NFT: Plagiarism...how much should it impact a person's career?

There is an ongoing story about Senator John Walsh from Montana coming under scrutiny regarding a case of plagiarism in his final thesis at the United States Army War College while he was with the Army National Guard. There have been several reports indicating that after initially denying that he plagiarized, Senator Walsh is asserting that his actions were unintentional and may have been a result of PTSD from his time in Iraq as well as his difficulty dealing with the suicide of a colleague.

I'm positing this story for two groups of posters on BBI specially. First group is our professionals in academia. We have many educators (among other posters), who probably have strong opinions on plagiarism. The danger of plagiarizing was beat into me since high school and more so during grad school, so I am having a hard time being sympathetic to Senator Walsh's case.

Second group is our military posters. Seeing that Senator Walsh was a Colonel in the Army National Guard, who was capable of leading hundreds of men and women in Iraq, does his reasoning for the plagiarism sound legitimate? Or is he using these to spin his failing to adhere to academic integrity? While the military writing isn't necessarily identical to academic writing, both still adhere to crediting and citing their sources (on top of the War College hammering into its students the importance of citing sources).

Most of these thesis take months to write and hundreds of hours of research, so it wasn't a spur of the moment thing where one just forgets to cite sources. Was Senator Walsh so overwhelmed by outside factor that he continued to forget about crediting and citing the sources? Or was he just lazy or thought that he can get away with it?

While he is a political figure, this isn't necessarily a political topic as much as it is a question regarding how much a case of plagiarism should impact a person's career (both military and civilian). We've seen this play out in news media with reporters getting canned for similar acts.

Quote:

But one of the highest-profile credentials of Mr. Walsh’s 33-year military career appears to have been improperly attained. An examination of the final paper required for Mr. Walsh’s master’s degree from the United States Army War College indicates the senator appropriated at least a quarter of his thesis on American Middle East policy from other authors’ works, with no attribution. Mr. Walsh completed the paper, what the War College calls a “strategy research project,” to earn his degree in 2007, when he was 46. The sources of the material he presents as his own include academic papers, policy journal essays and books that are almost all available online. Most strikingly, the six recommendations Mr. Walsh laid out at the conclusion of his 14-page paper, titled “The Case for Democracy as a Long Term National Strategy,” are taken nearly word-for-word without attribution from a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace document on the same topic. In his third recommendation, for example, Mr. Walsh writes: “Democracy promoters need to engage as much as possible in a dialogue with a wide cross section of influential elites: mainstream academics, journalists, moderate Islamists, and members of the professional associations who play a political role in some Arab countries, rather than only the narrow world of westernized democracy and human rights advocates.” The same sentence appears on the sixth page of a 2002 Carnegie paper written by four scholars at the research institute. In all, Mr. Walsh’s recommendations section runs to more than 800 words, nearly all of it taken verbatim from the Carnegie paper, without any footnote to it. In addition, significant portions of the language in Mr. Walsh’s paper can be found in a 1998 essay by a scholar at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, at Harvard.

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