A Tarnished Opal

The lens through which we view the controversy surrounding Kaavya Viswanathan ’08 is tinged with disappointment—disappointment with the unfounded conclusions to which many have jumped, disappointment with the utter glee with which some have skewered her, and, of course, disappointment with Viswanathan’s actions themselves.

The campus is abuzz with conversation and debate about the similarities between Viswanathan’s new novel “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life” and two books by Megan F. McCafferty, “Sloppy Firsts” and “Second Helpings.” Viswanathan, who received a two-book deal reportedly worth $500,000 at the age of 17, initially garnered high acclaim for “Opal,” including a movie deal and several glowing reviews (USA Today wrote, “you won’t read a sweeter, funnier, more charming book this year”). Viswanathan denies any conscious wrongdoing and claims that although she read, admired, and “internalized” McCafferty’s novels, “any phrasing similarities between her works and mine were completely unintentional and unconscious.”

But a judicious examination of the evidence thus far does not bode well for Viswanathan’s claim. This is more than merely an accident of two congruous organic creations. The novels include similar dialogue, sentence structure, and word choice. Some passages appear nearly verbatim with minor tweaks. (For instance, compare McCafferty’s “four major department stores and 170 specialty shops later” to Viswanathan’s “five department stores, and 170 specialty shops later.”) It is difficult to see how reading McCafferty’s novel “three or four times” several years ago, as Viswanathan says she did, would produce such a close match. As one letter to the Crimson noted, it’s hard to internalize italics.

This is unquestionably a serious offense. Plagiarism is, as an executive at Random House put it, “literary identity theft,” a high crime in both the publishing and academic worlds. Particularly at an institution that aspires to embody veritas each and every day, Viswanathan’s apparent misrepresentation and her suspect excuse demonstrate a lack of integrity.

A similarly disappointing corollary to this case is the apparent schadenfreude—the malicious glee of seeing Viswanathan fail—which seems to have greeted this story at Harvard and elsewhere. Call it jealousy, call it shock, or call it entertaining; whatever the explanation, people are reacting to Viswanathan’s predicament as they would to a Yankees loss. One of the clearest examples of this trend is a post from the notoriously snappy blog “Gawker,” which comments, “Let’s just sum it all up with the obvious: isn’t it kind of awesome to see an overachieving Indian kid finally do something wrong?” Everyone’s a pundit when it comes to Viswanathan, waxing self-righteous. Viswanathan has even been compared to Barry Bonds and the Duke lacrosse team.

To be sure, some degree of criticism is warranted, even needed. Half-million dollar book deals are not signed every day—by a seventeen-year-old, no less—and this type of success must necessarily be yoked to a high level of scrutiny, lest we cheapen true achievement. But treating Viswanathan with the same lack of judiciousness with which she herself treated McCafferty sinks this affair to a new low.

Some have also chosen to draw broader conclusions from this situation by linking it to the dog-eat-dog, rat-racing, ladder-climbing, and corner-cutting mentality of Harvard students. Others have related it to the stressful nature of college admissions, and still others have blamed a cocktail of overzealous parents and intense pressure. But such extrapolation should be braved with caution. Viswanathan is but one student among 6,500 undergraduates, and our knowledge of the details of her transgression is still limited and partially speculative.



What is clear, however, is that Harvard is neither a city on a hill nor a cesspool of immorality, though in our experience nearly every member of this community aspires to create the former. This incident is hardly paradigmatic, but is instead indicative of the human flaws that plague even those who seem to have it all.

In no way have we enjoyed witnessing the fall of our peer, nor do we intend to lessen the seriousness of her transgression by pointing to the improprieties of others. What she did was wrong; we are, quite simply, disappointed.