Hegseth faces plagiarism accusations by Princeton | Political News

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been accused of plagiarism by the scholar paper at Princeton University — his alma mater.

The Daily Princetonian alleges that Hegseth’s 2003 senior thesis accommodates eight cases of “uncredited material, sham paraphrasing, and verbatim copying.”

Hegseth’s thesis, titled “Modern Presidential Rhetoric and the Cold War Context,” was reviewed by three plagiarism specialists, who stated they weren’t made conscious of the identification of the writer before assessing the work, The Independent reported.

In one of the eight examples, Hegseth reportedly wrote about President George W. Bush’s response to being advised of the first assault on the World Trade Center in New York on 9/11, writing, “After Card’s whisper, Bush looked distracted and somber but continued to listen to the second-graders, joking that they ‘read like sixth-graders.'”

But an article in The Washington Post that was printed in 2001 reads, “After Card’s whisper, Bush looked distracted and somber but ontinued to listen to the second-graders, read and soon was smiling again. He joked that they read so well, they must be sixth-graders.”

That article from the Post will not be cited in Hegseth’s paper. Plagiarism detection fashions flagged 12 passages in the thesis.

The specialists flagged all 12, but famous that 4 weren’t important enough to be regarding and as a substitute “fit a broader pattern of some form of plagiarism.”

All of the specialists consulted stated the passages violated Princeton’s tutorial honesty laws, but that they had differing opinions on whether or not the cases have been severe enough to matter.

James M. Lang, the writer of Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty, known as the case “borderline,” telling the Princetonian, “There’s no silver bullet here; there’s no smoking gun in terms of a deep example of plagiarism.”

Instead, he stated there was more “gray than black and white,” with about half of the examples of plagiarism being severe and the opposite half being only minor.

One of the examples in which the specialists differ accommodates a passage the protection secretary wrote about the Berlin Wall speech by former President John F. Kennedy.

“The Berlin Wall speech represents a rare occurrence in presidential rhetoric; caught up in the emotion of the moment, Kennedy, who had just given a speech about the need for peace, got carried away and just ad-libbed the opposite, saying there was no way to work with the Communists,” Hegseth wrote.

The passage is markedly comparable to one in the e-book President Kennedy: Profile of Power by Richard Reeves, who wrote, “In his enthusiasm, Kennedy, who had just given a peace speech and was trying to work out a test ban treaty with the Soviets, had gotten carried away and just ad-libbed the opposite, saying there was no way to work with Communists.”

Reeves, however, is cited in Hegseth’s paper, even for that sentence, but there aren’t any citation marks around it. Lang views the incident as severe, but Jonathan Baily, who runs the web site Plagiarism immediately, advised the Princetonian that he did not see that or any of the opposite seven as egregious.

“Even the ones that were more direct still typically only involve a sentence or two at a time,” Bailey said. Guy Curtis, the third expert the paper spoke to, who is a researcher at the University of Western Australia studying academic integrity, said the thesis violatd rules as set by the university regarding unattributed copying.

“Once you get 10 to 15 phrases in a row by ‘accident’ that occur to correspond with one thing else — it’s in all probability not unintended,” Curtis told the publication.

There are no rules, however, governing cases of plagiarism issues discovered after a student’s graduation. Bailey believes they can simply be explained by sloppiness or oversight.

“This doesn’t match the sample of somebody who went into this intentionally, maliciously making an attempt to plagiarize their means to ending it,” Bailey said. “This looks as if it was just poor writing techniques and poor methodology.”

Following the publication of The Daily Princetonian’s article, Chief Pentagon Spokesperson Sean Parnell issued a statement to military.com defending Hegseth’s academic integrity.

“Secretary Hegseth has written 5 books. He’s written lots of of papers and op-eds. During the affirmation course of, every phrase was reviewed by high left-wing law companies working in conjunction with every media outlet in the nation,” Parnell began.

“They discovered no plagiarism because there was no plagiarism. This is a pretend story designed to distract from the DoD’s historic accomplishments under President Trump and Secretary Hegseth’s management,” he added.