Why Plagiarism Matters
Academic fraud is a deeply serious matter and should be treated as such, especially among our professorial elite.
The past few weeks have seen once-esoteric academic controversies reach the bright lights of the mainstream press. The ins and outs of academic integrity and plagiarism have been debated on the pages of august outlets like the New York Times. Political pundits are roleplaying as peer-reviewers, while whole segments of cable news have revolved around citation practices. At the center of this firestorm is former Harvard president Claudine Gay, who earned the ‘former’ part of her title just this week after resigning over dozens of incidents of academic dishonesty. The search through her (very small) volume of professional work – a mere 17 published works (no books) across a decades-long academic career – began after Gay’s disastrous testimony before Congress during which she failed to condemn antisemitism on Harvard’s campus. It was led by conservative journalists and activists like the Washington Free Beacon and the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, but has turned up airtight results of plagiarism across half of her professional writings, including her dissertation.
The coverage, however, has focused less on the actual plagiarism and more on the people who uncovered it. Progressive defenders of Gay, who was the first black Harvard president, claim that this entire issue is bogus, merely acting as cover for a racist mob action against a historic figure. The aptly-named New York Times op-ed writer Charles Blow wrote:
“But the campaign against her was never truly about her testimony or accusations of plagiarism. It was a political attack on a symbol. It was a campaign of abrogation. It was and is a project of displacement and defilement meant to reverse progress and shame the proponents of that progress.”
That sentiment could be found across the media, with outlets from Vox to the Associated Press labeling this as a conservative crusade against higher education, using plagiarism as a weapon. Antiracist guru Ibram X. Kendi (about whom I’ve written before) highlighted a particular passage from the AP story, arguing that the source of the allegations – “not from her academic peers but her political foes” – undermines them entirely. And Gay herself has fully embraced this narrative, casting herself as a martyr for diversity in higher education against those evil conservatives who seek to destroy it.
But all of this is besides the point. The focus here should not be on racism or DEI bureaucracies, nor should it be on Gay’s lackluster publication history or the politics of those who uncovered her plagiarism. It should be on the plagiarism itself.
Since Gay’s persistent academic dishonesty was revealed, several other scholars who politically align with her have come to her defense. They have made arguments ranging from “misattribution isn’t plagiarism,” and “unintentional plagiarism isn’t plagiarism,” to “if the plagiarized person doesn’t care, it shouldn’t count as plagiarism,” and “copying language isn’t plagiarism since it isn’t copying ideas.” We have also seen the argument made that this practice of faulty citation and “freely borrow[ing] each other’s work” is no big deal and is, in fact, de rigeur in academia. None of these excuses suffice, and all say absolutely terrible things about the state of the academy today.
First off, plagiarism is absolutely the cardinal sin of academic work and writing in general. The passing off of another’s unique work or words as your own is a crime against the very point of academia: the production and dissemination of knowledge. Taking credit for the ideas or writing of someone else is the antithesis of producing knowledge and it demeans the institution under which it occurs. It is not only a crime against the person being plagiarized, but against the academy itself. Like murder, which is still prosecuted by the State even if the victim’s family wishes otherwise, plagiarism isn’t dependent on the hurt feelings, or lack thereof, of the plagiarized. It also does not matter whether the theft is the result of an erroneous citation or was a deliberate attempt to copy another’s work. Both undermine the mission of academia in general.
At the same time, the idea that some things just have to be described in a certain specific way is total nonsense. It is actually quite difficult to describe something in English in the exact same way as someone else purely by happenstance; searching a string of less than a dozen words of one’s writing often only turns up that single source. For instance, searching this 20-word sentence from my last post – “That story is already making an enormous impact across the world and could signal far greater issues in the future” – only results in that one specific piece. Nobody else on the entirety of the internet has used those particular words in that particular order before or since. And this is the case for almost all professional writing. So it is beyond belief that Claudine Gay could have just stumbled upon the exact same phrasing as someone else when writing her dissertation, for example.
Plagiarism speaks ill of the plagiarizer, as it signals a laziness and an intellectual dishonesty that should be fundamentally disqualifying from any career in writing or academia. Gay not only stole the words of others in the text and footnotes of her papers, but even in the acknowledgements of her dissertation. This is peak plagiarism. In any other circumstance, this sort of repeated violation of academic standards – Gay has plagiarized half of her total academic output – would result in heavy penalties and immediate consequences for the plagiarizer. Harvard’s own Honor Code, which covers all students, says as much:
“Members of the Harvard College community commit themselves to producing academic work of integrity – that is, work that adheres to the scholarly and intellectual standards of accurate attribution of sources, appropriate collection and use of data, and transparent acknowledgement of the contribution of others to their ideas, discoveries, interpretations, and conclusions. Cheating on exams or problem sets, plagiarizing or misrepresenting the ideas or language of someone else as one’s own, falsifying data, or any other instance of academic dishonesty violates the standards of our community, as well as the standards of the wider world of learning and affairs.”
As someone who has recently been through a graduate program during which I wrote myriad papers and articles, I have dealt with very similar codes of conduct. Here’s a couple from my classes:
“Standards of academic integrity will be strictly enforced. Cheating and plagiarism automatically will result in a failing grade for the assignment in question. A pattern of academic dishonesty (two or more instances) will result in a failing grade for the course. All instances of cheating and plagiarism are reported to the History department chair and the appropriate academic dean.”
“It should go without saying that you must be honest in your dealings with the professor and your fellow students. Instances of plagiarism will be penalized severely, with sanctions ranging from failure for the assignment to failure for the course. Persistent dishonesty will result in removal from the program itself.”
The penalties for plagiarism are appropriately harsh, and the standards for citation are quite high. As a historian, I was trained to cite everything that came from another scholar or source, whether that was a direct quote, a paraphrase, or even a shared idea. As an example, in my graduate thesis which ran to about 200 pages of double-spaced text, I had nearly 1200 citations from dozens of primary and secondary sources. Had I failed to cite any of the scholars I “borrowed” from, I would have received a failing grade, even if the quality of my work was excellent. And I would have deserved that failing grade. That is how important appropriate citation practices are.
To think that powerful progressive academics like Claudine Gay (who, despite her resignation as Harvard’s president, will remain a tenured professor) and Kevin Kruse (whose own plagiarism scandal hasn’t impacted his career in the slightest) can get away with something that would result in suspension or expulsion for one of their students is galling. The downplaying of these very real scandals by the press is directly due to the fact that these academics are on the right side politically; if a conservative academic (as few and far between as they may be) had conducted themselves in this manner, they’d have been defenestrated immediately, tenure or no.
But the politics here shouldn’t matter. Nobody should get a pass on plagiarism. One academic, in response to this controversy, wrote that the Claudine Gay standard would result in “literally tens of thousands of professors and school administrators [losing] their jobs.”
And to that, I say good riddance.