Now is the winter of our discontent. All of a sudden, the headlines are everywhere.
What counts as plagiarism? Harvard president’s resignation sparks debate
Bill Ackman Took on Plagiarism. Then Plagiarism Came for His Wife.
Such examples are easy enough to find.
I think the increased ubiquity of the internet, and networked computing in general, allowed me to have some tether no matter where I was geographically. I could log in to a computer from anywhere in the world and access the same information and the same people. It allowed me to transcend the physical differences.
And having done so, it is easy peasy not only to locate attractive ideas and phrasing to claim (or obscure) as your own. For some, alas, it becomes irresistible. And the justification for intellectual larceny? One must merely, if I may be so immodest, consult Garfield’s Five Principles:
– The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
– Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.
– Plagiarism saves time.
– Stealing from one author is plagiarism; from many authors, research.
– Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.
God knows I have some experience in this area. Not as the culprit, but as the victim. In one case, having spent two years writing The Chaos Scenario, I was surprised five years later to discover a famous professor passing off its premise as his own. In another episode, a less famous professor from a Florida university sent me the galleys of a book he wrote, seeking from me a promotional blurb. And what did I find in the manuscript? Long passages of my unattributed words. In academia, as we have recently learned in the matter of Harvard’s now ex-President Claudine Gay, such larceny is a capital crime. Your career goes straight to the gallows. But as I’ve always said, “Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.” (And my father was super merciful, even when I backed up straight into Mrs. Fishman’s brand-new car.)
Now, in such scandals, the accusers sometimes slice the evidence rather thin — such as in the case of Gay, who in several cases attributed ideas to their original authors but failed to demarcate their exact language within quotation marks. In large bodies of work, these failures can often be attributed to mere carelessness in the transcription of research notes, and Gay was not clearly in violation of the university’s academic standards. Other cases are a bit more cut-and-dried.
Or cut-and-paste.
Neri Oxman, the former MIT professor of material ecology, was caught cribbing on topics like “Functionally graded material,” “Manifolds,” and “Constitutive equation.” But Oxman never acknowledged having pulled from Wikipedia. She didn’t just lift text, either: She also took an illustration from the article for “Heat flux” without citing a source, despite requirements in the image’s Creative Commons license to credit where the picture came from. It’s not surprising that Oxman wouldn’t credit Wikipedia in her doctoral dissertation: While Wikipedia is generally accurate, anyone can edit it, so teachers regularly tell their students that they should not cite the website as an authority.
What makes her case notable is that Oxman is not only the super-hottest MIT professor ever, but also the wife of hedge-fund billionaire and Harvard donor Bill Ackman, whose crusade against Claudine Gay (over the university’s handling of anti-Israel protests and antisemitism) forced Gay’s resignation. The eventual book about the twin scandals should be titled Fuck Me? Fuck YOU!
The bad news for academic integrity is that artificial intelligence is making it easier and easier for students and faculty to present unoriginal work as their own. The good news is that artificial intelligence is making it easier and easier to catch the perps. The beneficiaries are the likes of William Shakespeare, Chelsea Manning, Albert Einstein, Lionel Trilling, Stephen Hawking, Walter Moers, Jonathan Swift, Luke the Evangelist and Business Insider.
As for the moral, well, here’s how I’d put it: To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.