UTEP might need to legally re-define what appears to be the English Departments' view that a plagiarist is any female student whose instructor has her (or his) own ideologically ho-driven political agenda.

"Why?

"Because neither of the two out-of-state to UTEP female transfer students, both friends of one another, who in the Fall of 2004 were charged by their English professor with plagiarism were named Kaavya Viswanathan.

"Instead, one woman had openly exercised her constitutional right to free expression by publicly announcing her preference for one presidential contender over the other, in yet another English class that all three of us attended.

"And, just for that, apparently the two womens' other UTEP English professor decided both women had to pay."


Now: what follows is a classic example of a real-deal plagiarist. Big time!

Kaavya Viswanathan, a 19-year-old sophomore at Harvard has signed a reported deal close to $500,000 for two novels with Little, Brown.

Newsweek, March 6, 2006.

Oh, my goodness: and then what?

The realities of Hothouse Harvard

PHILIP DELVES BROUGHTON sheds no tears for Harvard's pushy, rat-racing, ladder-climbing students.

THE FIRST POST -- THE ONLINE DAILY MAGAZINE
First Posted May 3, 2006

"From my window on the campus of Harvard Business School I can see rowers on the Charles River, joggers from early in the morning until late at night and students hurtling around with laptops swinging from their arms. Harvard has such seriouusness of purpose that just admiring it can be exhausting.

"So when Kaavya Viswanathan, a young Indian student, is found to have cribbed her teen novel -- today withdrawn from sale by her publishers -- she becomes an object of national derision and a a symbol of all that is wrong with Harvard."

FOR MORE OF THIS STORY:

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/index.php?menuID=2&subID=484

Teenage writer

"SIR -- I liked your article on Kaavya Viswanathan (no relation), but I don't think it tells the whole story about US publishing. A book packager named Alloy Entertainment holds the copyright to the book along with the author, which is certianly unusual form a legal perspective. More unusual is the defense: all teenaers lie a little.

"Of course.

"But they don't usually get $500,000 for it."

NEERJA VISWANATHAN VIA EMAIL

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/index.php?menuID=1&subID=448

Sophomore's New Book Contains Passages Strikingly Similar to 2001 Novel

By DAVID ZHOU, Crimson Staff Writer, The Harvard Crimson, Published On 4/23/2006

"Reached on her cell phone Saturday night, Viswanathan said, No comment, I have no idea what you are talking about.

"[Megan F.] McCafferty, the author of three novels and a former editor at the magazine Cosmopolitan, wrote in an email to The Crimson Saturday night: I'm laready aware of this situation, and so is my publisher.

"Representatives from Little, Brown have not returned requests for comment.

"Dream Works has purchased the movie rights to Viswanathan's novel. A Dream Works spokesman, Bob Feldman, said Saturday night that the studio could not immediately respond."

For more details:

http://www.thecrimson.com/printerfriendly.aspx?ref=512968