Probably everyone has now heard of the cloud of plagiarism accusations hanging about Claudine Gay’s head. I don’t have any very extensive comments on them, except that some of the incidents seem rather bad, others seem less bad, and the correct response probably shouldn’t change depending on who it is that dredged up the passages in the first place. I am not writing this to defend her. But the allegations do offer a nice opportunity to think about something that has bothered me a long time, since middle school, at least: the very concept of plagiarism itself. I think you see some people defending the indefensible, and others making mountains of molehills, because the concept of plagiarism is poorly-founded and overbroad.
It’s easy to see why some incidents of plagiarism are wrong. For example, this Twitter thread went viral a few days ago. A then-graduate student describes how her academic advisor stole and published her work, without any credit, and tried to use his power to keep her quiet. (Never mind the last few Tweets in the thread, which you can take as an opportunity for some light bemusement at the human mind’s ability to confirm pre-existing biases.) This kind of incident might well jeopardize a victim’s publishing opportunities, and of course unfairly benefits the thief. It’s like a lord stealing from a peasant. Bad.
But that’s not the typical example of plagiarism. Usually it is a student who plagiarizes an established scholar, or maybe not a scholar but some unsigned rubbish content-mill piece that probably shows up in the top five results on Bing. At other times it is one scholar copying another. In these cases it usually doesn’t involve direct career harm or financial harm to anyone. It can be dishonest, perhaps a sort of affront to one scholar’s hard work or honor or even just self-image, but no one will go hungry. Indeed, the original idea (and sometimes its originator) will end up with more exposure than before.
Maybe the taboo on plagiarism is better described as a mode of enforcing intellectual property rights. Perhaps everyone has a right to some degree of control over the use and dissemination of his own published (or even spoken, when in a formal setting) ideas. Doubtless the positive law sometimes establishes such rights, through copyright and trademark protections. I don’t intend to attack those laws, which are necessary for a vibrant commercial society (though sometimes in tension with free speech).
But I am not sure of the extent to which they codify any natural property right. I agree with Locke that natural property rights exist, and see how they might extend to the fruits of labor. But a word once spoken, who can recall it? (I just paraphrased a well-known proverb. As far as I can tell, the original is from Horace. Has he got any property right in this idea? Even in the unique phrasing of the idea? Especially since he’s been dead for two thousand years?) It seems to me that the act of speech or publication is the act of relinquishing control over an idea. Maybe publication is like a kind of loan: I offer my idea to others for conditional use. But a reader assumes no obligations—especially when he does not read (or listen) of his own free will, but only to complete an assignment. In contract law (which I take to incorporate natural law in its foundational principles), a gift cannot create a contract, or, put another way, there’s no contract when consideration is lacking, when there is no mutual exchange. Any attempt to assert intellectual control over a published idea is like a belated, retroactive attempt to impose conditions on a gift. So any natural right to intellectual property seems like a narrow one.
But perhaps all that is beside the point. Perhaps our aversion to the slightest whiff of plagiarism really is about honesty, and it’s a noble thing to enforce that kind of moral norm even when pure utilitarianism would counsel otherwise. Maybe this fierce insistence on scrupulous acknowledgement of ideas is part of the great tradition of Western academia. If so, it is the sort of thing that ought not to be lightly dismissed.
Yet here I find myself equally befuddled. For it is not quite clear what kind of moral offense plagiarism entails (in the ordinary case, not the “I-am-your-advisor and will use you as my scared, unpaid idea mill” case). It’s connected to honesty, but plagiarism does not necessarily involve lying. It can, if someone explicitly claims as his own an idea or a passage that is not. But most written works make no such explicit pretense to originality. When I say that the Sherden, described in Egyptian sources as one of the Sea Peoples who raided the Nile Delta around 1160 BC, could be plausibly identified with the Nuraghic civilization of Sardinia, I am making a claim about the facts. I am not claiming to have come up with the idea myself, and presumably no reader will think I have (indeed I have no idea who first came up with this notion). This is true even if I diverge from common knowledge into some more technical claim; maybe I say that the Sherden used a particular type of boat at the Battle of Medinet Habu. Maybe I copied that information from somebody else. But my mere statement of a fact, or even an opinion, is just that: a statement of a fact or an opinion. It’s not a claim that I invented the fact or the opinion. Nor do I think it makes sense to start with an assumption that everything everyone writes is original, except where a citation indicates otherwise. In reality almost nothing any educated person writes is truly original. It’s always an amalgamation of tiny bits of information from this place or that place, a puzzle of data points and vaguer background influences, whether from personalities or cultures, that cannot be categorized or traced. Ultimately a lot of it comes from our parents or our teachers; indeed the very ability to read comes from our parents and teachers, but no one puts a citation after a long word, saying, “I owe my spelling of methylisothiazolinone to my third-grade teacher, Ms. McGillicuddy.” I think it is true that failing to cite a source can falsely imply originality. But I also think the false implication depends on context and readers: sometimes readers will assume that everything uncited is original, as they might in a law review article, but other times they will not, as in an encyclopedia article or a political speech. So our anti-plagiarism culture is indeed connected to honesty—only the connection is complicated and variable.
This comparative harmlessness, lack of an underlying property right, and unclear relationship to honesty, all lead me to wonder whether we over-police plagiarism. Certainly it should not be possible to plagiarize by accident, but right now I think it probably is. You can look at some of the examples in Harvard’s current plagiarism guide. I think a careless student could produce the “inadequate paraphrase,” or, more easily still, put a citation in the middle of paraphrased work when it should appear at the end (one of the “mosaic paraphrase”) examples. More importantly, though, neither of those examples seems morally opprobrious. They’re not really lies; they don’t infringe any property right; they don’t cause any tangible harm to anyone. They’re just lazy, and boring to read. But that’s the sort of thing that merits a lower grade, not a year-long suspension.
But what if someone plagiarized me? What if somebody copied this article and published it somewhere? Would I be upset? Probably—thought in such a case we’d be nearer the grad student/professor situation, since I am not a widely published author by any means, and so might suffer a significant opportunity cost. But take a milder case, the kind of scenario I’m suggesting we over-police: suppose someone said, “Meilaender thinks our obsession with plagiarism might be a little over-wrought,” and then proceeded to basically recite one of my paragraphs, without any quotation marks or additional citations. I can’t imagine getting upset. I’d be especially unbothered if some student did it. This seems like a good thing: other people are spreading my idea. More readers are hearing my argument. And there’s still a general acknowledgement that the idea was mine first.
So academic citation culture is not easily justified as a moral matter, at least in its extremes. But it does have practical benefits: citations are really helpful to readers who want to investigate an author’s sources and learn more about a topic. (Just yesterday, I followed a footnote to an unpublished paper, which in turn took me to a fascinating study I had not supposed had ever been conducted, and would not otherwise have found.) That’s why I do take great care to cite sources properly: even on Substack, most of my articles have a lot of links! I also really like pointing out and praising articles or sources that were helpful and well-written. Giving credit to others is pleasant and enjoyable. And there is an element of honesty, too: sometimes I’m concerned a reader might think I had come up with an argument or a statistic myself, when I really didn’t.
But all this suggests a more flexible model of attribution than the one we currently employ. Citations shouldn’t be rigidly formatted, but instead focused on making it easy for a reader to find a work (which means that hyperlinks matter while publisher information does not). And some kinds of plagiarism, like sloppy paraphrasing, could be stigmatized as evidence of dullness and unoriginality—but should not be grounds for disciplinary action against students. Certainly it should be difficult to commit plagiarism by accident. In other words, “plagiarism” is a term that encompasses too much—everything from genuine moral and practical wrongs to harmless sloppiness (or even efficient and helpful rebroadcasting of ideas). That overbreadth creates the twin risks of downplaying genuine wrongs and feigning righteous indignation over obvious nothingburgers.