We can step up #2 even further. Plagiarism is taking intellectual credit for someone else's work. Self-plagiarism by definition doesn't exist. There are some other 'academic honesty' crimes other than plagiarism, like citation manipulation, and republishing the same work under different titles can be for monetary or professional gain without being plagiarism. Having the same word for two different problems is... well, something bad, but not plagiarism, thankfully.
Sympathetic to this, although I think the exception is when people clearly are trying to just smuggle/recycle work at scale. But for those people, I always wonder: you can always just put tiny text in the bottom referring to the original? So why not? Most people won't read it anyways. Seems an easy solution.
I ran into this problem when writing my "From Poverty to Progress" book series. I originally intended it to be one book, but as I wrote it, I realized that it was actually two or three separate books.
But readers of the second book needed to understand key concepts from the first book, and I could not assume that they had read it. So I added a small Intro chapter and then reused paragraphs from the first book.
I did mention the title of my first book in that chapter and stated "The rest of this chapter briefly summarizes key concepts from my previous book that will help you to understand..."
I did not however have a format citation or highlight which sentences were exact quotes. I think what I did was ethical, but some may disagree. Unfortunately, the book is already published, so I could not update it if I wanted to (except the e-book)
By the way, I am no longer a professor, so I do not feel bound to exactly copy all the citation rules that I needed to follow when I was a professor.
Sometimes it does serve a purpose. See my post above.
I think that I made the right call, but perhaps I should have added a formal citation.
I don't think it was lazy of me as I had spent so much time honing the perfect explanation of my ideas in my first book that it seemed stupid to start over from scratch in my second book.
If I were a professor trying to churn out articles to get tenure, then I think it is both lazy and unethical.
When I was in college, I was assigned a report on the Philippine-American War. I wrote “The Philippine-American War, also known as the Filipino-American War, took place from 1899 to 1902.” The professor had me stay after class. “There are sentences very close to yours on the internet,” he said. “I’m sure,” I replied. “There are only so many ways to state that fact in one sentence...”
Maybe some people are so hyper aware of plagiarism and they start to see it everywhere?
I've also noticed this hyper-awareness of plagiarism. I'm a writing teacher, and I notice that some of my students are really paranoid about plagiarism. They'll write a perfectly good, clear sentence that looks too similar to someone else's. So then they'll bust out the thesaurus and use it to torture their poor sentence until it resembles no other sentence in the English language. This tends to make their writing unclear and tortuous and stuffy. The paranoia serves no-one; it certainly doesn't make the students better writers!
In scientific fields where there's a lot of shared jargon (like around methodologies) for decades people have just copy-pasted the methods sections of their papers, simply because by their fourth fMRI paper they are too annoyed to rewrite the section on voxel analysis because it's literally the exact same as their other papers and they don't want to play that exact "thesaurus game."
When I was in secondary school, I found myself spending a lot of time thinking about how to reword/reorder a sentence so as not to sound like any of the sources I had learnt the information from (which I cited anyway). This was especially a dilemma in subjects where I would have to introduce the topic with facts/dates/locations, such as history or chemistry.
I frequently used a thesaurus, which was quite easy considering that I could just use the "Synonyms" function in the Word document. Unfortunately, if I ever read back that essay in the future, the meaning felt diluted and in some cases, I would have to translate the complicated word salad back to its original form again, as I forgot what all the fancy words meant or what the original point I was trying to get across was. Ironically, I found the "Synonyms" function somewhat limited but still frequently used it; I knew what I was trying to say but the word that conveyed the exact meaning across was used by the original author, so I had to settle for a roundabout way of conveying close to the original message, knowing that this was a suboptimal method of explaining the idea/putting the point across.
Instead of focusing my time on constructing an argument, the fear of being told I had plagiarized even a little bit meant that I spent a disproportional amount of time on something that took away from the whole purpose of the task being set: to develop one's understanding of the topic at hand. There are only so many ways one can convey certain pieces of information sometimes and I think it was not the best use of my time being fearful of sounding similar to the other 29 students in the class who all had the same topic to research and who most likely consulted at least some similar sources to me.
You're not alone in having this kind of frustrating experience! It's maddening--constructing a halfway-coherent argument is hard enough without having to worry about being accused of plagiarism. There are so many more interesting things to worry about!
Honestly, no clue. I have seen online posts about professors getting more paranoid since the advent of ChatGPT, and that tool has contributed to a breakdown of the sense, between teachers and students, that they are embarking together on a journey of knowledge. It has made things into more of a game of Spy vs Spy. But GPT texts can be checked with “is this AI?” tools, which simplifies matters considerably—the paranoia can be allayed immediately and with some certainty. None of my students have yet used GPT, so I can’t say from personal experience.
Thank you for the reply. I have seen some articles questioning the accuracy of some of the earlier versions of the checking tools (for example, there have been cases of misidentification of pieces as having been written by ChatGPT when they weren't), although I am unsure what the current status is.
For political and cultural reasons, everyone will soon develop a burning passion against plagiarism (in their enemies). Regarding elite universities, everyone's a meritocrat until their group gets into power, after which they suddenly develop a country club attitude.
It sounds in some ways that you're proposing a measure of charity and grace to these people that the academics are human and make mistakes, which, I agree with; however, we do need to have standards, otherwise we can't really measure when someone has only marginally abused our intellectual trust as readers, versus more egregious examples, as it appears Gay has done both in this situation. The question is, is the punishment she suffers commensurate to the "crime"? Exile is one way, and shaming is another, but is it genuinely effective, or merciful?
Then again, charity, grace, and mercy are words that have effectively disappeared from the culture's lexicon, in both implied and explicit meaning. Asking folks to practice them is probably too much of an ask because it doesn't satisfy the lust for outrage and the public guillotine, and might beg a deeper existential and theological question for how to justify such virtues form a humanists standpoint.
"Ultimately, smart people sometimes say dumb things or make mistakes, and it’s often forgivable when they do. E.g., I read a review in Current Affairs of Yuval Noah Harari’s work claiming he was a “fraud”—a strong accusation—and one of the pieces of evidence they presented is that:
Harari’s assertion that chimpanzees “hunt together and fight shoulder to shoulder against baboons, cheetahs and enemy chimpanzees” cannot be true because cheetahs and chimpanzees don’t live in the same parts of Africa."
This isn't a dumb statement for the error of cheetahs and chimps not living in the same part of Africa. But it's a hilarious statement because chimps fighting "shoulder to shoulder" sounds like they are a union standing in a picket line.
Really thought-provoking. I loved the proposed eight standards!
Reading this made me think about my own experience when doing my Ph.D. in Music Composition. We all know the cliche "good artists borrow, great artists steal," and this is certainly the case within music departments. Lifting a phrase, a cadence, a treatment of an instrument, a chord progression, etc., are often non-issues in this field. We study forms and techniques found in the work of the masters and our peers in order to build a toolbox from which to pull. So long as something is used—dare I say "stolen"—because it fits the bill of the creative task at hand, it is fair game—and often thought of as a compliment.
Decorum strongly advises that any influences are transparently listed in program notes for the new composition, but this is not enforced. There are no footnotes for improvised solos, and I've learned that no one is ever truly original when improvising [as you mention in #4]—lost in the moment, we pull from what is floating around in our heads. If, upon later listening, we realize we've quoted someone's melody, it doesn't result in finger-pointing or mass panic. There are many (many!) issues with modern music departments, but I find the way the communities within these departments deal with quoting—or "stealing"—to be quite healthy and instructive.
Nothing is really original. I agree to such a great extent. That is the reason that I have been actively pushing back against publication rates. People seem to think more is better. I have yet to see any scholar publish MORE original work. What seems to happen is a form of sausage slicing in which very small differences lead to a new product. Since most of the article world is a mix of methodological and theoretical work, it is quite easy to produce a new manuscript that makes very small adjustments. It is barely incremental but so productive that others just count.
It's the main reason that I get a LOT out of books these days. Here I can see an entire argument fleshed out. I can hear the author's voice much better. It becomes clear what their point of view is. In the flood of articles that exist today, it becomes impossible to see anything new. It just seems like the same old story rewritten again and again. And it is so sciency that I lose the author's voice. I am not sure who is telling me what.
It's also the reason that I really appreciated your post. An argument that was well balanced, well thought through and thorough. If only, I could find that more often in the professional journals or the newspapers I read. There it seems to be a lot of hype and flashiness. But when I am done, I feel like I ate a bunch of french fries. Yes, I ate and they tasted really good but I am not really satisfied. I really appreciated reading something that will stay with me for a while!
As I recall chapter 11 of The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins doesn't take credit for inventing the concept of memes, only for giving it a name, and fleshing out its implications.
Well, 2024 should be a reckoning for sure, but not for stupid ass reasons like this (respectfully). I'd start with a reckoning for the utter failure to generations of students, beginning with mine in 1975, or even before, to properly educate them and prepare students for life, or a career in Academia. What an outrageous clusterFuck the American system has become over the decades. Reckoning? Ha! Reconstruction is more like it, perhaps a dismantling and rethinking of the entire hierarchy of fools and bozos that do more harm to most students than they help. I'm not talking just about the admins, but the faculties of big 8s, the ivyees, the liberal arts, and the state schools all have big problems, latent and corrosive. From admittance to handing out PhDs it was a nightmare even back when I was in the soup (70s/80s/90s). But now, any campus I would visit if I ever went back to one, would just horrify me. Even this quibble over uncited words is disturbing, as it seems it's on the front page of the NYT, but stats on kids who got fucked over Covid in Uni is not.
Yes, never mind about just this blow-up issue of Claudine Gay and her plagiarism, the true overall scale of the problem with the Western world's universities is near impossible to overstate. The dismal truth is that whilst Western publics have been mesmerised by the MSM psychodrama of elections and party-political pluralism, a 5-decade long transformation has quietly been ongoing whereby the 'educated' middle-class (the future leaders, professionals and administators) have passed through a right-of-passage Leftist sheep-dip. A highly seductive 'education' in how to think of yourself as virtuous just by the simple and cost-free adoption of 'correct' opinions. We have quietly got ourselves and our culture into a dreadful mess and the Claudine Gays et al are merely the tip of a very big iceberg. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Well, I guess the good news is that some of us are writing about the topic, as you are! Well done. But it goes way back, IMO. Something serious happened in the late 90s, early 2000s. Something I can't explain. Social media? That's always blamed, but could Zuck and other Borgs have fucked us this bad? Maybe, but as I said, things were bad in the 80s when I was going for a dissertation (that went nowhere, in the end). But it was not just me, hell, my first English professor at CU was famous for his book, "Why English is Bad for You" and he meant every word when he said, "It is." Great news for an aspiring writer, but I had a credit card, so they took it, and I went through the gristmill. Then for an MA, I wound up paying a cult many thousands to study with Ginsberg, who was living proof my first professor was right, this English business is bad for you.
ha! Yes, my peers, the children of the '60s who got tenure were the ones I had to fight with every day I was at University. Since I joined the US Army in the '70s, just to get a free 4-year hall pass, I was considered an outsider, not to be trusted, after all, I had worked for "the man." Those who avoided going to Nam had a bug up their ass about that, for sure, and perhaps the successes of the 60s (civil rights bill) went to all of their fat heads, as far as their abilities to save the world and end world pees. I had no such illusions, until later, once I was incorporated into the system. Then I had the same visions of grandeur as my professors. I suppose nothing has changed really, and that this virtue signaling that Graham talks about is just that, this vision that those in the ivory halls of Ivy League schools know better than the rest of us heathens outside the gates. Well, how's that working out for ya Harvard?
I was at university in the early 70's and the rot was setting in already then....the fashionable, cool thing to be at that time was a Maoist! (I did an English/American Lit degree too by the way).
OMG, I was a full-blown commie! Studied with one in South Chicago (with a prof Ogles if I recall) and graduated from that to a more insane school called Naropa College at the time, now an accredited uni. That was insanity meets apocalypse now, but Ginsberg and the gang made Colonel Walter E. Kurtz look like Mr. Rogers and his neighborhood. Ps. congrats on ur lit degree.
Sorry, but plagiarism and self-plagiarism are not remotely the same. Plagiarism is bad because (1) it almost never comes with perfect understanding of the content being plagiarized (otherwise, rewording it would not be a problem), and (2) it is only possible if the author agrees with the prior work he plagiarizes, so that you cannot expect a plagiarist to reveal any novel or conflicting results (since that would require him to use his own language). In Gay's case, these are somewhat ameliorated by the fact that she has concretized or even altered some of the plagiarized parts (the "decrease"-to-"increase" change, in particular, is noticeable -- I *hope* it refers to a different setting, though!), but I am not fully convinced.
I don't believe the "I threw everything into a big text file and forgot which parts were quotes" excuses, in Gay's or in anyone else's cases. Is this how scientists write papers? I don't. (Besides, I would easily recognize text not written by me if it is longer than a sentence.)
Self-plagiarism barely bothers anyone in science (you are not passing off anyone else's thoughts for their own, and you can be expected to understand and agree with yourself). Self-plagiarism *from a paper into a book* is standard modus operandi; research monographs are in part expected to be "final versions" of papers.
Really fascinating piece to read as a former Cambridge academic/footnote obsessive. I would be interested to know re your last point about fact checkers in the publishing industry whether there was a point in history where fact checkers were a non-negotiable part of the publishing process. If so, when and why? And why not? You might find this piece by @AntonHowes on writing history as a public historian pretty interesting: https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-how-to-be-a-public?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Regarding #1, “Accidental plagiarism due to lazy rewrites of common topics is likely far more common than people realize,” my experience is that there is an active disincentive to rewriting, coming from the people whose work is being rewritten, who have developed a certain formulation that they want to see propagated. For example, pretty much every retelling of IIT follows Guilio’s presentation starting with the five phenomenological axioms, but there is no reason it needs to be so—I personally avoid speaking of “axioms” in my own (popular-level) descriptions. Theoretical physics, too, has a strong cultural norm to repeat certain formulations and we science writers are criticized when we deviate from them—it is said we have “dumbed-down” the material even when all we have done is chosen an alternative but essentially equivalent metaphor.
Agree - many academics do want others to use their same language (e.g., I'm happy if I read a paper about causal emergence and they clearly cite me and use some of the same phrases to describe what it is)
If we treat plagiarism as a sin equivalent to fraud, shouldn't we limit our casting of stones to those instances where there really is an intent to deceive? Otherwise, an egregious number of mistakes should just be put down to sloppiness. That certainly can be a criticism of scholarly output, but it isn't exactly a crime.
The rise of AI writing is going to make this all but impossible to deal with. After all, isn't the AI itself FED with other people's wordings? I just read that new Windows keyboards will have an AI button --let someone else write your emails, replete with other people's words. If in an email about climate change the AI says "the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain" without quote marks, should you be fired if you've never heard My Fair Lady and don't know the source?
Fwiw...Jacques Monod’s 1971 “Chance and Necessity” (a good read btw) talks about the evolution of ideas. I’d be stunned if Bateson and Dawkins hadn’t both read that. Dawkins developed the idea much, much further. But at the same time, I don’t think he felt the idea was scientifically interesting, just an interesting metaphor.
Amen. It’s so much harder than people think. This is why I want to just write fiction. Fact checking non-fiction and all the rights is literally too hard. Or I’m too lazy!
Also, some people have a photographic memory and will accidentally write something they’ve already read.
Apparently Lil Wayne googles every single phrase in his new songs to confirm they are original because he realized he sometimes would think they were then discover they weren’t. And he’d just forgotten reading it or hearing it in a different song. Or he would reuse his own lyrics by mistake, so was always checking.
This is a common problem in graduate students where it's called "cryptomnesia" and graduate students often catch themselves accidentally swapping in ideas from others that they "rediscovered" and think are original.
We can step up #2 even further. Plagiarism is taking intellectual credit for someone else's work. Self-plagiarism by definition doesn't exist. There are some other 'academic honesty' crimes other than plagiarism, like citation manipulation, and republishing the same work under different titles can be for monetary or professional gain without being plagiarism. Having the same word for two different problems is... well, something bad, but not plagiarism, thankfully.
Sympathetic to this, although I think the exception is when people clearly are trying to just smuggle/recycle work at scale. But for those people, I always wonder: you can always just put tiny text in the bottom referring to the original? So why not? Most people won't read it anyways. Seems an easy solution.
I ran into this problem when writing my "From Poverty to Progress" book series. I originally intended it to be one book, but as I wrote it, I realized that it was actually two or three separate books.
But readers of the second book needed to understand key concepts from the first book, and I could not assume that they had read it. So I added a small Intro chapter and then reused paragraphs from the first book.
I did mention the title of my first book in that chapter and stated "The rest of this chapter briefly summarizes key concepts from my previous book that will help you to understand..."
I did not however have a format citation or highlight which sentences were exact quotes. I think what I did was ethical, but some may disagree. Unfortunately, the book is already published, so I could not update it if I wanted to (except the e-book)
By the way, I am no longer a professor, so I do not feel bound to exactly copy all the citation rules that I needed to follow when I was a professor.
I concur. Self plagiarism is not plagiarism. It is like saying you stole something that you own.
It might be lazy, but it isn't plagiarism.
Sometimes it does serve a purpose. See my post above.
I think that I made the right call, but perhaps I should have added a formal citation.
I don't think it was lazy of me as I had spent so much time honing the perfect explanation of my ideas in my first book that it seemed stupid to start over from scratch in my second book.
If I were a professor trying to churn out articles to get tenure, then I think it is both lazy and unethical.
It is an oxymoron not a problem. It is not a sin nor a crime to repeat yourself, even in writing. It is a mark of consistent thinking and expression.
Lots to think about here, thank you!
I’m thinking about...
When I was in college, I was assigned a report on the Philippine-American War. I wrote “The Philippine-American War, also known as the Filipino-American War, took place from 1899 to 1902.” The professor had me stay after class. “There are sentences very close to yours on the internet,” he said. “I’m sure,” I replied. “There are only so many ways to state that fact in one sentence...”
Maybe some people are so hyper aware of plagiarism and they start to see it everywhere?
I've also noticed this hyper-awareness of plagiarism. I'm a writing teacher, and I notice that some of my students are really paranoid about plagiarism. They'll write a perfectly good, clear sentence that looks too similar to someone else's. So then they'll bust out the thesaurus and use it to torture their poor sentence until it resembles no other sentence in the English language. This tends to make their writing unclear and tortuous and stuffy. The paranoia serves no-one; it certainly doesn't make the students better writers!
In scientific fields where there's a lot of shared jargon (like around methodologies) for decades people have just copy-pasted the methods sections of their papers, simply because by their fourth fMRI paper they are too annoyed to rewrite the section on voxel analysis because it's literally the exact same as their other papers and they don't want to play that exact "thesaurus game."
I can only imagine! My “incident” has stayed with me so clearly, nearly a decade later, that I remember word for word what I wrote.
When I was in secondary school, I found myself spending a lot of time thinking about how to reword/reorder a sentence so as not to sound like any of the sources I had learnt the information from (which I cited anyway). This was especially a dilemma in subjects where I would have to introduce the topic with facts/dates/locations, such as history or chemistry.
I frequently used a thesaurus, which was quite easy considering that I could just use the "Synonyms" function in the Word document. Unfortunately, if I ever read back that essay in the future, the meaning felt diluted and in some cases, I would have to translate the complicated word salad back to its original form again, as I forgot what all the fancy words meant or what the original point I was trying to get across was. Ironically, I found the "Synonyms" function somewhat limited but still frequently used it; I knew what I was trying to say but the word that conveyed the exact meaning across was used by the original author, so I had to settle for a roundabout way of conveying close to the original message, knowing that this was a suboptimal method of explaining the idea/putting the point across.
Instead of focusing my time on constructing an argument, the fear of being told I had plagiarized even a little bit meant that I spent a disproportional amount of time on something that took away from the whole purpose of the task being set: to develop one's understanding of the topic at hand. There are only so many ways one can convey certain pieces of information sometimes and I think it was not the best use of my time being fearful of sounding similar to the other 29 students in the class who all had the same topic to research and who most likely consulted at least some similar sources to me.
You're not alone in having this kind of frustrating experience! It's maddening--constructing a halfway-coherent argument is hard enough without having to worry about being accused of plagiarism. There are so many more interesting things to worry about!
Agreed! Do you think this problem will get worse or better with the advance of ChatGPT?
Honestly, no clue. I have seen online posts about professors getting more paranoid since the advent of ChatGPT, and that tool has contributed to a breakdown of the sense, between teachers and students, that they are embarking together on a journey of knowledge. It has made things into more of a game of Spy vs Spy. But GPT texts can be checked with “is this AI?” tools, which simplifies matters considerably—the paranoia can be allayed immediately and with some certainty. None of my students have yet used GPT, so I can’t say from personal experience.
Thank you for the reply. I have seen some articles questioning the accuracy of some of the earlier versions of the checking tools (for example, there have been cases of misidentification of pieces as having been written by ChatGPT when they weren't), although I am unsure what the current status is.
For political and cultural reasons, everyone will soon develop a burning passion against plagiarism (in their enemies). Regarding elite universities, everyone's a meritocrat until their group gets into power, after which they suddenly develop a country club attitude.
It sounds in some ways that you're proposing a measure of charity and grace to these people that the academics are human and make mistakes, which, I agree with; however, we do need to have standards, otherwise we can't really measure when someone has only marginally abused our intellectual trust as readers, versus more egregious examples, as it appears Gay has done both in this situation. The question is, is the punishment she suffers commensurate to the "crime"? Exile is one way, and shaming is another, but is it genuinely effective, or merciful?
Then again, charity, grace, and mercy are words that have effectively disappeared from the culture's lexicon, in both implied and explicit meaning. Asking folks to practice them is probably too much of an ask because it doesn't satisfy the lust for outrage and the public guillotine, and might beg a deeper existential and theological question for how to justify such virtues form a humanists standpoint.
"Ultimately, smart people sometimes say dumb things or make mistakes, and it’s often forgivable when they do. E.g., I read a review in Current Affairs of Yuval Noah Harari’s work claiming he was a “fraud”—a strong accusation—and one of the pieces of evidence they presented is that:
Harari’s assertion that chimpanzees “hunt together and fight shoulder to shoulder against baboons, cheetahs and enemy chimpanzees” cannot be true because cheetahs and chimpanzees don’t live in the same parts of Africa."
This isn't a dumb statement for the error of cheetahs and chimps not living in the same part of Africa. But it's a hilarious statement because chimps fighting "shoulder to shoulder" sounds like they are a union standing in a picket line.
Really thought-provoking. I loved the proposed eight standards!
Reading this made me think about my own experience when doing my Ph.D. in Music Composition. We all know the cliche "good artists borrow, great artists steal," and this is certainly the case within music departments. Lifting a phrase, a cadence, a treatment of an instrument, a chord progression, etc., are often non-issues in this field. We study forms and techniques found in the work of the masters and our peers in order to build a toolbox from which to pull. So long as something is used—dare I say "stolen"—because it fits the bill of the creative task at hand, it is fair game—and often thought of as a compliment.
Decorum strongly advises that any influences are transparently listed in program notes for the new composition, but this is not enforced. There are no footnotes for improvised solos, and I've learned that no one is ever truly original when improvising [as you mention in #4]—lost in the moment, we pull from what is floating around in our heads. If, upon later listening, we realize we've quoted someone's melody, it doesn't result in finger-pointing or mass panic. There are many (many!) issues with modern music departments, but I find the way the communities within these departments deal with quoting—or "stealing"—to be quite healthy and instructive.
Nothing is really original. I agree to such a great extent. That is the reason that I have been actively pushing back against publication rates. People seem to think more is better. I have yet to see any scholar publish MORE original work. What seems to happen is a form of sausage slicing in which very small differences lead to a new product. Since most of the article world is a mix of methodological and theoretical work, it is quite easy to produce a new manuscript that makes very small adjustments. It is barely incremental but so productive that others just count.
It's the main reason that I get a LOT out of books these days. Here I can see an entire argument fleshed out. I can hear the author's voice much better. It becomes clear what their point of view is. In the flood of articles that exist today, it becomes impossible to see anything new. It just seems like the same old story rewritten again and again. And it is so sciency that I lose the author's voice. I am not sure who is telling me what.
It's also the reason that I really appreciated your post. An argument that was well balanced, well thought through and thorough. If only, I could find that more often in the professional journals or the newspapers I read. There it seems to be a lot of hype and flashiness. But when I am done, I feel like I ate a bunch of french fries. Yes, I ate and they tasted really good but I am not really satisfied. I really appreciated reading something that will stay with me for a while!
As I recall chapter 11 of The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins doesn't take credit for inventing the concept of memes, only for giving it a name, and fleshing out its implications.
Well, 2024 should be a reckoning for sure, but not for stupid ass reasons like this (respectfully). I'd start with a reckoning for the utter failure to generations of students, beginning with mine in 1975, or even before, to properly educate them and prepare students for life, or a career in Academia. What an outrageous clusterFuck the American system has become over the decades. Reckoning? Ha! Reconstruction is more like it, perhaps a dismantling and rethinking of the entire hierarchy of fools and bozos that do more harm to most students than they help. I'm not talking just about the admins, but the faculties of big 8s, the ivyees, the liberal arts, and the state schools all have big problems, latent and corrosive. From admittance to handing out PhDs it was a nightmare even back when I was in the soup (70s/80s/90s). But now, any campus I would visit if I ever went back to one, would just horrify me. Even this quibble over uncited words is disturbing, as it seems it's on the front page of the NYT, but stats on kids who got fucked over Covid in Uni is not.
Yes, never mind about just this blow-up issue of Claudine Gay and her plagiarism, the true overall scale of the problem with the Western world's universities is near impossible to overstate. The dismal truth is that whilst Western publics have been mesmerised by the MSM psychodrama of elections and party-political pluralism, a 5-decade long transformation has quietly been ongoing whereby the 'educated' middle-class (the future leaders, professionals and administators) have passed through a right-of-passage Leftist sheep-dip. A highly seductive 'education' in how to think of yourself as virtuous just by the simple and cost-free adoption of 'correct' opinions. We have quietly got ourselves and our culture into a dreadful mess and the Claudine Gays et al are merely the tip of a very big iceberg. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Well, I guess the good news is that some of us are writing about the topic, as you are! Well done. But it goes way back, IMO. Something serious happened in the late 90s, early 2000s. Something I can't explain. Social media? That's always blamed, but could Zuck and other Borgs have fucked us this bad? Maybe, but as I said, things were bad in the 80s when I was going for a dissertation (that went nowhere, in the end). But it was not just me, hell, my first English professor at CU was famous for his book, "Why English is Bad for You" and he meant every word when he said, "It is." Great news for an aspiring writer, but I had a credit card, so they took it, and I went through the gristmill. Then for an MA, I wound up paying a cult many thousands to study with Ginsberg, who was living proof my first professor was right, this English business is bad for you.
What happened in the 1990's was that the children of the 1960's got tenure.
ha! Yes, my peers, the children of the '60s who got tenure were the ones I had to fight with every day I was at University. Since I joined the US Army in the '70s, just to get a free 4-year hall pass, I was considered an outsider, not to be trusted, after all, I had worked for "the man." Those who avoided going to Nam had a bug up their ass about that, for sure, and perhaps the successes of the 60s (civil rights bill) went to all of their fat heads, as far as their abilities to save the world and end world pees. I had no such illusions, until later, once I was incorporated into the system. Then I had the same visions of grandeur as my professors. I suppose nothing has changed really, and that this virtue signaling that Graham talks about is just that, this vision that those in the ivory halls of Ivy League schools know better than the rest of us heathens outside the gates. Well, how's that working out for ya Harvard?
I was at university in the early 70's and the rot was setting in already then....the fashionable, cool thing to be at that time was a Maoist! (I did an English/American Lit degree too by the way).
OMG, I was a full-blown commie! Studied with one in South Chicago (with a prof Ogles if I recall) and graduated from that to a more insane school called Naropa College at the time, now an accredited uni. That was insanity meets apocalypse now, but Ginsberg and the gang made Colonel Walter E. Kurtz look like Mr. Rogers and his neighborhood. Ps. congrats on ur lit degree.
Sorry, but plagiarism and self-plagiarism are not remotely the same. Plagiarism is bad because (1) it almost never comes with perfect understanding of the content being plagiarized (otherwise, rewording it would not be a problem), and (2) it is only possible if the author agrees with the prior work he plagiarizes, so that you cannot expect a plagiarist to reveal any novel or conflicting results (since that would require him to use his own language). In Gay's case, these are somewhat ameliorated by the fact that she has concretized or even altered some of the plagiarized parts (the "decrease"-to-"increase" change, in particular, is noticeable -- I *hope* it refers to a different setting, though!), but I am not fully convinced.
I don't believe the "I threw everything into a big text file and forgot which parts were quotes" excuses, in Gay's or in anyone else's cases. Is this how scientists write papers? I don't. (Besides, I would easily recognize text not written by me if it is longer than a sentence.)
Self-plagiarism barely bothers anyone in science (you are not passing off anyone else's thoughts for their own, and you can be expected to understand and agree with yourself). Self-plagiarism *from a paper into a book* is standard modus operandi; research monographs are in part expected to be "final versions" of papers.
Really fascinating piece to read as a former Cambridge academic/footnote obsessive. I would be interested to know re your last point about fact checkers in the publishing industry whether there was a point in history where fact checkers were a non-negotiable part of the publishing process. If so, when and why? And why not? You might find this piece by @AntonHowes on writing history as a public historian pretty interesting: https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-how-to-be-a-public?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
As a former professor, I approve of this message.
Regarding #1, “Accidental plagiarism due to lazy rewrites of common topics is likely far more common than people realize,” my experience is that there is an active disincentive to rewriting, coming from the people whose work is being rewritten, who have developed a certain formulation that they want to see propagated. For example, pretty much every retelling of IIT follows Guilio’s presentation starting with the five phenomenological axioms, but there is no reason it needs to be so—I personally avoid speaking of “axioms” in my own (popular-level) descriptions. Theoretical physics, too, has a strong cultural norm to repeat certain formulations and we science writers are criticized when we deviate from them—it is said we have “dumbed-down” the material even when all we have done is chosen an alternative but essentially equivalent metaphor.
Agree - many academics do want others to use their same language (e.g., I'm happy if I read a paper about causal emergence and they clearly cite me and use some of the same phrases to describe what it is)
If we treat plagiarism as a sin equivalent to fraud, shouldn't we limit our casting of stones to those instances where there really is an intent to deceive? Otherwise, an egregious number of mistakes should just be put down to sloppiness. That certainly can be a criticism of scholarly output, but it isn't exactly a crime.
The rise of AI writing is going to make this all but impossible to deal with. After all, isn't the AI itself FED with other people's wordings? I just read that new Windows keyboards will have an AI button --let someone else write your emails, replete with other people's words. If in an email about climate change the AI says "the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain" without quote marks, should you be fired if you've never heard My Fair Lady and don't know the source?
Fwiw...Jacques Monod’s 1971 “Chance and Necessity” (a good read btw) talks about the evolution of ideas. I’d be stunned if Bateson and Dawkins hadn’t both read that. Dawkins developed the idea much, much further. But at the same time, I don’t think he felt the idea was scientifically interesting, just an interesting metaphor.
Amen. It’s so much harder than people think. This is why I want to just write fiction. Fact checking non-fiction and all the rights is literally too hard. Or I’m too lazy!
Also, some people have a photographic memory and will accidentally write something they’ve already read.
Apparently Lil Wayne googles every single phrase in his new songs to confirm they are original because he realized he sometimes would think they were then discover they weren’t. And he’d just forgotten reading it or hearing it in a different song. Or he would reuse his own lyrics by mistake, so was always checking.
This is a common problem in graduate students where it's called "cryptomnesia" and graduate students often catch themselves accidentally swapping in ideas from others that they "rediscovered" and think are original.
Oh cool! Didn’t know there was an actual word for this. Thank you for teaching me this word!