well, huh: Goodwin's plagiarism

Reading, reading, reading today for texts to use in my English 101 course this fall. The course will focus on the politics of writing: who writes, who reads, who gets published, who you have to know in order to get published, and most importantly, the relative arbitrariness of it all. This pedagogy is indebted to Susan Miller and to Pierre Bourdieu. But anyway, my point is that I was reading a chapter in Jon Wiener's new book, Historians in Trouble, called "The Plagiarists: Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose" wherein I learned that Goodwin covered up her "plagiarism"--call it what you will, the jury's still out--fifteen years before it became public. "Goodwin's publisher and attorney's then negotiated an agreement in which she paid McTaggart [the author whose work she plagiarized] a 'substantial' sum in exchange for McTaggart's silence about the plagiarism" (183). Wiener observes that

virtually all the discussion in the press focused on the plagiarism and somehow ignored the more serious fact that Goodwin had paid to keep the plagiarism secret. (184)

Question I'm thinking about as I'm reading this stuff: to what extent does the kind of writing presumed to be plagiarized predict the public's outrage? The public is outraged by Goodwin and Ambrose and by Joseph Ellis, the Mount Holyoke professor who lied to his students about his serving in Vietnam. In these cases, trust was at stake--the public's trust and students' trust.

Second question: what kinds of beliefs are at stake when we learn that a text has been forged or plagiarized? History: who we are as a nation, our collective identity. Mormonism: who we are as a people, why we do what we do from day to day, what we have to look forward to in the afterlife. Student writing: this student has learned how to write, and I as writing teacher have the ability to detect when she is not doing the writing herself. National, religious, professional idenities on the line. Plagiarism and forgery threaten our fundamental beliefs about who we are.