I’m going to depart from my usual weekly rotation this week as I catch up on some of the news and conversations from the end of 2023 into this week.
I’ll have more to say about what happened at Harvard during the week but let’s start with a discussion of the complexity of plagiarism that isn’t necessarily pinned to specifically absolving Claudine Gay (but which may pertain to that case and others).
The issue is always discussed poorly in public culture. Sometimes that’s because it’s being talked about in bad faith (as it surely was in Gay’s case) but more often I think because it is something that most people were taught to fear and avoid in high school and college and yet that many people practice on some occasions, only some of them intentionally.
It’s much more confusing as a concept than teachers often suggest. The first reason is its history. Plagiarism is tied to relatively modern concepts of individual and property and to intellectual property law (which diverge notably between Anglo-American and Roman-Dutch doctrines). There may well have been premodern ideas in learned and literate circles about the theft of ideas and of written text,1 but the advent of print capitalism changed the scale and value of writing, and concern for and monitoring of ownership followed along. Like many historians and literary scholars, I’ve come across 18th and 19th Century texts with substantial bodies of word-for-word copying from an earlier author, most especially in the case of travel and exploration writing, where European travellers were often trying to provide a comprehensive and authoritative account of a particular region or location even when they did not visit it directly but someone else did—a practice that can be found in writing by travellers all the way back to antiquity. It’s possible with the 18th and 19th Century texts that I’ve seen that nobody noticed, but it’s also possible that readers noticed and didn’t particularly care.
I think you can see a divergence of sorts as concern for originality, ownership and the theft of intellectual property grew. In one branch, writing skewed towards standardization—towards common phraseologies, formats, and descriptions, towards nearly identical narrations of procedure, definitions, instructions and the like, often created by or regulated by institutions and groups. In the other branch, writing skewed towards originality, individuation, and idiosyncrasy.
Scholarship, particularly after 1945, fell into a complicated space between those branches. Most scholarly writing is on one hand profoundly referential and accumulative. Citation in this vein isn’t so much about acknowledging the original or distinctive work of another as it is about placing one text in a long chain of interrelated texts, about indexing those relationships in order to sustain and build knowledge between and through those texts. On the other hand, while scholars rarely realize direct monetary value from the sale of a particular work of writing, they accumulate reputation and gain employment based on attribution of particular work, especially in written form, to them as individuals. This is particularly true in the humanities and social sciences. Add to this that much scholarship (and performance, here closely connected) involves elaborate ‘horizontal’ collaborations where it’s not always clear what any given individual contributed to the work and ‘vertical’ teaching relationships where students are sometimes trained by emulating or reproducing aspects of their instructor’s work.
In practice, this can mean that there’s a lot of grey areas in scholarly communities when it comes to plagiarism and academic honesty. That bleeds over into how we teach students about plagiarism as well: statements about policy are usually clear about the standards for word-for-word copying but inevitably cannot be quite so clear about what constitutes a paraphrase that requires citation, particularly when there is only so much variation possible in common restatements of well-known facts and procedures. That’s one of the reasons that large-language model generative AI and topic modelling work in the first place. There’s still a strikingly large range of ways to express oneself in original ways in language but some of that variation bottlenecks pretty hard when you’re writing about a highly conventionalized topic.
In many areas of misconduct—both those codified in law or rules and those we worry about within the morality of everyday life—we care a great deal about intention, repetition and magnitude. We know people can do something wrong without being particularly aware or conscious, that they can do something wrong in a way that’s self-aware but careless, or that’s intensely deliberate and calculated. We know people can do something wrong once or twice and judge that differently than habitual wrong-doing. And we know that scale matters, even with the gravest transgressions.
People who look at university policies on academic honesty and who see them as cut-and-dried, allowing for no situational or circumstantial evaluation, are just wrong both in their reading but especially in terms of how those policies are actually applied. When an accusation of academic dishonesty is made, whomever the accused is, there’s usually some evaluation of intention, repetition and magnitude before there are consequences. Which I think is fitting, given the complexity of plagiarism as an actual practice.
It’s also the case, as in many areas of misconduct, that really serious misdeeds often go completely unpunished because the person responsible is cunning enough to make their activities undetectable or unprovable, or because the person who would have to make a fuss doesn’t want to pay the social costs. Wealthy students who are willing to pay a ghostwriter without admitting to doing so (a high-enough quality one that doesn’t plagiarize) are nearly undetectable until they are in a professional situation where their lack of knowledge implied by a credential is evident, at which point they may have gotten close enough to making it after faking it that it’s hard to challenge them.
Within academia, there are a lot of nasty little strategies that are in my view far worse than just copying other writers’ words. Many of us have seen a scholar gobbling up conference papers or presentations and quickly pushing out work that lays claim to some of that material. The really high-end strategy for doing that involves synthesizing that work so you can’t be accused of copying it but where the synthesizers work is out first and they end up with at least some of the credit. I personally had an experience with another strategy, which is a scholar using citations from my conference paper to imply that the scholar had been in an archive that I know they hadn’t been to—in that case, the author did that to a number of ABDs and newly-minted doctorates. In an odd way, the plagiarism you detect is often not the dishonesty you should worry about: what gets detected is usually clumsy, desperate or pathological, or is a sign that someone is attempting to win out with quantity instead of quality. There are some grossly dishonest people in academia, in culture and in public life, and I’m happy to see them caught on the occasion that it happens. Being aware of the situational subtleties and ethical contexts doesn’t mean forgiveness for transgressions that are intentional, repeated and massive. (Definitely watch that whole video: it’s quite excellent.)
I think the difficulty of originality given the character of modern culture and the institutions involved in making culture and knowledge is the other deep thing to consider. At the scale of public culture, or even just within academia, there are people converging on the same ideas, interpretations and approaches all the time. Darwin and Wallace weren’t a case of plagiarism, they were a case of convergence on the same truthful idea. My siblings and I have found many times that we have a private ‘in-house’ idea or plotline or concept that we’ve talked about with each other only to see it actually appear in the world a few years later. Nobody’s stealing from us; nobody stole from us. There are moments where we come close to breaking the basic edifice of scholarship and culture by requiring writers to comprehensively cite or reference everything that might have been written or said that relates to what they’ve written. Sometimes that’s just too big a weight to lay on writers who haven’t consulted or seen everything that might be kin to what they’re writing, where they really have gotten the ideas they’ve gotten without having seen some reference point that seems obvious to a reader.
And beyond that, there’s a vast domain of questions about the genealogies and sources of culture and knowledge, about who gets to call something inspiration instead of appropriation. I don’t care for the attempts to make appropriation a completely straightforward practice, easy to define and condemn, but it’s hard to ignore just how patterned it has been, most especially in terms of who profits and who does not, who owns work tightly and who has their basic touchstones routinely ripped away from them.
In the end, of course we judge situationally and individually, whether it’s an erring student or a major public figure. Bill Ackman, in the manner of billionaire assholes, seems to have learned the wrong lesson from having had someone throw stones at his glass house. The whole point of the proverb is not to call down a meteor storm of stones on a whole city of glass; it’s to think carefully about the legitimacy and gravity of an accusation before you make one.
Sadeghi, Ramin. “The Attitude of Scholars Has Not Changed towards Plagiarism since the Medieval Period: Definition of Plagiarism According to Shams-e-Qays, Thirteenth-Century Persian Literary Scientist.” Research Ethics Review, vol. 15, no. 2, 2019, pp. 1–3, https://doi.org/10.1177/1747016116654065.
Good one Tim. I started in on the video. Pretty engaging but then I noticed it’s length exceeded my monthly screen quota😉👏🏽😊 I’m taken by how many variations there are. Every example I have experienced is different from every other one. Very complicated field, as you note. Side question: on pay walls...do those who command 75 bucks before you can read someone’s article bear any responsibility for the author in respect to another’s appropriation of what is behind the pay wall?