Let me stray a bit from politics.
In this morning's Globe we learn that the Superintendent of Schools of Mansfield, Massachusetts has resigned after giving a graduation speech in which she plagiarized someone else's graduation speech.
In my opinion, the punishment doesn't fit the crime, at least if the only crime were plagiarism. Plagiarism is wrong in many contexts, but in some it is perfectly forgivable. We lawyers, for instance, feel perfectly free to rip off pages of other lawyer's briefs, they being, after all, in the public domain. So should it be with graduation speeches, which are, after all, largely composed of strings of cliches. And, after all, even Shakespeare stole his plots.
But does this mean she should not have resigned? Not at all, for though she sinned not in the literary realm, her mathematical sins were of the mortal variety, unless I am terribly mistaken:
The announcement followed weeks of controversy in Mansfield sparked by an anonymous student who sent Hodges an e-mail soon after her June 8 speech, alerting her to rumors that she had plagiarized the remarks by Navy Admiral William H. McRaven. An online petition started, calling for Hodges to step down.
In his speech in May, available on YouTube, McRaven told a University of Texas at Austin audience that “if every one of you changed the lives of just 10 people, and each one of those folks changed the lives of another 10 people, just 10, then in five generations, 125 years, the class of 2014 will have changed the lives of 800 million people.”
In her speech, Hodges said that if “every one of you changed the lives of just five people, just five, then in five generations, 125 years, the class of 2014 will have changed the lives of 400 million people.’’
via the Boston Globe
Let us put aside the Ponzi like nature of the admiral's assertion. His math, at least, might just add up. By my calculations, if one divides 800 million by 10, five times (the number of posited generations), one arrives at 8,000, which just might be equivalent to the number of people in the graduating class at the University of Texas at Austin. But if one divides 400,000,000 by 5, five times, one arrives at the figure of 128,000. My brother in law actually taught at Mansfield High School. That was some years ago, but I am still morally certain the graduating class at Mansfield is not that big. There is another mathematical sin embedded in Ms. Hodges's figures; the unspoken assumption that if you halve the admiral's rate of increase the end result will be half of Admiral McRaven's results. It just doesn't work like that.
So, Ms. Hodges was right to resign, though for the wrong reason. Even George Bush would be ashamed of such fuzzy math.
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