A Good Cartoon Starts With A Good Idea

To the editors:

Ideas—good, bad, and mediocre—are often just floating in the zeitgeist. They are put to good, bad, and middling use. Sometimes the same element will be played over and over, with varying degrees of ingenuity. (Think of the uses to which John Harvard’s statue in Harvard Yard has been put over generations.)

I applaud your concern for integrity at The Crimson, but, in the case of your cartoonist, what I hope was only your initial reaction was incorrect.

Plagiarism seems to be a topic of moment in education. Every college on the planet seems to be intent upon developing its own special guidelines and judicial procedures concerning academic dishonesty. The Internet now has hundreds of sites where teachers, employers, and your significant other can check what has been cited or appropriated from millions of other sites. Plagiarism is, at least as feared as the avian flu. But recent articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education remind us that even many professors do not really understand plagiarism, let alone their students.

As a teacher and the holder of graduate degrees from Harvard, I’m glad that editors at The Crimson still have high regard for journalistic standards, but this isn’t a matter of staying credible to your readership. You yet proudly hold aloft your stanchion emblazoned: “Veritas.”

But, let me suggest that you take out your steel and sharpen your critical knives to carve out a more valuable test for your editorial cartoonists. They should be incisive and funny. Threaten to slice and dice them all you want when they’re not.

THOMAS J. MURRAY

October 31, 2006