The Arcata Eye out of the Redwood Coast in California reports this disturbing story: A school district trustee called his graduating daughter on stage to read her a letter that he’d supposedly written, but that turned out to be a slightly altered edition of Wellesley High School English teacher David McCullough’s “You’re Not Special” speech.
Yes, the same speech that went viral on the web in both transcript and video formats.
Apparently that YouTube thing even reaches out to the west coast, and Arcata High students called the school muckety-muck on it, according to the Arcata Eye:
“Many of the students recognized the speech, as they had done a rhetorical analysis on it for their AP English class last year… One ‘disgusted’ AHS student was struck by the ‘irony that we get in trouble for copying a peer’s homework, and a board member gets away with stealing an entire graduation speech.'”
As for McCullough, a book that he worked on during a year-long sabbatical is off to the publisher and he plans to return to teaching at WHS in the fall.
This is not the same thing is plagiarizing a paper. The guy might just not have known what to say and in desperation went to the web for some inspiration. I don’t think it’s all that bad. His intentions were good and he just wanted to say something meaningful and didn’t know how to say it himself.