Harvard's Election 2008 Blog

I hate being so negative, but since we’re all mature college students here, who are acutely aware of what it means to plagiarize, I couldn’t help digging up this skeleton from Biden’s past.

It turns out Joe Biden has had an unflattering tendency to copy papers and speeches from other authors without giving proper attribution. For those of us who were following politics back in 1987, you might remember the plagiarism controversy which ended Biden’s first bid for the presidency. Here’s a NY Times article from September 18, 1987 if you want to check it out:

NY TIMES: BIDEN ADMITS TO PLAGIARISM IN SCHOOL BUT SAYS IT WAS NOT "MALEVOLENT"

(Lest I commit the same error, let it be known that the proceeding information was pulled from said NY Times article)

According to the article, the Biden ’88 campaign was called out for plagiarizing large portions of a speech from Neil Kinnock who had been a British Labor Party official at the time.

But that’s not all. The political mudslingers of ’88 dug deeper and discovered he had failed a class and was almost dismissed from Syracuse Law School in 1965 when it was discovered that he had ''used five pages from a published law review article without quotation or attribution'' in one of his papers. In his defense, Biden claimed that he “had simply misunderstood the need to cite sources carefully.” In the end, Biden ended up graduating 76th in a class of 85 (not too shabby compared to McCain being 5^th from last at the Naval Academy). For those interested in his undergraduate performance, his grades weren’t any better (e.g. mostly C’s, D’s, an F in R.O.T.C.  but an A in P.E.)

Not that this should have any effect on the campaign, but for those of us who actually write our papers, if you’re ever feeling down, take pride in the fact that you have greater academic integrity than Joe Biden had at about your age (or, at least, you have superior knowledge of the fact that you should cite your sources).

For any aspiring politicians who plan on plagiarizing a paper or speech in the future, I recommend you look up “Plagiarism” on Wikipedia and look for “Joe Biden.”