WorldNetDaily: Prof says he ghostwrote, didn't plagiarize, articles

Professor Churchill, I have a partnership stake in a bridge spanning the East River that I would like to offer for sale.

To recap, Ward Churchill is answering ethics charges at the University of Colorado, all alleging plagiarism of various kinds. He has reached a point in the proceedings where the investigating committee has turned up five essays with prose similar to that which Churchill has used on some of his screeds. So now he says that the original words on those other essays were his to begin with--because he ghostwrote them.

Nobody's name went on a piece I wrote that they didn't know about. They agreed with it or didn't care one way or another or just wanted a resume hit.

Now let me get this straight: Ward Churchill wrote those essays and then, as a personal favor, put other people's names on them? That sounds fishy in itself. Furthermore, an academic ethics expert says that the very idea of such ghostwriting violates several ethical precepts.

Well, I'm not an academician, so I'm not up on the ethics of ghostwriting in the halls of academe. But this much I know about commercial ghostwriting, from my own experiences registering an unpublished novel and a piece of software at the Copyright Office.

The key phrase here is work made for hire. Writing anything is like building a house. If you build the house you intend to live in, and pay your own expenses, then you own it. But if you build a house and then, whether for any consideration or no consideration, hand over the keys to another person, you may not live in that house.

And so it is with works made for hire. Copyright Office Circular No. 9 is explicit: works made for hire belong to the person who commissioned them and not to the person who actually penned them. So if Ward Churchill did copy any part of prose that he wrote under someone else's by-line into another work appearing under his by-line, that's the equivalent of a house builder retaining an extra key on the sly and letting himself in to raid the icebox any time he pleases! And just as illegal--that's right, illegal!

That university committee seems to be worried that he has broken faith by writing essays for other people who needed to "publish or perish." But what he's actually done, by telling that ridiculous story, is lay himself wide-open to a lawsuit and possibly to criminal prosecution. Add to it that one of his five so-called ghostwriting clients, who happens to be his ex-wife, flatly denies that Ward Churchill ever did her any such favor!

When you're in a hole, stop digging. And when every word you say makes your behavior sound worse, just shut up!