Mansfield, MA, school superintendent Brenda Hodges has stepped down from her post after allegations that her four minute commencement speech at last month's high school graduation was plagiarized from Navy Admiral William McRaven's commencement speech a month earlier at the University of Texas, Austin.
As The Boston Globe reports:
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.’’
Well, hey, might as well lower everyone's expectations by half and hope it makes things more realistic. Bonus points to Hodges.
Despite resigning, Hodges still claims she didn't plagiarize, stating that McRaven's speech was "a hundred times better," and that the admiral's speech wasn't really her inspiration, but instead that she largely borrowed passages from a pastor's talk in her native Oklahoma a year earlier. For not citing her pastor, Hodges apologized.
If you're desperately confused as to who is allegedly plagiarizing from whom at this point, you're not alone.
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