2006 Parody: Act 2, Song 3: "Sleazy (Like Doris Goodwin)"

HARVARD LAW SCHOOL
PARODY 2006
"FINDING BLACHMAN CONTRIBUTORILY NEGLIGENT"

Act 2, Song 2
"Sleazy (Like  Doris Goodwin)"

(Based on the Commodores' 
"Easy (Like Sunday Morning)" (Youtube)

 Setting: Mid-March 2005, Griswold Hall, Harvard Law School, office of Dean Elena Kagan. Tribe's plagiarism scandal has now dragged on for six long months, with no resolution of Harvard's investigation of the matter. Until recently, Tribe suffered in silence amidst chatter throughout the Law School concerning his ethics, for example, Judge Richard Posner's joke about Tribe's plagiarism during his October, 2004, visit to campus. But in the second week of March, in their annual Parody production, law students presented the "I'm Larry Tribe" parody song mocking Tribe as a plagiarist -- leading Tribe to e-mail his students that he'd heard the Parody "contained some pretty funny stuff about me," but he didn't understand "the business of my supposedly copying some passages from somebody else's work without sufficiently crediting the original author." Tribe's clarification that he's merely a user of (inept) ghostwriters -- and not a plagiarist -- led to the launch of the Harvard Parody blog, which retracted the "I'm Larry Tribe" song and substituted a more fair and balanced parody song, "Harvard Plagiarist Heaven."

Having unburdened himself of the taint of plagiarism (at the price of admitting he uses ghostwriters), in a meeting with Dean Kagan, Tribe presses her for an end to the investigation, and a finding by Harvard that the plagiarism in Tribe's book was merely the product of inadvertence on Tribe's part (because only Klain intentionally plagiarized). Tribe threatens to leave tomorrow if she does not agree to end the investigation, in his favor. This effort will ultimately prove successful, with Kagan concluding that she is "firmly convinced that the error was the product of inadvertence rather than intentionality."

Jeremy Blachman, narrator:

Again, another huge, missed opportunity. In writing the 2005 Parody, because we did not understand that Tribe's defense to the plagiarism charges was, in essence, "my ghostwriter did it," it didn't occur to us that Tribe might have pressed Dean Kagan to exonerate him on the basis that he doesn't write his own books, but instead hires students to write them, so that Tribe couldn't have been the one who plagiarized from Henry Abraham. Had we delved deeper into Tribe's scholarly practices, we would have discovered that in the 1980s Dean Kagan herself worked as a Tribe ghostwriter, and that during this period she was so close to Tribe that she even lived in his basement for awhile -- so that Tribe's lament that he was the victim of an inept ghostwriter must have fallen on sympathetic ears.  How awesome it would have been if we had better understood Tribe's true defense to the plagiarism charges, and could have included this parody song about Tribe defending his use of ghostwriters and threatening to leave if he is not exonerated -- especially given the irony of the song's focus on another notorious user of ghostwriters, former Harvard history professor Doris Kearns Goodwin (a future co-resident with Tribe in "Harvard Plagiarist Heaven"), who Tribe defended against plagiarism charges back in 2002, putting his own scholarly "integrity and reputation for meticulous attribution" on the line in her defense.

"Sleazy (Like Doris Goodwin)"

(Sung by Laurence Tribe)

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

 I know it sounds funny
But I just can't stand the pain
Dean, I'm leaving here tomorrow
Seems to me Dean
You know I wrote all I can
And then I begged, stole, and I borrowed! Yeah!

Ooh, that's ‘cuz I'm sleazy
I'm sleazy like Doris Goodwin
That's ‘cuz I'm sleazy
I'm sleazy like Doris Goodwin

Why in the world would ghostwriters complain ‘bout me?
I paid them whores to write it
Everybody is so uptight
And they want me to write
But I'm lazy, so I try to fake it! Yeah!

Ooh, that's ‘cuz I'm sleazy
I'm sleazy like Doris Goodwin
That's ‘cuz I'm sleazy
I'm sleazy like Doris Goodwin

I tried to just lie, just lie
But now they all know
The whores I had ghostwrite
In secret for me
Just me! Woah, oh! Babe!

Ooh, that's ‘cuz I'm sleazy
I'm sleazy like Doris Goodwin
That's ‘cuz I'm sleazy
I'm sleazy like Doris Goodwin

Ooh, that's ‘cuz I'm sleazy
I'm sleazy like Doris Goodwin
That's ‘cuz I'm sleazy
I'm sleazy like Doris Goodwin