2006 HLS Parody, Act 1, Song 3: "Hire Some Ghostwriters"

HARVARD LAW SCHOOL
PARODY 2006
"FINDING BLACHMAN CONTRIBUTORILY NEGLIGENT"

Act 1, Song 3
"Hire Some Ghostwriters"

(Based on Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger") (Youtube)

Setting: Fall, 2003, Hauser Hall, Harvard Law School, office of Professor Charles Ogletree. Ogletree has just returned from one of his frequent out-of-town trips to spend a few days at the Law School. He realizes he has only a few months left to finish his book about Brown v. Board of Education in time for the 50th anniversary of the decision, May 17, 2004. This deadline has caught Ogletree by surprise, as he only learned of the deadline recently (49 years ago), and he has barely begun work on the book. After some thinking, he hits on a solution to the problem. As former Harvard president Derek Bok would later summarize Ogletree's solution, given the “very tight deadline” faced by him: "He marshaled his assistants and parceled out the work . . . .” Not that he did nothing on the book: as Ogletree would later clarify, he was "closely involved in most of the drafting of the book . . . ." Listen as Professor Ogletree, in his mellifluous singing voice, provides this soliloquy in the fall of 2003 about his chosen course of action . . . .

Jeremy Blachman, narrator:

Probably my most egregious error in writing songs for the 2005 Parody was in the treatment of Professor Charles Ogletree, who of course started the 2004-05 school year for us with quite a bang: with his puzzling announcement about his “corrections” of “mistakes” made during the final "production process" on a book he published in the spring of 2004 timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. This statement was quickly ripped apart by journalists and bloggers who established to pretty much everyone’s satisfaction that the “mistakes” involved blatant plagiarism of a book published by a Yale law professor, which resulted from Ogletree hiring law students to ghostwrite at least parts of the book for him -- something Ogletree did not deny when the ghostwriting charge was specifically made by the dean of another law school in the fall of 2004, and again in the spring of 2005.

As pointed out on the Harvard Law School Drama Society’s totally unofficial blog, our treatment of Professor Ogletree in the 2005 Parody quite possibly violated the Law School’s stringent regulations on parodies designed to avoid even a hint of racial or gender bias. For example, we devoted an entire musical skit to Professor Tribe, most of which lauded his many amazing abilities and achievements, but we did no musical skit at all on Ogletree. Worse, in our only musical reference to Ogletree, we had Tribe denigrate him, singing of “stupid Ogletree.” Whereas we depicted Tribe as “the smartest man alive” for copying material straight out of a book by a historian, we depicted Ogletree as “stupid” for hiring ghostwriters who then plagiarized from a Yale law professor which, in turn, because of Tribe's decision to comment on the resulting Weekly Standard article on Ogletree, ultimately led to a tip to the Weekly Standard about Tribe's own plagiarism, and thus Tribe's own downfall.

What we should have done was leave Ogletree out of the parody about Tribe. Rather than making a token, insulting reference to him in that parody, we should have crafted a separate musical skit to cover the entire Ogletree ghostwriting affair, something along the lines of the following musical skit based on Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger,"the awesome theme song from the so-so movie "Rocky III." The song sure works better for this parody than the last time we used it! Imagine how well a musical skit on Professor Ogletree like this would have worked in the 2005 Parody . . . .

 "Hire Some Ghostwriters"
(Sung by Charles Ogletree)

(Here is a MIDI file in case you want to sing it!)

Flying up -- back to Cambridge
Got no time to write my book
Went to D.C., now I'm back at Harvard
Just a man and his book to produce

So many times, it happens to fast
You trade your ethics for glory
I got a book deadline coming on fast
It's been years since I last tried to write

I'll just hire some ghostwriters
Find the cream of the crop
Risin' up to the challenge of their rivals
Let the last two survivors
Write my book in the night
So it's no work at all!
I'll just hire some ghostwriters

Face to face -- they'll copy fast
Hangin' tough, stayin' hungry
They'll cut the corners, 'til they get it done
If I can, I will read what they write 

I'll just hire some ghostwriters
Find the cream of the crop
Risin' up to the challenge of their rivals
Let the last two survivors
Write my book in the night
So it's no work at all!
I'll just hire some ghostwriters

Flying up -- straight to the top
Hire the grunts, get the glory
Went to D.C., now I'm back at Harvard
Just a man and his book to produce 

I'll just hire some ghostwriters
Find the cream of the crop
Risin' up to the challenge of their rivals
Let the last two survivors
Write my book in the night
So it's no work at all!
I'll just hire some ghostwriters

Just hire some ghostwriters 
Just hire some ghostwriters
Just hire some ghostwriters
Just hire some ghostwriters