Context is as important to plagiarism as to antisemitism accusations

Since Claudine Gay’s resignation as Harvard president, the press has been full of pieces by both journalists and academics suggesting that however politically driven the campaign against her might have been, her plagiarism meant that she had to go.

This is wrong on many levels. First, Gay resigned for multiple reasons, as the reality of the situation, her letter of resignation and Harvard’s statement all made clear. Second, there is, in fact, no evidence or accepted conclusions from reputable authorities that Gay, who is still a Harvard professor, actually plagiarised. Harvard’s own review authorities in her field found no such evidence.

Certain articles have suggested that Gay is just the latest in a long line of US college presidents who have been accused of plagiarism and/or resigned from office. But to me, as a historian, the radical right wing’s coordinated campaign against her is unprecedented, with the plagiarism accusations made for political ends – not scholarly ones.

Without doubt, the history of scholarship shows that accusations of plagiarism have always been “weaponised”, to repeat an over-used, imprecise term of the moment. But even comparisons of Gay’s case with Senator Joe McCarthy’s 1950s unconstitutional war on supposed “communists” are flawed, not least because McCarthy did not attend to published scholarship.

To be clear, Gay was sloppy: she admitted this and apologised. She made corrections. But she did not plagiarise, either by legal definitions or by accepted standards of intellectual ethics and integrity.

I am well versed in these distinctions because a book was published recently that completely depends on a well-known book of mine, published in 2008. The author actually wrote to inform me of his indebtedness and to thank me. But when I looked at the pre-publication copy, I found not one word of acknowledgement or attribution, nor a single footnote or bibliography listing. The publisher promised “to fix matters”, but proceeded to print, publish and sell the uncorrected version.

I consulted a nationally recognised intellectual property rights attorney who is familiar with scholarship. But while sympathetic to my concerns about the clear breaches of academic and publishing ethics, she made it clear, with reference to major court rulings, that I lacked grounds for a successful legal suit because the offending author did not copy entire lines, sentences and paragraphs verbatim from my work.

Claudine Gay, though, did not even breach ethics. The purported 40-odd published examples of her alleged plagiarism fall into three categories. The first involves failure to list all major secondary sources in footnotes or reference lists. Though that perhaps falls short of common practices, it does not constitute an ethics violation because following those practices is not required. Some scholars, indeed, are criticised for making too many citations.

The second category includes a few instances where Gay’s published work failed to include end-of-quotation marks after beginning a passage with quotation marks. This might have been sloppy proof-reading. Or it may have been a printer’s or copy-editor’s failing. Regardless, it is not plagiarism.

The third category involves the use of very common words and short phrases, especially in acknowledgements. But for any writer, this is unavoidable: there are only so many rhetorical conventions. No well-published author’s work can possibly stand up to such intense computer-driven scrutiny.

Take Neri Oxman, the former MIT academic and wife of Bill Ackman, the billionaire Harvard donor who campaigned loudly against Gay. Oxman had to apologise when the media revealed that she copied entire paragraphs from Wikipedia without acknowledgement in her academic writing and made attribution errors in her PhD dissertation. Ackman, for his part, immediately responded by threatening to investigate both the reporters who exposed her and all MIT faculty, beginning with Sally Kornbluth, the threatened but still sitting MIT president. Kornbluth was criticised alongside Gay and University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill in a congressional hearing on antisemitism for failing to straightforwardly answer whether student protesters calling for the genocide of Jews would be in breach of the university’s code of conduct, explaining that it depended on the context.

Inseparable from the campaign against Gay, Kornbluth and Magill (who resigned shortly after the hearing) is the fact that they are women presidents of three of the most prominent elite intellectual centres in the US. In Gay’s case, the fact that she is the first Black Harvard president and supported affirmative action and diversity-equity-inclusion only added to the right’s animus.

Given that Gay, Magill and Kornbluth were assailed by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik for daring to refer (if not as clearly as they might have done) to the need to address specific contexts and the facts of student protests on their campus, it is more than ironic that both journalists and academic commentators almost completely ignore specific contexts in rushing to their own unqualified generalisations.

What is new today is how even unfounded, false and ignorant charges of plagiarism are quickly and widely publicised and immediately linked to other, often unrelated issues. Will any reporters or consultants – or even scholars – take up that question?

Harvey J. Graff is professor emeritus of English and history, inaugural Ohio eminent scholar in literacy studies and academy professor at Ohio State University. He is drafting Reconstructing the New ‘Uni-versity’ from the Ashes of the ‘Multi- and Mega-versity and editing Changing Paths of Academic Lives: Revising How We Understand Higher Education/Universities, 1960s to 2020s and Beyond, a collection of original essays.