How Kaavya Viswanathan Got Caught

Not sure about how much play this story is getting up here, but down south there's been a lot of brouhaha about Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan's plagiarism scandal.

Essentially, wunderkind Kaavya wrote and published a book at the age of 17, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got A Life, which, ironically, is about an Indian-American girl who studies all day but strives to get a social life to appear more well-rounded for her application to Harvard.

Well the book was a big hit, got Kaavya a $500,000 deal with the publisher and, more importantly, got her into Harvard. Turns out though that she's a big fraud, and the Harvard Crimson discovered that her novel bears an astonishing likeness to Megan McAfferty's Sloppy Firsts.

For example, from page 7 of McCafferty’s first novel:

"Bridget is my age and lives across the street. For the first twelve years of my life, these qualifications were all I needed in a best friend."

From page 14 of Viswanathan’s novel:

"Priscilla was my age and lived two blocks away. For the first fifteen years of my life, those were the only qualifications I needed in a best friend."

And there are many more examples of blatant plaigarism.

So now it seems the US media is going on a witchhunt crucifying this girl. It's classic schaudenfraude - people take pleasure in seeing successful people fall because it absolves them of their own mediocrity.

My assessment of the situation is that here we have a case of an overachieving ambitious young Indian/Tamil girl who, much like the protagonist in her novel, would have done anything for admission to Harvard. It doesn't seem to me that she was motivated by anything else - her aspiration is to become an investment banker, not a writer.

Getting into an Ivy League school (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Columbia, UPenn), though, is tough. Harvard is the most excruciatingly tough of them all - it's worse than getting into med school in Ontario. Harvard gets tens of thousands of applications from kids who are the cream of the crop, so Harvard can pick and choose. Harvard can stack its student body with 4000 piano playing Chinese kids with 1600 SATs and 4.0 GPAs, but it'd then end up like Waterloo - a school filled with uniformly boring nobodys. What Harvard wants are:

1. Dynamic people, people with exceptional talents who are likely to go far in their careers and maintain/bolster Harvard's rep.
2. Kids from Protestant old-money families who'll offer multi-million dollar endowments ("legacy" cases like President GWB)

Hmmm... so Kaavya, at age 16, thinks, "What can I do to stand out from the flock? How do I make my application stand out... Why don't I write a novel? And a novel about a girl who wants to get in to Harvard at that! And it worked! The admissions officers at Harvard were suitably impressed and brought her in.

What I like about a profoundly middle-class society like Canada is the lack of elitism - nobody seems to care what school you went to. In the US though, many parents will do anything short of donating their kidneys to get their kids into Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. The social cachet of attending an Ivy League school is great, and indeed it'll open a lot of doors in business, industry, and amongst the blue-bloods in New England. Here in egalitarian Canada we treasure our public Universities and, though there are schools perceived as "better" and some "worse", it's nothing like the States. Had Kaavya grown up in Toronto and not New Jersey, an aspiring investment banker like her would likely be sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with us at Waterloo in our corporate finance class.

But what is inevitable is that Kaavya is now scarred for life. Her admission to Harvard should be revoked because if she plaigarized her book, who knows what other fraudulent things she's guilty of or lied about in her application?

But it's equally revolting to see the media take an almost putrid pleasure in this case - mostly bitter journalists who themselves were rejected from Harvard. Plaigarism sucks, she's young, she made a really stupid mistake and she should acknowledge it and come clean. If anything, Kaavya will serve as a lamb to the slaughter - an example for all those aspiring Ivy Leaguers that ambitious embellishment is not the way to go, and that the ends don't really justify the means (because you just might get caught).