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The Revelation of St. John ’09: Student Commencement Speech Found to be Largely Plagiarized

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.”

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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?”

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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.

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