What Is Plagiarism?
By Okay, I’ve been drawn into this conversation. It continues to be a distraction from the rightwing attack on education, but it’s connected.
Last night I made the point in a comment that what I’ve seen so far of the accusations against Claudine Gay and Neri Oxman barely make it to the level of what I would call plagiarism. They are of concern and should be investigated and/or explained, but my criterion for plagiarism involves the improper appropriation of someone else’s ideas.
Judah Grunstein says something similar in a Bluesky thread. (I think you can now see posts even if you’re not signed in.) Here’s the first post in that thread, which says most of what I want to quote.
We now have tools that can compare texts, word for word. Far too many of the current accusations of plagiarism rely on the repetition of relatively short strings of words. In Gay’s case, some of the examples I’ve seen are ordinary expressions of concepts common to her field. It’s annoying to rephrase such things every time you write them. Early on in the use of these tools, an inordinate number of chemistry papers were flagged. It turns out that Methods sections of chemistry papers are very similar. There are only a few ways to describe a preparation or analytical procedure.
Oxman seems to have lifted small paragraphs and a photo from Wikipedia without attribution. The more serious problem seems to be her use of Wikipedia for research purposes. What she lifted were mostly definitions, which tend toward the use of similar sequences of words.
A few decades back, the director of a small-to-medium think tank published a report. My report, actually, but he didn’t bother to say that. He put his name on it as author. That was in the days before easy cut-and-paste, so he must have had someone retype it and then copy the illustrations into the report. That was unambiguously plagiarism. The current accusations are of something much more ambiguous.
One of the ways I collect material is to copy chunks into a document of notes. When I started doing this, I didn’t always clearly note which parts were copies and which were my comments. It’s possible that if you searched my internet oeuvre, you could find a few of these copies. When I realized that I might not be attributing properly, I became more scrupulous in my note-taking. Something like this could be the explanation for most of what is being held up against Gay and Oxman.
Sloppy? Yes. But not necessarily dishonest. And the examples are few enough that this seems a reasonable explanation. But there is no way we can know exactly the process that led to Gay’s and Oxman’s results without an investigation that involves asking them.
I consulted with my management about that plagiarized report, and we decided it wasn’t worth pursuing. It wasn’t one of my more important contributions. I can’t even recall now what it was about. Something to keep in one’s back pocket in case something else happened with the culprit, but nothing ever did.
The appropriate response to Gay’s and Oxman’s offenses is a short investigation and a slap on the wrist. But Oxman’s husband, Bill Ackman, and the New York Times are on a crusade against women who are the presidents of Ivy League universities. So here we are.