Controversial Opinion of the Day: Plagiarism is Bad

Academics are becoming their own worst enemy. Which kinda sucks, because I like being one.

It’s a good indication of the pit into which academia has fallen that the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay opened up discussion of whether or not plagiarism is bad.  Plagiarism is usually defined as taking someone else’s writing or speech and attributing it to yourself.  There are degrees of plagiarism, to be fair.  Forgetting to put quotation marks around a sentence which one has otherwise correctly cited differs from, say, lifting entire paragraphs without citation at all.  But the accusations against Dr. Gay appear to extend beyond a few human examples of sloppiness to a clear, ongoing track record of false attribution.

I’ll say upfront: I don’t really think of myself as the plagiarism police.  As much as I can, when I catch students at it (easier now with machine checkers), depending on the extent plagiarized, I try to make a learning experience of it.  New students, I’ve found, sometimes get bad advice from high school teachers who sometimes seem indifferent to copy and paste in student writings.  Naturally, I don’t accept plagiarized papers, and I think it’s fair for university academic standards to track for repeat offenders.  But I’m a bit wary of ending a student’s academic career over a first-time ignorant offense.

Of course, the president of Harvard can’t claim to be a first-year student.  And the accusations against her indicate a pattern of offense, not merely a few incidents of forgotten quotation marks.  When I first learned of the initial accusations, I thought perhaps it was just a few moments of carelessness, but the breadth of issues indicates it rises far beyond that.

Academic integrity is a cornerstone of scholarship.  So, it’s been amazing to watch so many scholars (not least the Harvard Corporation) appear to bend over backwards to excuse Gay’s behavior.

Let’s say something upfront…Gay’s tenure as an administrator at Harvard was already bad.  Her academic credentials were thin, she appeared to go all in on the 2020 BLM/DEI movement that is now clearly a horrendous mistake, and oversaw Harvard’s plummet to dead last in rankings over free speech.  Her controversial testimony over antisemitism at Harvard in congress was just par for a really bumpy course.  She was ineffective as a university president and should have resigned before the plagiarism scandal.

Now it seems were’ in for a tit-for-tat battle.  Harvard alum and wealthy donor Bill Ackman was a vocal critic of Gay.  Business Insider, poking the bear, has accused his wife of plagiarizing her MIT dissertation.  Now Ackman is threatening to run entire universities’ scholarly rosters through plagiarism detectors, which is easy to do with machines.  Between 1-2% of scholars admit to plagiarism on anonymous surveys, though 30% of scholars admit to witnessing plagiarism in other scholars.  Even anonymous responses tend to underestimate embarrassing information, so let’s say the real number is around 5%.  Harvard reports having about 1500 tenured or tenure-track faculty.  This would mean we could safely guess Ackman’s efforts could reveal somewhere around 75 plagiarizing faculty, a huge embarrassment for the university, and of course every other university (in a tweet, Ackman mentioned starting with MIT). 

My take is that Gay’s plagiarism was bad; if it’s confirmed Ackman’s wife plagiarized, this is also bad, and if Ackman finds more plagiarists, their behavior is bad too.  The whole thing will be embarrassing for academia which probably didn’t want yet another widespread scandal, but alas if you don’t want a behavior, deterrence is the best way to reduce its frequency.

Despite that University of Pennsylvania’s white president was the first to resign after the scandal over the congressional testimony, Gay’s defenders are crying racism.  I don’t find this at all credible.  I think we can say, at this point, the woke left use identity as a shield, invoking racism and every other “ism” as an ad hominem defense against legitimate criticisms.  The idea that Gay’s downfall is somehow an affront to all black women is insulting to black women.  CUNY professor Mark Lamont Hill threw gasoline on this fire by proclaiming “The next president of Harvard University MUST be a Black woman” (see those quotation marks there?!)  I almost wonder if Hill, a frequent culture warrior, is secretly paid by conservatives.  If the next Harvard president (or any university president) is a black woman, Hill couldn’t have thrown her under the bus any more efficiently than by declaring to the world it would be because of her sex and race.  But we all know this left tactic of crying racism/sexism/transphobia at every chance.  It’s time to start calling that out for what it is.  It does nothing to help with actual racism. 

Various data point to the fact that Americans today (and Europeans too), have historically low levels of racist beliefs, essentially for any culture, anywhere in the history of humanity.  Most claims of racism being the root of disparate outcomes just don’t fit the data, which tend to suggest communities really do differ in important way.  Identifying and rectifying real causes of divergent outcomes would really help people, but that requires honesty, even for what people don’t want to hear. Is Gay’s ouster political?  Sure.  But this has more to do with the public’s increasing disdain of universities, which is well deserved, than Gay being black.  Folks like Ackman happily danced on the professional grave of Penn’s former white president, and you can bet they’ll be happy to bring down progressive white men who lead universities too.

Academia leaning into this by effectively saying “So what?” to some serious charges of plagiarism couldn’t have been worse.  It diminishes our values and is an insult to our students whom we are expected to hold to a high standard.  It’s hard to think of a worse defense of Gay at the worst possible time for universities.  Academia is long overdue for serious reform.