by Ashley Lee

For two consecutive years, a speech delivered by a student speaker during the high school’s graduation ceremony has raised concerns of plagiarism.

Aspects of the graduation speech made by N.I. ’13 were similar to those of the high school graduation speech made in the movie “Eclipse,” the third installment of the “Twilight Saga.” English teacher Elon Fischer said that he thinks it was a parent who raised a concern that N.I’s speech might not have been her original work.

The graduation speech made by T.S. ’14 contained many similar phrases and sentences to Conan O’Brien’s commencement address to the Dartmouth College Class of 2011. Dean of Students Anthony Meyer said he does not remember a specific person who brought this to the administration’s attention, but thinks that it must have been a parent or a student.

Both N.I. and T.S. had been in Fischer’s Public Speaking course and wrote their speeches as their final assignments for the course.

According to Meyer, the administration investigated the potential case of plagiarism in T.S.’s speech. Meyer said that he and Associate Dean Lisa Redding met with T.S. and his mother after graduation, and T.S. was asked to write a letter of apology to Headmaster Deborah Holman stating that he recognized the concerns caused by his speech.

“The language was different but the concept seemed similar, and we expressed our concern about that and he had a response that I think made sense,” Meyer said. “I don’t think it was a clear-cut, full-blown case of plagiarism. I think there were some gray areas that we began to explore.”

There were no consequences for N.I. Dean of Students Scott Butchart said that he was not aware of the complaint for months.

“A long time elapsed after the 2013 graduation before I had any idea this had happened,” he said.

By then, N.I.’s graduation was long gone, Butchart said.

Both N.I. and T.S. denied having plagiarized in their graduation speeches.

N.I. admitted that she was influenced by the graduation speech in “Eclipse” as she wrote her own but said that she felt it did not constitute plagiarism.

N.I. said that Fischer had shown her class examples of other graduation speeches, and she also looked to other speeches when preparing her own.

“I knew that I wanted to go back and reminisce about each year, and I liked the idea of having one main event that happened each year both in pop culture and at school,” she said. “Using Mr. Fischer’s technique, I also went online and I looked up some graduation speeches from other schools and movies and TV shows. So I got a basic idea of what I wanted to do from those and I just kind of put it together in the end.”

T.S. said that he had not seen O’Brien’s commencement address prior to giving his graduation speech. He saw it for the first time after a friend notified him a couple of days after graduation of the concerns his speech raised, he said. According to Meyer, T.S. had been absent on the day when Fischer showed the O’Brien commencement address in his Public Speaking course.

“I just came up with everything on my own. A lot of it was just made up on the spot,” T.S. said. “I had a few people ask me about it and I just told them the truth which is that I didn’t copy anything. People come up with jokes all the time.”

According to Fischer, it is hard to determine when speech-makers deliver plagiarized remarks.

“When you’re writing an English paper and you use someone else’s words or ideas, you can footnote them. It’s harder to do in a speech,” he said. “Unless you’re quoting someone’s words, if you’re using an idea, there’s no place to put a footnote. And I, as a teacher of public speaking, struggle with trying to get kids to understand: When is it okay to use other people’s words or ideas or forms? It’s not so simple in public speaking. There’s some very common things that are done in speeches. And so it’s complicated. It’s messy.”

Fischer said that he considers N.I.’s speech to be a tribute of a sort.

“She took a general form and used that form and put in her own content,” Fischer said. “She made a big joke about how she was a huge ‘Twilight’ fan, and so my sense was that she was acknowledging she was doing something. For people who knew her, it was sort of an in-joke. And I think they got it and it was okay. For people who were outside of that circle, or don’t know about ‘Twilight’ and didn’t know her, it didn’t work. Because all they saw was: ‘This is similar to that.’”

According to Fischer, many students noticed the similarities with the speech made in “Eclipse” as N.I. presented her speech to her Public Speaking class, and later to the committee that picks the student speakers for graduation, which is comprised of deans, guidance counselors, teachers and a couple of students at the high school. Fischer said that the other students liked N.I.’s idea of incorporating aspects of the speech from “Eclipse” into her own.

“They recognized what it was, and they thought this was a good speech. It captured a lot of what they felt,” he said. “And the graduation is very much for them, and so it made sense in that regard.”

This was different from how T.S.’s speech progressed: Fischer said he had not seen the similarities between T.S.’s speech and O’Brien’s speech prior to listening to T.S. at his graduation ceremony. Meyer said that although it is possible that he had seen some of the similarities between T.S.’s and O’Brien’s speeches before T.S. gave the speech, he does not recall it.

T.S. said that for the Public Speaking assignment and his auditions for the graduation ceremony, his speech did not contain as many similarities as the one he presented at graduation. About a week before the graduation ceremony, Meyer told him he would proofread his speech for him, at which point T.S. sent Meyer his speech.

“I think he took the whole week to reply,” T.S. said. “So I just added some more stuff to it since then. Like I’d just been practicing in my room so I came up with a few more jokes and stuff. So I didn’t write that down. I just figured they’re just jokes; no one’s going to be upset about it.”

Regardless of the similarities, Fischer said that the majority of T.S.’s speech was genuine.

“It feels to me like had he turned it in as a paper, it would have led to a conversation,” he said. “I would have said, ‘It seems to me that these are very similar to this. Are you aware of that?’ That would be the first thing. And: ‘Are you claiming that these ideas are your own? And if they’re not your own, how can we attribute them to who they’re from?’ I think it’s certainly conceivable to me that other people have told those jokes over and over to the point that it has become part of the common joke. I don’t know enough about [T.S.]’s thinking. So I think in a technical sense, yes, it constitutes plagiarism. For me, that’s less important than trying to understand how it happened and why it happened.”

Fischer said that although he does not think there is a systematic problem related to the issue of potential plagiarism after two consecutive graduation ceremonies, he does think that there is room for improvement in how the school approaches graduation speeches.

“We could do a better job to say to people who are doing a graduation speech that it’s going out to the public, to people who don’t know the speaker and so won’t take things for granted and won’t assume the best of intentions,” he said.

Meyer also said he does not believe the main problem lies with the current system.

“I think we can be tighter in our process and be even more explicit, but I don’t know that it’s a huge systemic issue,” he said. “When a student submits a speech, I think our understanding, whether implicit or explicit, has been: ‘This is your work.’ I think we need to make that even more explicit: When you say you’re going to give this speech, this is all your work. And then if there are any changes between when a speech is submitted and given, I think, asking to be made aware of that, because that has happened too, where you have a student who submits a speech and then they go, they make some changes—which is normal, I think, in the speech-writing process. But I think it puts us in a tricky position if there’s material added that we don’t know about.”

However, Fischer said that he is unsure of what else could happen besides emphasizing to students that they will be addressing the public who may not understand their jokes and references.

“There’s plenty of plagiarism at Brookline High School,” Fischer said. “I don’t think it’s worse here than anyplace else, so I don’t think we need to say, ‘Oh my gosh, what kinds of horrible students are we creating here?’ Plagiarism happens all over the place, and it’s not something we want to happen. So all that is a way of saying, the fact that the school has not exploded with ‘We have to figure out what to do!’ doesn’t surprise me or concern me that much.”

The Sagamore chose not to publish the full names of the two students whose speeches were the subject of this article due to the article’s sensitive nature. The editors felt that the use of initials would effectively convey the information the reporter had gathered without causing unnecessary harm.

Ashley Lee can be contacted at [email protected]