On Plagiarism, and the President of Harvard

Here’s a common problem in academic writing. You’re writing an introductory section to an article or a chapter, and need to include some basic background information, say, on how a particular institution was organized, or the order in which certain events took place. You find the information you need in a reputable secondary source, where it is written out in two or three nicely clear and economical sentences. So how do you proceed? A good principle of academic writing is to keep direct quotations to a minimum, as they break up the text and make it less readable. This is all the more true for introductory sections, where a great deal of the material is essentially common knowledge. Quote too much and your text becomes an off-putting mosaic of apostrophes (e.g., “the French Revolution, ‘which began with the convocation of the Estates General in 1789,’ and quickly led to ‘violent attacks on the old social order,’ and ‘had important ramifications for international affairs,’” etc. etc. etc.). Save the direct quotations for when you are referencing an important, original idea or discovery and need to give due credit to the author in question. Instead, an acceptable procedure is to paraphrase the author’s language, while adding a footnote to his or her work where appropriate. The problem, though, is that the author may have already found one of the best possible ways to express the information. In paraphrasing, you yourself have to struggle to find language which is both different, and not markedly worse. It’s a tiresome, if unavoidable task. I’d be surprised if any of the academics reading this have not engaged in it from time to time.

Of course, there is another solution: just use the original author’s text without attribution. This is, essentially, what Claudine Gay, the President of Harvard, did in her Ph.D. dissertation and in a number of her academic articles. In none of the cases did she steal important ideas from other authors and pass them off as her own. In none of the cases was the text she took from other authors particularly remarkable for its language. Her use of the text (I won’t call it “borrowing”—it’s not as if she can give it back), may well have been entirely unintentional. Either she forgot that the words she found in her notes were a direct quotation, or she intended to go back later and add quotation marks, or to paraphrase the text, and simply forgot. It’s an understandable enough lapse, given the pressures that academics often find themselves under. It is plagiarism, but it is not comparable to the theft of someone else's key ideas and insights, or to the use of long sections of someone else’s text verbatim, without attribution.

So how should we judge such cases? When we discuss crimes, we make a distinction between ones where every instance is major and deserving of serious punishment, and ones where some instances can fairly be called minor. Driving five miles an hour over the speed limit on the interstate is minor; driving seventy miles an hour over it is not. On the other hand, we don’t speak of minor cases of murder. Does plagiarism admit of a major/minor distinction? I would argue that it does, and most universities would agree. Even if they insist, rightly, that the sort of thing Claudine Gay engaged in is plagiarism, they do not punish all cases of it equally. The extent and importance of the offense, and the intent of the offender, all matter.

So should this be the end of the matter? Should we conclude that while, yes, President Gay committed plagiarism (or even, “technically committed plagiarism”), it was a minor case, more indicative of sloppiness than of any sort of malicious intent, and undeserving of further attention? Especially because it came to light thanks to the work of ill-intentioned right-wing trolls? Actually, no.

For one thing, even minor offenses are still offenses. Gay’s plagiarism may not have done any damage to the authors plagiarized from. But there is still an unfair advantage gained—a minor one, perhaps, but an unfair advantage nonetheless—in passing off a particularly clear and felicitous expression as one’s own and getting credit for it. There has been quite of lot of joking over the fact that Claudine Gay even plagiarized some phrases in her dissertation Acknowledgments. But every academic knows that Acknowledgements are one of the most closely read pieces of any academic work, and especially memorable phrases in them create good impressions, which bring professional benefits. The lapse was not entirely laughable.

And the status of the offender matters. If I caught a first-year college student doing the sort of thing Gay did, and my university allowed me leeway in how to proceed in such cases, I would probably knock a couple of grade points off the assignment and give the student a lecture. I’d be a bit harder on a senior who did the same. As for a senior professor, while not a firing offense, this sort of plagiarism might well merit some sort of formal reprimand and material sanction.  Claudine Gay’s most extensive plagiarism came when she was a graduate student, but she continued the pattern as a professor. And now, of course, she is President of Harvard University.

What bothers me most about this whole affair is the fact that Gay herself has not taken responsibility for the plagiarism, and that so many have supported her in not doing so. Yes, the plagiarism was discovered and publicized by ill-intentioned right-wing trolls, but so what? To dismiss the charges because of who leveled them is to follow a logic most associated today with Donald Trump: You can’t take the accusations against me seriously, because my accusers are on the side of my political enemies. If we don’t accept this logic from him, we shouldn’t accept it from Claudine Gay’s supporters.

I would think much more of Claudine Gay if, in response to the uncovering of her (yes, minor) plagiarism, she had simply admitted it, apologized, and called for the university to determine the seriousness of the offenses and to recommend a possible punishment. Instead, she limited herself to issuing “corrections” to her works, as if the trolls had found an embarrassing number of typographical errors, while the Harvard Corporation essentially pronounced her blameless. She was going to emerge from this episode wounded in any case. The question was whether the wounds were going to heal quickly, or continue to suppurate, further damaging both her and her university.