Cheater = Historian?

In my earlier litany about cheaters and liars in the history profession, I left out Jayme Sokolow. This incredible scoundrel walked the campus of Texas Technique in the mid-1970s before he was found out as a serial plagiarizer. After being run out of Lubbock, he surfaced elsewhere as a plagiarist, going to the National Endowment for the Humanities from Texas Technique. One of the best of the rest was the prexy of Southwest Texas State University (LBJ's alma mater, now Texas State University) in the late 1960s. James McCrocklin copied a U. S. Marine Corps historical document about the occupation of Haiti in the 1930s verbatim and passed it off as his dissertation ("Garde D' Haiti, 1915-1934: Twenty Years of Organization and Training by the U.S.M.C") for a Ph.D. in history at The University as the Longhorn faithful are wont to call it. UT-Austin rescinded McCrocklin's degree and he resigned his presidency. LBJ then gave McCrocklin a job at HEW (before there was a Department of Education). Moral: if you have more nerve than a government mule, plagiarize 'til the cows come home. If this is (fair & balanced) sleaze, so be it.

"My history professor plagiarizes, so why can't I?"
Copyright © 2005 Matthew Henry Hall and The Chronicle of Higher Education
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