New attack on Brad Vice is merely poor journalism

Normally Thanksgiving brings out the good in people . . . probably because everyone’s groggy from the tryptophan in the turkey they ate. However, it appears that Robert Clark Young missed out on this year’s turkey and happiness infusion, as evidenced by his new attack-dog article on Brad Vice’s supposed plagiarism (an issue I debunked weeks ago).

In the article, Young expands upon the nasty comments he originally made about Vice on storySouth (such as this inane example, located in the comments below Jake’s original essay). However, I’m going to ignore the fact that Young’s comments attack anyone from the South and compares any defense of Vice to support of slavery (which Young implies all Southerners still support). And never mind the fact that Young’s article is published in a poorly regarded weekly newspaper.

No, the more important truth is that Young’s article is poor journalism.

The reasons for this are simple. First, Young’s article tries to make it sound as if he has discovered a new case of plagiarism. However, all that Young has done is show that Vice used The Junction Boys, a nonfiction book about Bear Bryant by author Jim Dent, as a reference source for his short story “Report from Junction.” Like any writer, Vice had to research some obscure issues (in this case, screwworms and one of Bear Bryant’s early football stars) and used Dent’s book to make sure he was accurate. The similarities in what Young points out arise from the sentences describing a common process. Descriptive terms can not be considered plagiarism since there are only so many ways to write certain descriptions. For example, how many writers have written the sentence “He ran up the hill”? If I wrote this exact sentence in a story of mine it would not be plagiarism because it is a simple descriptive sentence.

More importantly, though, the examples that Young gives from Vice’s dissertation to support this new charge of plagiarism are incorrect. For example, Young states that Vice’s dissertation has this sentence in it:

“(T)he maggots will most likely screw themselves into its brain … before they exit back through its eyes.”

I will admit that this sounds similar to Dent’s original sentence of “They sometimes would screw themselves into the brain and exit through the eyeballs.” However, when I read page 180 of Vice’s dissertation I discovered that Young’s use of Vice’s quotation isn’t correct. Vice’s original sentence actually reads:

“In fact, with worms that close to its head, the maggots would most likely screw themselves into the bull’s brain and drive him completely mad before they exited back through the eyes.”

That sentence no longer sounds at all like Dent’s. By using an excerpt from Vice’s original sentence, and the creative use of an ellipsis, Young makes his case for plagiarism sound stronger than it actually is. The other screwworm sentences Young quotes from are also different than what Young says they are (the sentences all occur in one short section of a paragraph on page 180 of the dissertation). Since Young says he went back to Vice’s dissertation to get an accurate accounting of what Vice did, it is strange that the examples he gives to support his plagiarism charge are so inaccurate.

Of these so-called plagiarized sentences, the only ones that actually resemble each other are the last examples Young gives. Young states that Dent’s book has the sentence “He kicked the gelding and rode up on a ghastly sight” while Vice’s short story in his dissertation has “Kurt kicked the gelding and charged up to a gruesome sight.” The reason these sentences are similar is that the character in Vice’s short story is based on Dennis Goehring, who is described as “One of the most hard-nosed, toughest players Bryant ever had.” Vice’s character was originally called Dennis Schaffer and is obviously based on Goehring. Since Vice’s book aims to intergrate fiction with the actual events that occurred during Bear Bryant’s life (which is a form of literary sampling) it makes sense that Vice would adapt an actual event from Dennis Goehring’s life to a story based on this most famous of the Bear’s early players. The similarities in these sentences result from the fact that they are describing the same event (a cow giving birth to a calf, which is then eaten by buzzards).

Once again, though, Young fails to quote accurately from the dissertation. Vice’s original sentence reads, “Dennis kicked the gelding and charged up to a gruesome sight,” while Young’s quote gives the character’s name as Kurt. Obviously the name of the main character changed from Dennis to Kurt by the time the story made its way to book publication. In fact, this brings up the question of if Young actually took his quotes from Vice’s dissertation or the book publication of The Bear Bryant Funeral Train. The article is unclear on this (again, poor journalism). Regardless, Young states that Vice’s dissertation makes the clearest case for plagiarism, which strongly implies that his excerpts are from the dissertation. As Young says in the article, “Plagiarism tends to be a first-draft offense; it is now possible to trace Vice’s plagiarism from its genesis in his original documents.” But despite this claim by Young, he fails to quote accurately from the original document.

While Young’s use of creative excerpts from Vice’s dissertation is bad enough, a worse sin is that he fails to mention anything that might support Vice’s assertion (and the belief of others) that what Vice did was not plagiarism. For example, Young fails to mention that on page 144 of Vice’s dissertation is an epigraph from Carl Carmer’s book Stars Fell on Alabama. When the dissertation was published as The Bear Bryant Funeral Train by the University of Georgia Press, this epigraph was left off for some reason. As many commentators have remarked, if Vice had included a citation or epigraph in his book, no one would have accused him of plagiarism. Yet here in Vice’s dissertation is that called for epigraph. Young, however, ignores this evidence in support of Vice.

The final reason that Young’s article is poor journalism is that he fails to note his personal relationship with the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Since the last third of Young’s article is an attack on the Sewanee conference and anyone who is connected with the place (such as Barry Hannah), one would think that Young might mention he himself attended Sewanee at the same time as Brad Vice. The failure to disclose this information leads one to wonder if Young’s article is part of a vendetta against Sewanee and Vice.

In short, Young’s article is simply poor journalism. By altering the quotes from Vice’s dissertation and ignoring evidence that would support Vice, Young makes the plagiarism case against Vice appear stronger than it is. Young also fails to disclose a serious conflict of interest in his attack on the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Because of these issues, I am reluctant to trust this article.