I want to offer some observations on the plagiarism charges brought against Harvard President Claudine Gay that resulted in her resignation. Obviously, this resignation was part of a broader political context related to statements made by Gay and two other Presidents while being questioned by politicians. The claims of plagiarism were a completely separate issue in Gay’s situation, but part of a general argument claiming she was not suited to lead a major university.

I have no interest in defending Gay, but I was personally interested in the plagiarism issue as I am a retired professor and have experience with the scholarship we are expected to pursue. I can offer a couple of things. First, I was interested in reviewing examples of the plagiarism Gay was accused of committing. Copy the work of others without attribution can be purposeful or accidental and it can be extensive or limited. I found a source with examples. 

Second, I wanted to comment on a NY Times opinion piece by Charles Seife that suggests plagiarism is but a sign of broader misconduct or lack of sound values in higher education. 

Aaron Sibarium is the author of “This is definitely plagiarism” which appears in the Free Beacon. I had not heard of this publication, but I found descriptions describing it as a conservative source with a mixed record for accurate reporting. I had trouble locating examples showing plagiarism and prefer a source I and others know more about, but this source did provide the type of data I wanted. What was the original source and what did Gay write without clear attribution? 

I would encourage your own review of the examples keeping in mind my claim that plagiarism can be purposeful or accidental and it be extensive or limited. I found the examples to be minor and limited. 

If you have not been through the process of generating lengthy formal academic documents, allow me to speculate about how such errors of sloppiness or laziness happen. It is my guess that the type of plagiarism Guy is accused of is more common than people would expect. For example, someone checked the dissertation of Bill Ackman’s wife Neri Oxman who received her PhD from MIT and found she also had plagiarized several small segments of her dissertation. Ackman is a conservative Harvard donor largely responsible for the scrutiny of Gay. A dissertation can easily run a hundred and fifty pages or more. If you do a research-focused dissertation that involves the collection of data, your writing contains a lengthy introduction describing the existing work on the topic and then identifying the purpose of your extension. You also describe the method you are taking to describe the way you are going about collecting the information to support or reject your proposed extension. So, let’s say you have 50 or so pages of content to write for the Introduction. Typically, you go about this using the notes you have taken from many existing studies and position papers. When you take these notes, you sometimes copy down segments or arguments of descriptions from these other studies. If you then recopy parts of these notes verbatim to your own paper, this is technically plagiarism. You are expected to accurately summarize or paraphrase what the other studies said, but sometimes you overlook the difference between when your notes were already summaries and when they were straight copies of other material. By the way, this problem is getting more frequent now that most of us read the original material in a digital format and export our own notes and highlighted material to a document we save to refer to for later writing activities. The highlighted content would be a copy of the original and if pasted into new content would represent plagiarism. 

I cannot be certain and I am not approving of this type of sloppy scholarship, but what I describe seems consistent with the examples I read attributed to Dr. Gay. The impression that large sections were simply moved from one document to another without attribution does not seem to be the case here. The examples also do not seem to me like someone was trying to take credit for significant insights or new discoveries, but perhaps was lazy in generating original text to summarize generic material from another source. 

Like I said. Take the time to read the examples and decide for yourself.

In the second article “Plagiarism in Academia,” Charles Seife argues that institutions are partly to blame for the high rates of plagiarism in academia. Seife argues that institutions often have lax review practices and that they do not do enough to educate students about plagiarism. Seife describes the review practices for both dissertations and scholarly publications as lacking in care and skill. With manuscripts being reviewed for publication, Seife speculates that faculty members often pass on the manuscripts to graduate students rather than do the work of carefully going through the review process themselves. Seife is correct in that journals do not compensate reviewers. We make the effort as a professional responsibility expected by our institutions and typically counted as part of the service portion of our contracts. 

I can say from having received possibly a hundred or more journal manuscripts that Seife has extremely unrealistic expectations. I would say that for the average manuscript, I would have read only about 50% of the articles cited by the author. Just starting with this situation, recognizing word by word copying would be impossible. With student work that concerned me, I would copy a paragraph of work I found suspect and search for this content using Google. I required access to a digital copy of writing assignments because it was easiest for me to comment on documents in this form. I have found a few examples of plagiarism. There are now digital tools available for doing more sophisticated searches. Modern course management systems (e.g., Blackboard) make such tools available to both students and faculty members. If similar tools would be used with manuscripts submitted for publication, it would seem reasonable to require manuscripts that be examined by the journal staff before being sent out for review. I have not reviewed manuscripts in a few years now, so it is possible this approach is already in place.

Sometimes I feel academics are targets for one reason or another. We do work many do not understand and are sometimes considered out of touch with real issues. While there are certainly examples that fit such perceptions, to stereotype intelligent and hard working people in this way is also typically due to a lack of experience on the part of those circulating such claims.