Saturday, May 12, 2018

Plagiarism in a high school yearbook in Pensacola?



From the Pensacola News Journal article titled Escambia High rewrites yearbook page on school's racial history, claims student plagiarized :



Escambia High School administrators removed and rewrote a page from this year's student yearbook that contained information about the school's origin and race-related issues, claiming the student who wrote the page plagiarized information from the internet.

But the student, 18-year-old yearbook co-editor Sasha Slack, believes the school rewrote the page because they are "trying to change the history of Escambia High School because they’re too ashamed to admit that our school was founded as an all-white school."

In the 60th anniversary edition of the yearbook, Slack wrote about the school's pre-segregated era and the on-campus race riots of 1976. The senior said she researched multiple websites and wrote a long paragraph titled "Escambia's Past" in her own words, which the school claims to be false. [emphasis added]

(...)

Murphy said that ultimately, he did not want Slack's original writing to reflect poorly on the school.

"I just feel that we cannot allowed plagiarized work to be presented in a journalism class," Murphy said. "That is the issue here. That's the only issue here, is the plagiarism." [emphasis added]



There are several issues here

was there plagiarism? [copying without attribution]

if no plagiarism, was the motivation of the school an unfavorable portrayal in the yearbook? Was the portrayal false?

was the plagiarism claim a pretextual makeweight argument or a reasonable response to a concern about bad journalism?

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