No one
wants to criticize Jane Goodall—
Dame Goodall—the soft-spoken, white-haired doyenne of primatology. [...] When it was revealed last week in
The Washington Post that Goodall’s latest book,
Seeds of Hope, a fluffy treatise on plant life, contained passages that were “borrowed” from other authors, the reaction was surprisingly muted. The writer who discovered the plagiarism—an unnamed academic reviewing the book for the
Post—alerted the newspaper and backed out of the assignment. When the
Post and the
New York Times reported his findings, both avoided saying that Goodall had plagiarized—which, even by the strictest definition of the word, she did—instead writing that she “borrowed” passages, fully intending, apparently, to return them upon publication.
The entire controversy has been clouded in euphemism.
