I agree that those who are cheating to gain advancement in their careers are not only hurting themselves but are hurting their entire fields. It isn’t fair to the people competing honestly when the people in the top spots are there erroneously.
But I have to ask, who are their challengers? Isn’t it usually the people in the bottom spots who are jealous of the successes of the people at the top? Maybe if the challengers trained a little harder in their fields and worried a little less about the people in the number one spots, they could achieve their own victories and not have to worry about how those people got there to begin with.
Of course, that doesn’t solve the problem of writers citing sources that were plagiarized to begin with, but it’s a start.
(Re: Kristen Lamb’s blog: http://warriorwriters.wordpress.com/2012/08/24/lance-armstrong-jonah-lehrer-what-are-we-willing-to-do-to-win/)
2 Responses
Agreed. I wonder what it would be like to live in the days when a contest was just a contest and there didn’t have to be governing bodies and asterisks in the record books. I feel for Armstrong if he is innocent and is tired of fighting the good fight, and I’m disgusted if he won those titles with an edge to his performance. We’ll never know. I love the analogy of writer to athlete, though. Sometimes I feel it’s a marathon, sometime I feel it’s a sprint, but always I feel it’s a race I want to run honestly. Thanks for the post, Kristen.
It’s a conundrum for sure. I know I love Lehrer’s works and would love to cite it, but I don’t know what is authentic, and what stinks is that likely very little in his books are suspect. Sad how a little lie can poison the whole thing.
I feel for Armstrong and can see why he would just eventually give up. It has to be exhausting. Yet, if there weren’t so many athletes willing to cheat to the top, these organizations wouldn’t have to exist.