Commencement is both and ending and a beginning

I can see how it could have happened.

Priya Parkash, Class of 2022, heeded Duke's call and sent in her application to be the student speaker. She just needed to send in a 250 word outline, but that might not have mattered in the least. How were the Duke powers-that-be going to resist the lure of selecting an international student, a woman, a STEM woman, a POC. I'm sure there were a lot of polished, accomplished students applying. Duke has plenty of them. But Priya Parkash had to look pretty darned golden to the selection committee. It's not like they were going to pick a lax bro.  

Student commencement speaker. Ah! What a nice capstone to a successful academic career, four years of being smart at Duke. 

Maybe her boyfriend pushed the idea, maybe her sorority sisters or suitemates prodded her along. "You're a natural. How can they not pick you?"

Just think of how good it will look on the B-school application when you take the GMATs and get the essays started for Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Chicago. Duke's Fuqua School of Management? Safety school!

So Priya Parkash sent in her application. 

And damned if they didn't pick Priya Parkash. 

Next step: figure out what to say. 

So she may have looked around at other class speeches at other elite institutions of higher learning, and liked the one she found that Sarah Abushaar delivered way back in 2014. So she decided to borrow an idea or two. Or, what the hell, the entire speech, and translate the Harvard references into Duke-speak.

Or, as Ms. Parkash said in a "statement provided through crisis public relations firm Red Banyan:"

...she was so thrilled and honored that Duke selected her to speak at the graduation ceremony that she “sought advice from respected friends and family about topics I might address.”

“I was embarrassed and confused to find out too late that some of the suggested passages were taken from a recent commencement speech at another university,” she said.  (Source: Washington Post)

Respected friends and family of Priya Parkash, meet the bus she just pushed you under.

Someone must have dimed her, because the Duke Chronicle (campus news) picked the story up, as did the Harvard Crimson, which did a side-by-side comparison, a full textual exegesis, and found an awful lot of copy-cattery going on - well beyond the hackneyed "Webster defines graduation..." and "Commencement is both and ending and a beginning..." bromides.

Among other ideas she cadged were the notion that Harvard Duke was its very own nation, and the fact that both universities have colossal endowments: Harvard's is "larger than more than half the world's countries' GDP;" the more

modest Duke endowment is only "larger than the GDP of one third of the countries in the world." Abushaar referred to the Harvard Alumni Association as a tax collection agency; Parkash did the same for Duke. 

One of the more noted borrowings was a reference to decking out in school gear - right down to Harvard or Duke underwear - to pass by immigration officers who might otherwise peg them for terrorists. (Abushaar is Kuwaiti; Parkash is from Pakistan.)

Despite laying the blame off to those who helped her craft her speech - alas, she found out "to late" that some of her letters were purloined - Parkash kinda/sorta takes reponsibility.

“I take full responsibility for this oversight and I regret if this incident has in any way distracted from the accomplishments of the Duke Class of 2022.”

Kinda/sorta as in "this oversight." That's some oversight. 

As for distracting "from the accomplishments" of her classmates: hardly. 

What this has done is distracting from Parkash's accomplishments, of which there are no doubt many.

Duke has made some vague noises about investigating the matter. Maybe they'll take a peek at some of her papers to make sure they weren't ripped off, even though this isn't likely. I'm pretty sure that most professors use online services to look for plagiarism. Maybe Duke'll just change the way they vet student speech givers and speeches.

Regrettably, this incident - even if there was no malintent on Parkash's part, just a breezy "I'm too busy to write this thang" that had her give the writing over to someone else - will follow her for a good long time.

It won't likely - and shouldn't - destroy her future. Plenty of people get caught lifting lines or concepts/sentiments in their speeches. (Looking at you, Joe Biden, way back in time. He recovered quite nicely.)

But people will look at her differently. They'll talk behind her back. She may miss out on a job, a reference letter, a grad school acceptance.

And talk about the world's worst crisis PR firm. 

A little more honesty would have gone a long way.

If Parkash actually did the borrowing directly, why not just acknowledge it gracefully. As in "I saw the video of Sarah's speech, loved it, and thought it would be fun and interesting to adapt it to Duke. I should have given her credit for the ideas I keyed off of." Apology accepted!

Of course, giving Harvard (a higher ranked school) credit would have likely been a non-starter.

And if she let someone else write the speech for her, why not just say "I take full responsibility for this matter," without going on to blame others. Because there ain't no way in which admitting that you gave over the creation of this speech to someone else(s) is going to look good. Just take the damned responsibility and shut your trap would have been, methinks, better advice.

Whatever, I'm guessing that Priya Parkash is kicking herself tonight, and will be for a while longer.

Or maybe she can rationalize the entire matter. Maybe it's Duke's fault. Blue Devil made me do it.

In any case, she would have been better off droning on about commencement being both a beginning and an ending and been done with it.