So, here are two thoughts I've been having on plagiarism.
First, I've seen very little acknowledgment that plagiarism is actually not a universal rule. It's obviously heavily condemned in education, academia, and journalism but less so in other fields. I'm an attorney, and 95% of what attorneys do is plagiarize. If you need to write a motion to dismiss, the first thing you do is find another motion to dismiss that you, someone else at your firm, or just someone else wrote. You then proceed to change as little of it as you can (which still is usually a lot), and you certainly don't cite, quote, or attribute the portions of the motion you are copying. When I started my most recent job, I actually got scolded for writing a report from scratch rather than using a model. I've even seen suggestions that it could be unethical to do so since you are billing your client for work you don't need to do.
While attorneys do frequently use quotations and cite sources, it isn't for plagiarism reasons, but because Judge Cardozo or Learned Hand saying something carries a lot more weight than a random attorney saying it, and you want to invoke their authority (either as controlling authority if it is a higher court or as persuasive authority if it is a non-controlling court or notable jurist).
This was roughly the case when I worked as a computer programmer c. 2000. While there are obviously IP concerns, and certain licenses require that you include comments or other acknowledgments, there was a lot of "recycling" code in ways that would constitute plagiarism in academia. I'm assuming this comes up in other fields, too. In most fields, if you are working on the June TPS report, do you start from scratch or pull up the May TPS report and work from that? And if it is the latter, do you quote and cite the May TPS report? I doubt it.
The other thought I've had, which you somewhat touch on in your article, is that rules against plagiarism really serve different functions when you are talking about students vs. academics/journalists. The goal with students is to ensure they are doing and understanding the work, which they are not if they are plagiarizing. You mentioned "cheating themselves," but it also cheats other students. This can either be through direct ranking (you don't want to miss being valedictorian because someone else plagiarized to get better grades) or through diminution of the credential (if Harvard starts spitting out a bunch of lousy graduates because they all plagiarized rather than learning the material, pretty soon a Harvard degree will be worth less). On the other hand, the problem with academics/journalists plagiarizing is stolen credit. If you come up with a good idea, you want credit for it so that it can help you advance. You don't want someone else taking it as your own. This is less of a concern for students, particularly at lower levels. No one's job prospects depend on whether they were cited in a 10th-grader's social studies paper.
I think this plays into John McWhorter's call for a distinction between stealing ideas and stealing words. If we are talking about a student, you care about both because both count as part of the assignment. On the other hand, I could see caring less about stealing words when it comes to an academic/journalist. The goal there is for them to come up with and spread new and interesting ideas. The words are just a tool they use for doing so. If you steal an academic/journalist's ideas, you have really stolen something of value. Words, less so. In fact, it may make sense to let academics/journalists steal words, particularly reasonably boilerplate words, for the same reason attorneys do it - to save time. If you have a brilliant academic, I'd rather have them spend their time doing research and thinking (or teaching students) rather than figuring out a novel way to phrase a sentence that 100 people have said before them.
At least one of Gay's alleged plagiarisms was her summary of a statute. It was close enough to the source that she probably did copy it, but it was also banal enough that I have a hard time seeing why, from a broader perspective, it was wrong for her to do so. It was an efficient summary. There were also only so many ways to summarize the statute without having to intentionally make your language bulky and inelegant (which includes adding a bunch of quotation marks and citations), which serves no one. Given how banal the description was, saying that she "stole" the language from the original author reminds me of a lot of the "business method" patents in the 2000s, where you know there was nothing creative about the solution; it's just that the patentor was the first person to come across the problem. IIRC, these patents have largely been invalidated and are at least much harder to get.
This isn't really intended as a defense of Gay. Mainly because I don't care to defend her, but also because, whether or not the rules make sense, you are generally expected to play by them. However, it is intended as a call to rethink whether plagiarism rules actually make sense in the context of academics and journalists or whether we should focus more on stealing ideas than language (poets can still complain about plagiarized language).
I do not, at all, in the strongest of terms, view the argument against plagiarism as wanting not to cheat students out of learning. Plagiarism is stealing and deceit; lying, cheating, and stealing. The argument against plagiarism is that it is wrong.
How to react may depend. With a high school student, as in case #1, surely the response obviously better than any of the listed options is to talk to the parent and kid together while giving an F on that paper. This addresses two questions, 1, did the kid just turn on the waterworks and come up with a tale to shift blame and gain sympathy? 2, does the mom know that now you and all of the other teachers now will never trust the kid or the kid's work again? And it is an opportunity to lay out transparently for the two of them together that 3, if the mom did not actually do that, she needs to deal with her kid's lying and underhandedness; 4, if the mom did do that, impress upon the kid that she (10th grade!!) should have her own integrity and not be a liar and a cheat like her mom; and 5, I guess maybe try the argument about not missing the opportunity to learn by doing the assignment, not that I think it's going to do any good in that case. Still, a huge missed opportunity to teach that kid crying isn't an excuse and neither is 'my mom made me do it'.
I lived through a version of case #3, except I was regular faculty, it was a grad school class, most students international, and the outcome was messier. The submitted work was clearly copy-pasted (varying fonts, colors, etc.) and the student was international. I flunked him and told the program director, since I wasn't sure who needed to take the other steps by policy. Nonetheless, he raised a huge stink, how could he know, how unfair it was, something something cultural something, you can't give me an F.
This was a near-Ivy school, selective program for early mid-career professionals. The program director was solid and never gave me any grief. The administration took the student's side and wanted a 'compromise'. The program director never suggested I change anything, took over all discussions with the powers that be, kept the heat completely off me, stood up for integrity and so forth. Looking back, I did not realize the pressures that must have been exerted. The brouhaha dragged on for a couple of semesters. Ultimately I suppose the administration got their compromise, in a way, since I think he was suspended for a semester then allowed to complete the program (by the book, he should have been kicked out). The process was the punishment for the department, as well as I think not doing me any good. No one blamed me exactly but it was a bummer, annoyance, long-running aggravation, and there I was, inextricably part of it.
This was roughly 15 years ago, I guess. Even then, even at an 'elite' school and in an 'exclusive' professional program, the so-called leadership had no thought of setting standards and requiring people to live up to them. It was coddling and condoning and keeping that tuition coming into the coffers, fairly shamelessly. It's worse now.
And finally, a story from the real world: Working elsewhere (not teaching), I was recruiting for staff and required short-listed candidates to submit work samples. One of them sent me a slightly edited document that, in fact, I myself had written. She didn't get the job.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s papers were donated by his wife Coretta Scott King to Stanford University's King Papers Project. During the late 1980s, as the papers were being organized and catalogued, the staff of the project discovered that King's doctoral dissertation at Boston University, titled A Comparison of the Conception of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman, included large sections from a dissertation written by another student (Jack Boozer) three years earlier at Boston University.
Great column, Mari. I confess to being stunned at John McWhorter's column in the NYT. I always find him really reasonable, but his defense of "duplicative language" and saying that he didn't mind if people copied his work and passed it off as their own was honestly appalling. The whole point of any kind of writing is that it is original. And as you point out, we have these punctuation marks called quotation marks that make stealing another person's words completely unnecessary and unjustifiable. I worry I sound like a scold, but as a writer myself I'm scrupulous about giving credit where credit is due--it's not hard and it's important.
First of all I loved the “ps” examples.... great fun! I was surprised in the discussion of the Gray example, there was no discussion of interaction with the professor though there must have been some. For me that example was the most egregious by a publisher that must have known better. That’s really painful. If scholarly publications ignore the rules there are no rules!
It always wrong and the only way to handle it is to punish swiftly no matter who’s ‘side’ the person is on. The norms should not change because of AI or any other reason. We hold everyone to the same standard.
My thoughts on this go back to a very, very big-picture view. In the English-speaking world, you often find that Party A is anti-higher-education, has already defunded it to some extent but wants to go even further, and calls it all virtue signalling and a waste of time and should all be thrown to the dogs of the free market, except perhaps useful things like military engineering. Party B argues that education, including or perhaps especially the non-STEM kind, should be funded properly by the state as a public service, not only because that's the morally right thing to do and for the great benefits to everyone involved even if not all of them can be easily quantified; but even if you only care about numbers on a balance sheet, education is an investment that pays good returns - even more so if you count the indirect financial benefits (like everyone who is not on unemployment pay, because their education helped them to stay employed).
I am very strongly on the side of Party B myself, and even if my teaching is in a STEM subject I support properly funding art, music, theater and the like at universities too. But all this with one big demand for those on my own side: we must actually be doing the good things we claim to be doing, and delivering the benefits to society that give us the moral argument we base our claims on.
It is hard to see how that argument could be made for a school that tolerates plagiarism, especially of the variety where copying paragraphs from wikipedia substitutes for having your own summary - possibly even an opinion - on the matter. Being able to distinguish your own from others' ideas, and properly research, and critically evaluate, is such a key part of what liberal arts degrees claim to do, that I find it quite right to fail someone who has not demonstrated these skills. Copying without attribution misses the very purpose of most intelligently-set writing assignments, a purpose which goes well beyond "produce X written words somehow linked to this topic". (Students sometimes need reminding of this!)
Using others' ideas, while being aware of the source, is absolutely to be encouraged. Then you can do all kinds of insightful things like going from "A said X." to asking: do you agree? Is X true in general, or only in the specific scenario that A was talking about? Does the place and time when A wrote this influence your opinion? Who, if anyone, said not-X; was A replying to someone when they said X? And many other things like this. You lose all that if you just repeat "X.", possibly in a totally different context to the one it was originally said in.
There's a much stronger argument for my why plagiarism is wrong than just "look we have an arbitrary, perhaps historically grown list of rules, and plagiarism is on the no-no list". It's on that list because it's not compatible with the deeper purpose of what education is supposed to be about. And that, for me, makes it unacceptable in all cases, but especially in the case of a university president who is supposed to represent and be a role model for the values of higher education.
Working in the English department at a small university we saw plagiarism cases all the time. The university policy was first time offenders got an F for the assignment and a note in their file. Second offense F for the course and a note they violated academic integrity policy. Also possible suspension/expulsion. My colleague had a student who submitted an online paper written very well which was in direct contradiction to all other correspondence she had had with the student. She asked him to come to campus and on speaking with him it was clear English was his second language. He admitted that he told his friend what he wanted to write and the friend translated and wrote the paper. My colleague was able to direct the student to resources to help him succeed and did not report him for plagiarism, however he did get an F for the paper.
On a funny note, my friend, who is a breast surgeon, ended up quoting herself from an earlier paper she had authored in a later paper.
So, here are two thoughts I've been having on plagiarism.
First, I've seen very little acknowledgment that plagiarism is actually not a universal rule. It's obviously heavily condemned in education, academia, and journalism but less so in other fields. I'm an attorney, and 95% of what attorneys do is plagiarize. If you need to write a motion to dismiss, the first thing you do is find another motion to dismiss that you, someone else at your firm, or just someone else wrote. You then proceed to change as little of it as you can (which still is usually a lot), and you certainly don't cite, quote, or attribute the portions of the motion you are copying. When I started my most recent job, I actually got scolded for writing a report from scratch rather than using a model. I've even seen suggestions that it could be unethical to do so since you are billing your client for work you don't need to do.
While attorneys do frequently use quotations and cite sources, it isn't for plagiarism reasons, but because Judge Cardozo or Learned Hand saying something carries a lot more weight than a random attorney saying it, and you want to invoke their authority (either as controlling authority if it is a higher court or as persuasive authority if it is a non-controlling court or notable jurist).
This was roughly the case when I worked as a computer programmer c. 2000. While there are obviously IP concerns, and certain licenses require that you include comments or other acknowledgments, there was a lot of "recycling" code in ways that would constitute plagiarism in academia. I'm assuming this comes up in other fields, too. In most fields, if you are working on the June TPS report, do you start from scratch or pull up the May TPS report and work from that? And if it is the latter, do you quote and cite the May TPS report? I doubt it.
The other thought I've had, which you somewhat touch on in your article, is that rules against plagiarism really serve different functions when you are talking about students vs. academics/journalists. The goal with students is to ensure they are doing and understanding the work, which they are not if they are plagiarizing. You mentioned "cheating themselves," but it also cheats other students. This can either be through direct ranking (you don't want to miss being valedictorian because someone else plagiarized to get better grades) or through diminution of the credential (if Harvard starts spitting out a bunch of lousy graduates because they all plagiarized rather than learning the material, pretty soon a Harvard degree will be worth less). On the other hand, the problem with academics/journalists plagiarizing is stolen credit. If you come up with a good idea, you want credit for it so that it can help you advance. You don't want someone else taking it as your own. This is less of a concern for students, particularly at lower levels. No one's job prospects depend on whether they were cited in a 10th-grader's social studies paper.
I think this plays into John McWhorter's call for a distinction between stealing ideas and stealing words. If we are talking about a student, you care about both because both count as part of the assignment. On the other hand, I could see caring less about stealing words when it comes to an academic/journalist. The goal there is for them to come up with and spread new and interesting ideas. The words are just a tool they use for doing so. If you steal an academic/journalist's ideas, you have really stolen something of value. Words, less so. In fact, it may make sense to let academics/journalists steal words, particularly reasonably boilerplate words, for the same reason attorneys do it - to save time. If you have a brilliant academic, I'd rather have them spend their time doing research and thinking (or teaching students) rather than figuring out a novel way to phrase a sentence that 100 people have said before them.
At least one of Gay's alleged plagiarisms was her summary of a statute. It was close enough to the source that she probably did copy it, but it was also banal enough that I have a hard time seeing why, from a broader perspective, it was wrong for her to do so. It was an efficient summary. There were also only so many ways to summarize the statute without having to intentionally make your language bulky and inelegant (which includes adding a bunch of quotation marks and citations), which serves no one. Given how banal the description was, saying that she "stole" the language from the original author reminds me of a lot of the "business method" patents in the 2000s, where you know there was nothing creative about the solution; it's just that the patentor was the first person to come across the problem. IIRC, these patents have largely been invalidated and are at least much harder to get.
This isn't really intended as a defense of Gay. Mainly because I don't care to defend her, but also because, whether or not the rules make sense, you are generally expected to play by them. However, it is intended as a call to rethink whether plagiarism rules actually make sense in the context of academics and journalists or whether we should focus more on stealing ideas than language (poets can still complain about plagiarized language).
I do not, at all, in the strongest of terms, view the argument against plagiarism as wanting not to cheat students out of learning. Plagiarism is stealing and deceit; lying, cheating, and stealing. The argument against plagiarism is that it is wrong.
How to react may depend. With a high school student, as in case #1, surely the response obviously better than any of the listed options is to talk to the parent and kid together while giving an F on that paper. This addresses two questions, 1, did the kid just turn on the waterworks and come up with a tale to shift blame and gain sympathy? 2, does the mom know that now you and all of the other teachers now will never trust the kid or the kid's work again? And it is an opportunity to lay out transparently for the two of them together that 3, if the mom did not actually do that, she needs to deal with her kid's lying and underhandedness; 4, if the mom did do that, impress upon the kid that she (10th grade!!) should have her own integrity and not be a liar and a cheat like her mom; and 5, I guess maybe try the argument about not missing the opportunity to learn by doing the assignment, not that I think it's going to do any good in that case. Still, a huge missed opportunity to teach that kid crying isn't an excuse and neither is 'my mom made me do it'.
I lived through a version of case #3, except I was regular faculty, it was a grad school class, most students international, and the outcome was messier. The submitted work was clearly copy-pasted (varying fonts, colors, etc.) and the student was international. I flunked him and told the program director, since I wasn't sure who needed to take the other steps by policy. Nonetheless, he raised a huge stink, how could he know, how unfair it was, something something cultural something, you can't give me an F.
This was a near-Ivy school, selective program for early mid-career professionals. The program director was solid and never gave me any grief. The administration took the student's side and wanted a 'compromise'. The program director never suggested I change anything, took over all discussions with the powers that be, kept the heat completely off me, stood up for integrity and so forth. Looking back, I did not realize the pressures that must have been exerted. The brouhaha dragged on for a couple of semesters. Ultimately I suppose the administration got their compromise, in a way, since I think he was suspended for a semester then allowed to complete the program (by the book, he should have been kicked out). The process was the punishment for the department, as well as I think not doing me any good. No one blamed me exactly but it was a bummer, annoyance, long-running aggravation, and there I was, inextricably part of it.
This was roughly 15 years ago, I guess. Even then, even at an 'elite' school and in an 'exclusive' professional program, the so-called leadership had no thought of setting standards and requiring people to live up to them. It was coddling and condoning and keeping that tuition coming into the coffers, fairly shamelessly. It's worse now.
And finally, a story from the real world: Working elsewhere (not teaching), I was recruiting for staff and required short-listed candidates to submit work samples. One of them sent me a slightly edited document that, in fact, I myself had written. She didn't get the job.
Martin Luther King Jr. authorship issues--
Martin Luther King Jr.'s papers were donated by his wife Coretta Scott King to Stanford University's King Papers Project. During the late 1980s, as the papers were being organized and catalogued, the staff of the project discovered that King's doctoral dissertation at Boston University, titled A Comparison of the Conception of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman, included large sections from a dissertation written by another student (Jack Boozer) three years earlier at Boston University.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr._authorship_issues#:~:text=Boston%20University%2C%20where%20King%20received,who%20wrote%20about%20the%20topic.
Great column, Mari. I confess to being stunned at John McWhorter's column in the NYT. I always find him really reasonable, but his defense of "duplicative language" and saying that he didn't mind if people copied his work and passed it off as their own was honestly appalling. The whole point of any kind of writing is that it is original. And as you point out, we have these punctuation marks called quotation marks that make stealing another person's words completely unnecessary and unjustifiable. I worry I sound like a scold, but as a writer myself I'm scrupulous about giving credit where credit is due--it's not hard and it's important.
First of all I loved the “ps” examples.... great fun! I was surprised in the discussion of the Gray example, there was no discussion of interaction with the professor though there must have been some. For me that example was the most egregious by a publisher that must have known better. That’s really painful. If scholarly publications ignore the rules there are no rules!
It always wrong and the only way to handle it is to punish swiftly no matter who’s ‘side’ the person is on. The norms should not change because of AI or any other reason. We hold everyone to the same standard.
My thoughts on this go back to a very, very big-picture view. In the English-speaking world, you often find that Party A is anti-higher-education, has already defunded it to some extent but wants to go even further, and calls it all virtue signalling and a waste of time and should all be thrown to the dogs of the free market, except perhaps useful things like military engineering. Party B argues that education, including or perhaps especially the non-STEM kind, should be funded properly by the state as a public service, not only because that's the morally right thing to do and for the great benefits to everyone involved even if not all of them can be easily quantified; but even if you only care about numbers on a balance sheet, education is an investment that pays good returns - even more so if you count the indirect financial benefits (like everyone who is not on unemployment pay, because their education helped them to stay employed).
I am very strongly on the side of Party B myself, and even if my teaching is in a STEM subject I support properly funding art, music, theater and the like at universities too. But all this with one big demand for those on my own side: we must actually be doing the good things we claim to be doing, and delivering the benefits to society that give us the moral argument we base our claims on.
It is hard to see how that argument could be made for a school that tolerates plagiarism, especially of the variety where copying paragraphs from wikipedia substitutes for having your own summary - possibly even an opinion - on the matter. Being able to distinguish your own from others' ideas, and properly research, and critically evaluate, is such a key part of what liberal arts degrees claim to do, that I find it quite right to fail someone who has not demonstrated these skills. Copying without attribution misses the very purpose of most intelligently-set writing assignments, a purpose which goes well beyond "produce X written words somehow linked to this topic". (Students sometimes need reminding of this!)
Using others' ideas, while being aware of the source, is absolutely to be encouraged. Then you can do all kinds of insightful things like going from "A said X." to asking: do you agree? Is X true in general, or only in the specific scenario that A was talking about? Does the place and time when A wrote this influence your opinion? Who, if anyone, said not-X; was A replying to someone when they said X? And many other things like this. You lose all that if you just repeat "X.", possibly in a totally different context to the one it was originally said in.
There's a much stronger argument for my why plagiarism is wrong than just "look we have an arbitrary, perhaps historically grown list of rules, and plagiarism is on the no-no list". It's on that list because it's not compatible with the deeper purpose of what education is supposed to be about. And that, for me, makes it unacceptable in all cases, but especially in the case of a university president who is supposed to represent and be a role model for the values of higher education.
Working in the English department at a small university we saw plagiarism cases all the time. The university policy was first time offenders got an F for the assignment and a note in their file. Second offense F for the course and a note they violated academic integrity policy. Also possible suspension/expulsion. My colleague had a student who submitted an online paper written very well which was in direct contradiction to all other correspondence she had had with the student. She asked him to come to campus and on speaking with him it was clear English was his second language. He admitted that he told his friend what he wanted to write and the friend translated and wrote the paper. My colleague was able to direct the student to resources to help him succeed and did not report him for plagiarism, however he did get an F for the paper.
On a funny note, my friend, who is a breast surgeon, ended up quoting herself from an earlier paper she had authored in a later paper.