So how big a deal is it when a candidate for governor commits plagiarism?
According to the candidate in question, former Congressman Scott McInnis, who’s seeking the Republican nomination for Colorado’s highest office, it’s not that important. After being accused of plagiarism, he told a Denver television station that “Voters don’t really care about this issue. They care about jobs, getting back to work.”
McInnis wrote a series of articles about Colorado water issues in 2005-2006 as a “senior fellow” for a foundation. The articles, which were not publicly distributed at the time, came to light this year during the campaign. And it turned out that some of his work was taken, almost word-for-word, from an article — “Green Mountain Reservoir: Lock or Key?” — written by Gregory J. Hobbs and published in 1984 by the Colorado Water Congress. McInnis provided no attribution, not even a footnote.
Perhaps voters in general don’t care about plagiarism. But as a member of the despised “chattering class,” I find it disgusting, and I’ll explain why. But first, a little background.
After service in the state Legislature, McInnis was elected in 1992 to represent Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District, a swath from Grand Junction to Pueblo. Term limits were fashionable then, and he promised to serve no more than three terms — a pledge he broke by seeking re-election in 1998.
He left office in 2005 and signed on to use his governmental experience and contacts for a big Denver law firm. But he also hired on as a “senior fellow” with the Hasan Family Foundation, based in Pueblo. He was to receive $150,000 a year for two years to write articles and give talks about Colorado water. As Seeme Hasan, who chairs the foundation, explained in a Denver Post op-ed, Colorado was suffering from a long drought, and the foundation deemed it important to get someone prominent to make the case for Colorado developing its full share of water under the 1922 Colorado River Compact.
After the first two years and $300,000, the McInnis fellowship was not renewed. The writing that McInnis submitted to the foundation was not made public until recently, after some prodding by Jason Salzman, a Colorado journalist.
And then reporter Karen Crummy of the Denver Post discovered that some of McInnis’ material, concerning the operation of Green Mountain Reservoir on the Blue River, was taken almost word-for-word from an article by Hobbs, a water lawyer then who is now an associate justice of the Colorado Supreme Court.
McInnis blamed his “research advisor,” Rolly Fischer of Glenwood Springs, a water engineer who had served as chairman of the Colorado River Water Conservation District. Fischer said McInnis had told him to put together some background material in preparation for a 2008 run for the U.S. Senate, and he had no idea the work was for publication.
So there’s the story, in brief. And here’s why it bothers me so much:
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1) The $150,000-a-year “fellowship” for writing and speaking about Colorado water issues doesn’t pass the laugh test. I can think of several people — Chris Woodka at the Pueblo Chieftain, Jerd Smith of the deceased Rocky Mountain News, fellow freelancer Allen Best, retired professor George Sibley, blogger John Orr, former farmer John Mattingly, even my not-so-humble self — who could have done a better job of this than McInnis. And I am sure there are many more.
McInnis didn’t get that sweet gig because of his deep water knowledge or writing ability. He just got it as a kind of sinecure, one way the establishment looks after its own. It demonstrates once again that who you are is a lot more important than what you know or how well you do your work.
2) For further evidence that McInnis was getting paid for something other than his writing, note that aside from the known plagiarized portions, McInnis is a terrible writer.
Consider the start of McInnis’ first piece for the foundation:
“WATER! It’s an absolute human and economic necessity. WATER! You and I cannot live without it. Colorado’s economy and people absolutely depend on water. The water we use day-to-day comes mostly from mountain snow melt — some from rain — but mostly snow melt.”
A high-school composition teacher would tell students not to use all capitals and exclamation points to call attention to certain words, and to avoid redundancy, such using “mostly from mountain snow melt” and “mostly snow melt” in the same sentence.
3) Except on the rare day off, I work hard all day to come up with original work that is well-researched. I do it for a lot less than $150,000 a year. And I don’t know any writer personally who makes anything like that kind of money.
Yet we all strive to do such work as we can find with competence and honesty. Is there some good reason why we shouldn’t be angry about the McInnis deal, which rewarded a fellow who appeared to have trouble writing a telegram home for money?
4) In the writing business, plagiarism is a big deal. It’s a form of theft.
Plagiarism is passing someone else’s work off as your own. If McInnis had forged a signature to access someone else’s bank account, would it still be something “voters don’t care about”? Is there a moral difference between stealing the fruits of someone else’s labor — fruits stored in a bank account — and putting your name on the fruits of someone else’s labor and getting paid (quite well) for it?
It’s something a writer is always worried about, because you can never be sure that a phrase or sentence that leaps to mind is original, or something you read or heard somewhere. It happens to the best of us — Stephen J. Ambrose, Alex Haley, Doris Kearns Goodwin — in part because it’s so damned hard to avoid, even when you’re making the effort.
But was McInnis even making the effort? Initially he blamed this on a researcher. That’s somewhere past disgusting. He wasn’t even supposed to have a researcher — his agreement with the Foundation said he was supposed to do all the work himself. And if he did hire a ghostwriter under the table, why didn’t he tell the writer what was going on, that this was work for publication, instead of pretending it was campaign research?
And it doesn’t matter that once this came out, he agreed to repay the foundation — he took the money then, and he would have kept it if there had been no outcry. He’s only embarrassed that he got caught, not that he plagiarized.
5) A few years ago, the University of Colorado fired Professor Ward Churchill after a faculty committee’s investigation found him guilty of plagiarism, among other academic misconduct. And I supported that decision, even though it meant agreeing with a lot of red-meat Republicans, because I believe an academic institution should not tolerate academic fraud.
So why should we tolerate similar fraud in other arenas? If Churchill mattered, so does McInnis.
Granted, writers — be they journalists, bloggers, columnists, freelancers — likely care more about the McInnis plagiarism scandal than run-of-the-mill voters. We know how hard we would have worked to earn $150,000 a year, and we see how poorly McInnis performed. So damn right a lot of us are steamed. But I suspect voters are going to wonder why they should trust McInnis with his promise of “jobs, jobs, jobs” when he couldn’t be trusted to turn in his own work.
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