Work hard and tell the truth

As fires raged across much of Washington and Oregon this summer — and as drought continued to afflict California — another western state suffered from damage of another kind: In late July, the New York Times reported that Sen. John Walsh, D-Mont., had plagiarized most of his master's thesis at the U.S. Army War College.

Walsh had taken close to one-third of his thesis word for word — without attribution — from documents published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and from an essay by a scholar at Harvard — all of which were available online. Another third of his thesis consisted of word-for-word theft marked only by footnotes. (When writers use footnotes after material that does not appear within quotation marks, it means — or should mean — that the language is their own but they owe ideas or information to the source being cited.)

Walsh was a colonel at the time he plagiarized — a colonel who had commanded American soldiers in Iraq. Thanks in part to his fraudulently attained degree, he would go on to be appointed adjunct general of Montana's National Guard — and in February 2014, to be appointed to fill the vacancy in the Senate created when Max Baucus resigned to become ambassador to China. Until news of his plagiarism surfaced, Walsh seemed to have achieved a distinguished record.

Cheats of all kind should take note of this case, quaint though it may seem in an era when parents have reason to worry if their children will be gunned down at school (and generals enjoy the authority to send some of them into combat after the age of 18).

As a new school year begins, students, parents and educators should resolve to work hard and tell the truth — resisting (among other temptations) the appeal of downloading work from the Internet and passing it off as one's own, copying the work of someone else, hiring someone to complete an assignment, or rewriting someone's essay while pretending only "to correct" it.

So here is some quick advice for all concerned.

Students: Do not cheat. There are many temptations to do so, and the possibility of short-term gratification. But the ultimate result is disgrace — as the Walsh case shows.

Educators: No one becomes a teacher in order to act like a member of the Plagiarism Police. And experienced teachers understand that students can sometimes plagiarize inadvertently — by, say, accidentally forgetting to put quotation marks around a memorable phrase or by echoing someone else's argument too closely when writing from memory.

But that does not eliminate the need to be alert for cheats, sad though that duty may be. And that means teachers need to examine work closely.

Anyone making a serious assignment should be prepared to teach how it can be completed successfully and then examine whatever is submitted, not just flip through pages. (And, yes, I am aware that many teachers are overworked.) As someone who taught writing for more than 30 years, I know that the prose of students — even that of graduate students — is unlikely to have the depth or polish achieved by the seasoned scholars who craft papers for publication by Carnegie or Harvard. The teacher at the Army College who supervised Walsh's thesis failed in the line of duty.

As for Walsh: His master's degree should be revoked and his pension reduced to that of the rank he held when he first chose to cheat (and we now know that he lied even about the school from which he earned his bachelor's degree). Then, if anyone under his command died in the line of duty, the junior senator from Montana should start writing new letters of condolence — using his own ideas and his own language.