What's the problem with plagiarism?

There are actually three different sins of plagiarism

“Plagiarism” is the word on everyone’s lips in academia. The president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, was recently forced to resign when it was revealed that she had engaged in substantial plagiarism. While Gay’s resignation was prompted by revelations of plagiarism, the story is a bit more complicated than that. Conservatives had been targeting Gay for some time, and that targeting intensified following her recent abysmal performance testifying in front of Congress. Conservative activists and journalists went digging into Gay, and found plagiarism allegations, which they then gleefully pursued. Those allegations turned out to be regrettably well-substantiated, and Gay went down.

Because those allegations originated from Gay’s explicit political enemies, liberal academia circled the wagons to defend Gay in the week before her resignation. Several defenses have been offered up. One is that Gay is doing something that every academic does. This is inane; I know for certain that this is false. What’s more, I think pretty much everyone saying this knows it’s false, too. People are trying to participate in a weird “I am Spartacus” moment. (And if anyone really is guilty of the same plagiarism that Gay is, they should lose their job as well. God knows there are plenty of struggling academics who’d happily take the place of a tenured plagiarist.)

More interesting are those who say that Gay’s offense wasn’t really that bad. Sure, perhaps she misbehaved in some narrow technical sense, but this is a venial sin, not a mortal sin. The appropriate response is a slap on the wrist, not the end of her career. I’m unpersuaded by this defense, but I don’t find it to be transparently absurd, as many of her critics do. Let me explain why.

Take it back to first principles. What’s wrong with plagiarism in the first place? To many, this might seem to be an arcane, esoteric sin, the sort of thing that makes sense only within the norms of a certain community but is entirely inscrutable from without. And in a way it is, but the nature of the sin is not hard to explain. However, this is made complicated by the fact that there’s not really just one crime of plagiarism. There’s three.

The first of these is the plagiarism of the writer. This kind of plagiarism is least relevant to the matter at hand, so we’ll get it out of the way first. Plagiarism of the writer is copying someone’s particular form of expression and passing it off as your own. This is a crime among writers because it’s a way of stealing another person’s work. For the writer, the goal is not always to fashion some new idea, but to take an idea that many people have and render it with eloquence and beauty. Everyone thinks of love, and thousands of love poems have been written over the years. But a good love poem is one that expresses love in a new and exciting way. Copying someone’s love poem and passing it off as your own is stealing the work of the original poet. This is bad because it’s a way of stealing credit. The poet earns admiration for their creativity. When someone copies those words, they take credit they didn’t earn. I still remember going to a comedy club when I lived in New York and seeing a guy do a bit that he stole from Jerry Seinfeld. The audience laughed — of course they did, the guy was doing Seinfeld’s jokes, and Seinfeld is hilarious — but I didn’t. I was angry. Stop laughing and clapping! He hasn’t earned your applause.

The second kind of plagiarism is the plagiarism of the student. When we professors assign essays to students, the not-so-secret truth is that we don’t care about your beautiful, sparkling ideas. What we want is for the students to demonstrate their understanding of the ideas we’ve covered in class. And the way that students demonstrate understanding of ideas is by putting those ideas in their own words. If you just copy someone else’s words, you’ve given no indication that you actually understand the material. So for that alone, you get a failing grade. But if you not only fail to demonstrate your understanding, but also try to trick the professor by passing off someone else’s understanding as your own, that’s a kind of academic deception which is taken very seriously. That’ll get you in deep trouble. It’s a kind of stealing credit, but it involves stealing a different kind of credit. Plagiarism of the writer steals credit for eloquence. Plagiarism of the student steals credit for understanding.

The third kind of plagiarism is the plagiarism of the academic. This is theft of ideas. We academics will slave away at research, thinking, and writing for months, often years, trying to nail down an important idea and work it into a shape where it can get published. For this, we are not particularly well-paid (outside of a few rock star exceptions). The coin of the realm in academia is, well, credit. We want people to read our ideas and be inspired by them. Hopefully inspired to agree, perhaps inspired to disagree, but at any rate to read the idea and say, “Ah, that’s worth thinking about some more and discussing some more. And Matt Lutz (or whoever) is the person who came up with this worthy idea.” That’s the goal. That’s why academics do what they do. It’s the reason we get out of bed in the morning.

And because of this, if someone reads what you wrote, says “Oh, that’s a cool idea,” but then they write their own paper and they DON’T say that they got that idea from you, they pass it off as their OWN, then that’s about the worst thing they can do. Because that raises the very real possibility that someone else will read that idea and be inspired by it, and then go on to attribute it to the plagiarist rather than you. And then perhaps others will do that, and your idea will be known far and wide, and everyone will discuss it for a hundred years… but you will be forgotten, and the guy who stole from you will be remembered instead. This is the worst academic sin. If it happens to you, you will HATE it. I believe this has happened to me; I don’t want to drag that grudge into public, but it rankles. So again, we have a kind of theft of credit. But a different kind of theft of credit. Plagiarism of the academic steals credit for new and potentially influential ideas.

That brings us to the plagiarism of Claudine Gay. Did she plagiarize? Absolutely. She copied whole paragraphs of text with little to no modification. But most (perhaps all, I haven’t looked into things too closely) of these cases of plagiarism were cases where Gay copied workmanlike text describing common analytical methods or other kinds of rote verbal minutiae. So she was committing plagiarism of the writer… but so what? She works in political theory, eloquence isn’t the goal. She was committing plagiarism of the student… but so what? She’s not a student, she has no need to demonstrate understanding. And she was not committing plagiarism of the academic, because the things she was copying weren’t new and potentially useful ideas. So she wasn’t committing the awful kind of plagiarism that academics care deeply about. Like her defenders said: she had not committed the great, mortal sin of academia.

So was the penalty on Gay too harsh? No, she had to go. And the reason is that, while Gay isn’t a student, she was the president of Harvard University, which is chock full of students. There is a plagiarism code at Harvard which is aimed primarily at ruling plagiarism of the student out of bounds. Disputes over student plagiarism involve some very high-stakes decisions for the people involved, and the buck stops with Gay, as head of the university. Although the kind of plagiarism she committed doesn’t matter for an academic, no plagiarism policies make the kinds of fine distinctions I’ve made here. Nor should they; the lines between these three kinds of plagiarism are blurrier than my presentation would suggest, and so it’s best to not try to draw these kinds of distinctions in pretty much any practical case. But Gay can’t be the head of an institution that strictly enforces a plagiarism policy that she herself very publicly violated. That puts everyone in the institution charged with enforcing the policy in an untenable position, which is why she had to resign.

If Gay was an unaffiliated academic, writing just to make a contribution to the academic literature, the kind of plagiarism she engaged in would be entirely uninteresting, barely worthy of notice. But because she committed the kind of plagiarism that is very bad when students do it, she could no longer be the head of an educational institution.

She’s still a professor at Harvard, though. It’ll be real awkward if she ever catches a student plagiarizing.