Critic Resigns When Caught in Plagiarism

The St. Paul Pioneer Press & Dispatch’s drama critic resigned today after being forced by an alert reader to acknowledge he had plagiarized portions of a review published six years ago in the New York Times.

In his final column, David Hawley said that in preparing to write his Feb. 14 review of “Good,” a play by C. P. Taylor, he studied articles and reviews written when the play was performed elsewhere.

“My own piece contained material from a review by Frank Rich printed Oct. 14, 1982, in the New York Times,” Hawley wrote.

Hawley, the St. Paul paper’s drama critic for 9 1/2 years, said the plagiarism was discovered by a reader, who sent him a personal letter.

He Confessed to Editors

“My reaction was first surprise, then shock, then humiliation. Clearly, I have forfeited any right to work as a drama critic,” Hawley said.

He said he brought the problem to the attention of his editors himself and said he will be allowed to remain at the paper in another capacity.

“Although I did not have the original notice before me at the time I was writing, my reference notes--by then ‘commingled’ with notes taken during the performance--were so detailed that I duplicated both the general structure of the original piece and many key phrases.

‘I Convinced Myself’

“It constituted blatant plagiarism, though I managed to ignore that fact while I was writing my review and after I had written it,” Hawley wrote in the column published today. “I convinced myself that my reasoning was original enough to be my own and that my words, too, were my own.”

“Plagiarism is one of the most serious of all journalistic sins and cannot be tolerated,” Editor Deborah Howell said in a notice to readers printed with Hawley’s column.

In his column, Hawley wrote, “By not firing me outright, they have generously given me the opportunity to redeem myself in some other capacity.”