what he did, it was awful. But I think the school has dug a bit of a hole for themselves in how they have dealt with this – and at this point – they are trying to dig themselves out. The Voice has given not good, but SUPERB coverage to the situation, and is stirring up great intellectual conversation and debate. But if St. John is a man, he’ll come out and apologize for what he did to the school like Higdon suggested in his letter that he wrote today and he’ll apologize for what he did and perhaps tell us what punishments he’s been given that have been so oddly closed off from us. And no matter what, this is something that’s going to plague the guy for the rest of his life.
As journalism is meant to do — it is not itself supposed to propose a solution. It’s supposed to start a conversation and initiate REAL change. This article I think did this well. Conversation about the Honor Code is something that we’ve been tiptoeing around every year I’ve been here and it has never ended in any real clear way. This, I hope, will make conversations about the effectiveness of the Code with administrators, staff, faculty, students, alumni, and more….
Not sure why some are in such a snit over CC reaction. Based on the article, it was handled appropriately. Yes the whole business is/was unfortunate. A couple of quotation marks and an oral citation would have solved the problem (reality check to one previous commentator – most people DON’T use another’s work and call it their own so that part IS a big deal!). CC should be proud of their student newspaper. Great research and writing on a difficult subject. Time to move on, though. The real world awaits!
I don’t think anyone would deny that Peter made a large mistake. As a member of the class of 2009, I do find it sad that those words I soaked up so readily on Graduation day were not Peter’s own. What started as a dark and gloomy day–a wet, windy morning in which seniors graduated into a down economy,– was made better by Peter’s supposed words of encouragement and wisdom.
That said, it was a mistake. He made an error, knowing that what he did was at the very least, embarrassing, disrespectful and irresponsible. But are we all not guilty of making at least one mistake in our lifetime? Are we all so perfect that we can allow one of our own to be skewered academically and personally by his peers?
What I find morally reprehensible is how the college community has so readily turned its back on Peter who, for all we know, may have been overwhelmed and simply cracked. It would be tragic, wouldn’t it, if he felt so much pressure from the Conn community to say something meaningful that he felt he could not do it himself and thus looked somewhere else? I feel bad that after a stunning college career, his reputation on campus has been so ruined, so erased.
Peter broke the Honor Code on what is the most sacred day in any student’s academic career, but that does not make him any more guilty than those of us who opted for violating the Honor Code on any other day. Because surely some of us forgot at least once–spilling beer on the dance floor of Cro, knocking over a trashcan, tearing down a bulletin board in a drunken haze, or even, in the midst of our own academic efforts, edging towards plagiarism–that we all pledged to take seriously the Honor Code and act with “integrity.”
I am not condoning Peter’s actions, but merely asking that people step back and remember that he is a human being, and like the rest of us, not infallible.
No one asked Peter to be infallible. He was selected to represent the best in all of us.
After reading this article, I gave Peter St.John the benefit of the doubt, but after talking to seniors in the past few days, i was surprised to find that even many of the people who knew him weren’t really surprised.
Who in their right mind has the gaul to steal someone’s work and use it as their own in front of the entire school? I think his entire academic career should be called into question, maybe even until some of his old essays were checked on turnitin.com, at the very least he should lose the job that lying helped him earn.
Maybe his privacy should be protected, but what’s to protect? The whole crime is public and yet we as its victims are not allowed to hear the courtroom verdict and judge for ourselves whether justice was served. It seems like we’re the only ones being punished.
“It appears that as part of the public relations flurry to bury all traces of St. John and his speech, the cry of “FERPA!” is a distraction from the matter. Does FERPA make an exception for public announcements only if they are made in quiet 8-point font?”
another great point. i guess condoning is ok as long as there’s solid excuse-oh wait.
I agree that this kid’s conduct was wrong. I saw this happen a few times when I was the equivalent of a public defender for students who violated the academic code at law school. Many kids in that generation don’t see copying and pasting material from the internet as morally wrong. Maybe it’s because of the low transaction costs — it’s easy to do and fast (way easier and faster than typing your own words out) — or maybe because the words are so easily accessible (in ancient times St. John would have had to ask Jim McDonald at the reference desk of Shain for a book on commencement speeches to find these words) or maybe it’s for some other reason. For instance, that generation may have less respect for intellectual property rights because they were in middle school when they looked up to us while we were cavalierly taking music for free off Napster. Whatever the reason, the moral lens through which they view the acquisition and use of intellectual property is different from what we currently accept as a society. I’m not putting this up as an excuse, just an explanation for his — or his partner-in-crime’s — conduct.
What we do with him and how we publicize it is a whole other ball of wax. St. John plagiarized, and whether he knew he was stealing the words of Kingsolver or thought he was taking the words of his friend, he knew they were someone else’s words. Had he truly believed the latter, we could forgive him for believing that he had the consent of his friend to use these words, but he is still guilty of misleading the entire community into believing they were his words. Unfortunately for us, and luckily for St. John, Connecticut College lacks the tools necessary to punish St. John the way he could be punished were he a student. Tools like suspension, public apology to the community, or lengthy hours of community service (unpropping doors for campus safety on a Saturday night for instance) are at the college’s disposal when they still hold the Damoclesian right to expel someone from the College, but having conferred a diploma, the College’s options for punishment are limited to either rescission of that diploma, making that person persona-non-grata on campus, or disassociating itself from the person and their action. The College has taken the second and third steps but taking the first requires more than one instance of plagiarism, no matter how grand or embarrassing. Had he given this speech and the community had found out about it while he was still a student, we wouldn’t have expelled him, especially given how much he gave back to the community during his time there. Part of the reason we send kids to college, and especially to a place as warm and fuzzy as Connecticut College, is to put them in an environment where they can make mistakes, even big ones, and have a safety net to catch them and guidance to correct them. St. John made his biggest mistake just before we took his safety net away. Lucky him.
I am disappointed in the College’s failure to inform the entire alumni community. The College thinks to send emails whenever Lee Higdon writes an op-ed piece in the Day, and there is no excuse for not informing the community of this incident too. Had the College promptly told us the actions it had taken, I would have thought more highly of the College for identifying the problem and taking appropriate action against St. John. Alumni are more likely to support an honest institution that admits its mistakes publicly and quickly.
This brings me to my last point. Ultimately, this was the College’s fault for not catching this when then did. There are many great programs that comb the internet for text from documents submitted by students and thereby catch plagiarism. Professors have been using this software for years. The fact that we don’t use this technology the safeguard the integrity of our most important student interaction with the community is a glaring failure. Peter St. John is just a kid that we let make a huge and embarrassing mistake. Having the community see him as merely that is probably punishment enough for someone who probably saw himself as a Connecticut College golden boy. Our job is to take this lesson and apply it by doing a better job of better understanding the new moral compass of that generation and taking steps to correct it or adapt to it. As Kingsolver tried to emphasize in her 2008 speech to the Duke graduating class, we cannot be successful if we “operat[e] on software that hasn’t been updated for a good while.” (and yes, I copied and pasted that from the internet)
A Broader Picture:
The college’s trajectory must be question, possibly even the leadership Higdon as brought to our administration. Let’s review recent events, just the facts. I will leave my comments to the end, but anyone should feel free to correct any issues of fact if I got them wrong.
– Conn’s ranking has dropped in US News (from I believe the mid
30’s to 40)
– Recent Huffington Post articles ranked the college as both
highly “preppy” and “expensive”
– The college last year responded to a now notorious lobster dinner
in Harris with blast emails, coming within days of the event.
– The college recently released a “new” camel for athletics
As for the most St. John’s blatant plagiarism:
– The plagiarism of St. John received, from an alumni perspective,
1 vague email. No further follow up has been seen.
– Emails to the college community (alumni and current) only came
following a College Voice Article
– The retractions and corrections were in small font, rear of
college’s magazine
The picture here is a bleak one. Rankings haven fallen, prices have risen and inside the college administration, from the top down, appears to be out of touch with the student body and the college’s culture.
The lobster event was largely blown out of perspective, hardly warranting any attention. For those of you unfamiliar- several students purchased lobsters, brought them to Harris Dinning and sat down and ate them. The students, if I recall correctly, were white. The event was a joke and mocking of the college’s tradition of lobster dinner once a year in the dining hall. Administration highlighted this as both a racial incident and time to create campus discussions on race and class. Lobster mind you is/was all of about $5 lb/person, and most consensus (students and many faculty) was “it’s a lobster?” and “why is this an issue?”. Say what you will, lobsters got more attention than lies.
St. Johns Plagiarism is nothing more than that; pure, blatant fraud. The response? None whatsoever, until the College Voice broke the story. Then? A single email to alumni, no further follow up. This in a school with an honor code. A proven case of outright dishonesty, at arguably one of the college’s most public events, and a cover up? Sweep it under the rug, nothing of serious note? As further details emerge the campus has received emails. Alumni have not, I at least have seen none.
The college image and rankings- What I believe draws many to the college, among other reasons, is the honor code, campus and to a certain extent the image- what will this degree do for me in the future? Rankings have fallen. The college has not risen in notoriety in positive ways. The college’s image efforts recently turned to our beloved camel. A symbol of the academics first, non-aggressive, no frats, honor code school was assaulted by a sea monster-esque, winged aggressor. Where did the need even emerge from? I certainly recall no dining hall conversations of “You know what President Higdon, we need a “new” camel, and make him aggressive”. Posts to Conn’s facebook page bare out just this reality. Nearly 100 complaints. Justifications that this was for varsity sports only do little to justify the investment. We are, arguably a community, not academics here, sports there. Furthermore, anyone got a number on how much was paid out for a camel that doesn’t even match the survey results?
Let me end with this- Is Connecticut College on the right path?
Additionally, the 2010 commencement planners have removed the student speaker position from this year’s program for the first time in at least ten years.
Briddell made clear that while the Class of 2010’s lack of a selected senior speaker appears to be related, it was a discussion that began before the incident. It will be reinstituted next year in lieu of the Class President speech.
“Appears to be related”? Whether or not the “discussion … began before the incident,” there is now no way to separate the crime of a member of the class of ’09 and the punishment being meted out to the class of ’10.
If anything, the college should make sure that there is a student speaker this year, and if a competition needs to be held to determine who that speaker will be, the committee would do well to assign a theme of the ethical and moral as well as criminal perils of plagiarism in the larger life of the world, beyond the college community. Let this year’s graduating class provide a well reasoned response to the despicable behavior of the so-called spokesman for last year’s class.
Further, that anyone could condone St. John’s actions based on the notion that he made commencement more memorable and stimulating, when the other speakers were “boring,” is so reprehensible as to be beyond comment.
Shame on the administration for taking away the student speaker from a class that has done nothing to deserve this sanction, and congratulations to The Voice for bringing out a good piece on the incident.
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