Double standard

Today's NYT deals with something that has long irked me: the double standard on academic plagiarism. If a student commits academic dishonesty and is caught, the penalty is course failure, probation, suspension, or outright expulsion. The transgression exists on the student's academic record until the end of time, limiting their ability to move on from the incident. I'm not saying this punishment is unjustified. But as the article highlights, very different standards exist for quote-unquote "star" professors who commit the same offense. Some names associated with Harvard's plagiarism mill include Lawrence Tribe and Doris Kearns Goodwin; elsewhere it is the (late) pop-academic star Stephen Ambrose. Who knows how many else are out there. The punishments for such academics are unclear at best, but they certainly do not include the loss of tenure. Their excuses are no better than those of student plagiarists: "the error, he said, had occurred in his rush to meet a final deadline, when a pair of research assistants inserted the material into a draft of his manuscript and accidentally dropped the quotation marks and attribution". So we give credit to these "star" professors for brilliant academic work when it is others who do the heavy lifting, yet when it comes time to dole out punishment, it is the grad students who are to blame? Then a scholar offers this preposterous reasoning for the lack of consummate punishment: 'Some scholars argued that Professor Ogletree's statement was a public humiliation more severe than any punishment that could be meted out to a student. "The discovery is the punishment," Professor Gillers said.' But isn't a college student subjected to just as excruciating and experience among peers and family, let alone employers and other institutions that may consider readmitting them to higher education? And at the beginning of their professional lives, academic or otherwise, surely the effect of such ostracism is greater when you do not have a job guaranteed through tenure. As is noted in the article, it is probably unrealistic to expect the professor to be dismissed, since the market for star academics is limitless. But isn't the lack of punishment for such transgressions an admission of lower standards for those who should be held to the highest? And if you are going to toss out a freshman for plagiarism, shouldn't you stiffen the punishment on a professor who, after all those years and advanced degrees, should know better?