Penn, meet Jake Shuster, current Undergraduate Assembly Treasurer and presidential candidate in the upcoming UA elections. As a freshman Money Booster, Shuster caused some StudGov drama after sending out a mass email encouraging his classmates to vote for him instead of reelecting Jon Youshaei, the freshman class prez. Whew.

Now a junior, Shuster is in the news again, this time over allegations of campaign platform plagiarism. Ruh-roh. That Ivy League internet trash compactor IvyGate has undertaken an investigation into the similarities between the campaign platforms of current UA Prez and VP Tyler Ernst and Faye Cheng (respectively) from last year and that of would-be president Shuster. Though smug and sensational, IvyGate‘s post does raise some serious concerns about the campaign that shouldn’t be ignored. Naturally, Shuster didn’t take these jabs lying down.  Check out Jake Shuster’s official response after the jump:

Well, this is interesting. We just got wind that the winner of the Nora Magid Mentorship Prize, a seriously prestigious prize that goes to a graduating senior who has shown promise in non-fiction writing, was awarded to a former DP columnist. And not just any DP columnist, but one who in fact wrote a plagiarized column for the paper in 2007 and was subsequently fired.

Such background information is not hard to come by, as a Google search of the writer’s name will quickly reveal both the published article itself and a scathing IvyGate post on the subject.

We do acknowledge that everyone makes mistakes, the winner definitely has talent as a writer (so did Stephen Glass), has had impressive internships and yeah, it was a few years ago. However, it did happen during the writer’s Penn career, for the school paper. Did the judges forget to Google or just not care? Anyway, this just seems kind of surprising, or there’s something we’re missing.