Flashback 1987 to
The New York Times:
Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., fighting to salvage his Presidential campaign, today acknowledged ''a mistake'' in his youth, when he plagiarized a law review article for a paper he wrote in his first year at law school.
Mr. Biden insisted, however, that he had done nothing ''malevolent,'' that he had simply misunderstood the need to cite sources carefully. And he asserted that another controversy, concerning recent reports of his using material from others' speeches without attribution, was ''much ado about nothing.''
Mr. Biden, the 44-year-old Delaware Democrat who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, addressed these issues at the Capitol in a morning news conference he had called expressly for that purpose. The news conference was held just before he presided over the third day of hearings on the nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court.
To buttress his assertions of sincerity and openness, Mr. Biden released a 65-page file, obtained by the Senator from the Syracuse University College of Law, that he said contained all the records of his years there. It disclosed relatively poor grades in college and law school, mixed evaluations from teachers and details of the plagiarism.
There's more:
The faculty ruled that Mr. Biden would get an F in the course but would have the grade stricken when he retook it the next year. Mr. Biden eventually received a grade of 80 in the course, which, he joked today, prevented him from falling even further in his class rank. Mr. Biden, who graduated from the law school in 1968, was 76th in a class of 85.
The file also included Mr. Biden's transcript from his days as an undergraduate at the University of Delaware. In his first three semesters, his grades were C's or D's, with three exceptions: two A's in physical education courses, a B in a course on ''Great English Writers'' and an F in R.O.T.C. The grades improved somewhat later but were never exceptional. Biden's Defense on Speeches
Affirmative Action for dumb white men on display.
