“At first I was incredulous, since I remember Professor Watts as a brilliant and honorable scholar. Yet, after reviewing her book, I can only conclude with shock and great disappointment that she had engaged herself in massive and deliberate theft of my research, my conclusions, and my words. In fact, there are pages of identical or parallel passages, including whole paragraphs lifted word for word.”
Across the room, Vanessa slumped into herself. Amazingly she did not protest but stood glaring at the screen in strange resignation. A stunned hush fell on the crowd, which stood transfixed at the split screen with pages from Blake’s dissertation juxtaposed with those from Vanessa Watts’s book.
“Aside from a few feeble attempts at rewording, large passages are nearly identical, as you can see,” Blake continued. “I don’t know what your motives were, Professor Watts. Perhaps you had just assumed that because I was a lowly grad student you could help yourself to my material while I disappeared into the world and my dissertation molded away in the basement of Middlesex Library. What amazes and saddens me even more is that nowhere in your book am I acknowledged—not a single word of attribution. It pains me, but I accuse you of gross theft of intellectual property, and a violation of trust.”
Vanessa put her hand over her eyes, while her husband tried to comfort her. Meanwhile, the tape continued. “I have informed my attorneys to file suit against—”
“Turn the goddamn thing off,” Brad Watts shouted. “Turn it off!”
The picture went dead.
While the crowd looked on in disbelief, Vanessa pulled herself free of her husband and walked out of the room without a word. Brad began to follow, but she waved him back and left.
“My God,” whispered Rachel to Martin. “That poor woman.”
Vanessa rode around for nearly two hours hoping to find her center again. She had no place to go, nor did she want to drive home and face her family. Although Lisa was sleeping over at a girlfriend’s house and Julian would be doing his silent-troll routine (he couldn’t care less about her), Brad would want a full explanation.
In one stunning moment, she had been totally and permanently destroyed. And tomorrow, to forestall litigation, her publisher would publicly express embarrassment and apologize for the gross act of plagiarism and announce that it was halting distribution of her book, and that all fifty thousand copies would be taken off the market and destroyed—and that the twenty thousand scheduled for release in the UK and Europe next month would also be junked. The press would crackle with scathing indictments, contempt, and ridicule from colleagues and associates at Middlesex and other institutions around the country. Some would speculate on reasons—arrogance, entitlement, and academic pressure. Others would offer up the “death wish” theory, since this was such a careless, wholesale case of plagiarism.
The president would apologize while expressing concern for the kind of example this set for students and faculty alike, declaring something to the effect: “Originality like free expression is sacred in the academic world. This is an utter abuse of our trust as well as an affront to the academy and an example of intellectual corrosion.”
For the next several days, her telephone would ring off the hook with reporters scrambling for a statement— for the scoop on her ruination. There would be an inquiry at the university; and in a few weeks she’d be relieved from her teaching post. Meanwhile, her publisher would demand reimbursement of the $70,000 advance and present a bill for another few hundred thousand dollars to cover the cost of the worldwide withdrawal and destruction of her books.
By this time next week, she, like her book, would be pulped.
As she drove around in the thick of the night, the reality of it all had hit her, rising up from that warm protected recess of her mind where she had packed it away for all these years. Joshua Blake was right: She was a plagiarist. She had stolen his work. And in the world of academic publications, that was the highest crime— tantamount to murder and suicide.
She had taken his material not because it was so much better than hers, but because she was desperate to get the book into production and out in time for the 2003 George Orwell centennial. Adding to the pressure was her publisher’s insistence that the book had high sales potential—a promise, which realized, could reduce the enormous debt incurred by Julian’s enhancement and pricey education.
She had done it for him, she told herself. For Julian. She’d been on an unpaid leave of absence, racing to meet deadlines so he could nurture his genius. For her son. A mother’s sacrifice.
As for the actual plagiarism, she was certain she could have come up with Blake’s very insights. He had not made any conclusions of which she was incapable. In fact, she had felt entitled to them—more so for being his former advisor. And, yes, she had assumed he had disappeared and would never know.
And she had done it before. At Littleton College in New York where she had plagiarized a paper on Jonathan Swift in a graduate eighteenth-century course. At the time she was a doctoral student and a TA, and under tremendous pressure to excel at both. But she was young and foolish and for twenty dollars bought a paper on Jonathan Swift from one of those term-paper houses. Unfortunately, the same paper had been turned in the year before to the same professor. She had done stuff like that in undergraduate school, but this time she was given a term’s suspension—a permanent note on her transcript.
Vanessa’s insides were wracked with agony, but she did not go directly home. Instead she drove in the dark talking into her portable tape recorder, the one she kept in her car and used while working on her book. Her remarks were brief and pointed. When she was through, she drove to the home of the Whitmans and dropped off the recorder with tape in the glove compartment of Rachel’s Maxima. Luckily the car was unlocked.
She then drove home.
Brad had left the downstairs lights on, but the rest of the interior was dark. All but Julian’s room.
She didn’t want to see him. She didn’t want to see anybody. All she wanted to do was go into a deep sleep and not come out of it. Thankfully, Brad had probably given up waiting and gone to bed.
She looked up at Julian’s bedroom.
She pulled the car into the garage. Julian’s skis were hanging up along the back wall. New parabolics that had cost over seven hundred dollars. They had been used once, on their winter vacation in Vail last year. He had no interest in skiing, and the entire week he spent inside the condo doing his pictures—stippling away like some crazed gnome. He had gotten soft and flabby, and given up everything physical. At school he was known as “Dots.”
She unlocked the door and pushed her way inside. Except for the hum of the refrigerator, the place was dead quiet. The only relief from the dark was the light strip under Julian’s door at the top of the stairs.
Vanessa climbed the stairs, feeling old and weary. On the landing she looked into the master bedroom. Brad was asleep. She then stopped just outside of Julian’s door and listened. Nothing. No CD, no television, no sound of some mindless video game. He had probably fallen asleep on his bed. Good. She’d just flick off his light and let him sleep out the night.
She tapped quietly. Although he slept little, he would occasionally pass out from sheer exhaustion. She tapped again, and still nothing. Gently she turned the knob and pushed open the door.
Julian was not in bed but at his workbench.
The halogen lamp glowed brilliantly over the tilt board. His back was to her and his head was hunched below his shoulders. For a moment she thought that he had fallen asleep in place, because he did not move as she entered. But as she moved closer, she noticed his left hand.
“You’re still up.” She tried to sound pleasant, but the effort was strained. The public humiliation had its source in him; and at the moment it took every fiber of her being to feign civility.
