The university president Rufo installed at New College can't get caught in a plagiarism scandal, because Richard Corcoran has never published an academic paper. He doesn't even have a master's degree.
If Rufo himself were shown to have plagiarized, right now, it would change nothing. He would lose no credibility with his base, his plan wouldn't change, and mainstream news would pretend it's beneath them to report on it.
His credentials are DeSantis appointed him Public Education Czar of Florida after homeschooling his kids before sending them to a charter school his wife is CEO of. 🤦♂️
I’d like to see someone start matching his book to all previously published content. We all absorb phrases or get sloppy in note-taking and end up reproducing similar phrases and sentences when saying something others have already said.
Yes, the supposed "plagiarism" of Gay's acknowledgements seems like it may be repeating common phrases.
Remember "give purchase" going around a few years ago?
But, there are still issues beyond that and the "open text"ish citation of narrow methods (which I guess is OK in quantitative social sci).
She was absolutely too sloppy at times. It would be frowned on in humanities. A student was using a weird word to describe a phenomenon in her diss. I just thought it was a weird word and made her change it. The other day I realized her source for it.
But also? I figured her source from a book I was reading that she couldn’t have read. I traced the strange usage backwards through several generations of Roman historians. Nobody cited anyone. In 2023, the phrase sounded weird and not at all like the student (as she is not a Brit in her late 80s).
No! I have phrases and words that are echoes of my diss advisor. This was a phrase that originated with the great Peter Brown and then got picked up by one of his earliest doctoral students and disseminated from there. It looks like it was not really used after 2000.
Unfortunately, I can't find his thesis on HOLLIS (assuming that it is under his own name). I suspect it's under MyDCE, but only someone with a login could check that.
You still have to have a senior paper for your Bachelor's degree. The question is whether they still have any records of them. A University President is an administrative job. I'd propose someone who had held admin/operations jobs for 30-40 yrs in Academia just as qualified as a Masters holder.
1. He went to St. Leo, which does not have a senior thesis (and only one college I ever taught at had them for non-honors students)
2. His only experience in academia was a short stint as the state education commissioner, which is not really academia at all
Not where I got mine, anyway. I mean, I certainly wrote a raft of papers during the course of my undergraduate career, but not specifically a senior paper for the degree.
