From New York Magazine’s Intelligencer: Neri Oxman and Claudine Gay Cases Show We Need New Rules on Plagiarism

16 thoughts on “From New York Magazine’s Intelligencer: Neri Oxman and Claudine Gay Cases Show We Need New Rules on Plagiarism”

1. There’s an interesting section in the middle that talks about a plagiarism scandal that toppled Jill Abramson. It focuses on this sentence:

   When he lived in Chicago, Mojica sang in punk bands, ran a record label, and owned the Jinx Café and a video rental shop called Big Brother.

   That’s one of the sentences that brought Abramson down.

   He gets into plagiarism theory in there.

   I might find his argument 100% persuasive if there weren’t some weird “That fence was put there for a reason” thought nagging at the back of my head.Report

   1. Sprigman says at greater length and in greater detail what I have been saying all along. Therefore, I agree with it heartily.Report

2. Hmm…Report

3. “That campaign was a right-wing hatchet job — and yet even hatchet-men sometimes say true things. Most of the allegations against Gay involved low-grade misconduct, like crediting sources but failing to put copied passages in quotes. In several instances though, Gay went further, reproducing more lengthy passages without any attribution at all.”

   If it was true, it’s not a hatchet job. Hatchet job defined: “A hatchet job is an unfair attack on someone, especially a written attack” The MOTIVE for the investigation and the bringing to light the plagiarism might be by less than pure reasons, but the “crime” was committed.Report

   1. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.Report

4. I was thinking about a syllabus in one of my college classes as I drove around today. Bear in mind, my college days spanned most of the ’80s. In it was a warning regarding plagiarism, which read that you could commit murder and still pass the class, but writing without attribution was the death penalty for the course.

   Granted, it would have been well nigh impossible to get caught, but any history major (like me) lived in mortal fear of a plagiarism accusation and probably over-cited to avoid one. The messenger in Gay’s case might be one of the most execrable human beings residing in this country at the moment, and his motive certainly less than pure, but he, most likely inadvertently, he’s opened up a new avenue of attack for the politically motivated, to wit sloppy scholarship. It’ll be interesting to see how both sides of the aisle use this new tool.

   Now we have computers that can sift through entire libraries looking for textual similarities. I’ll bet frats around the country have jettisoned entire file cabinets worth of old term papers and essays as a result.Report

   1. Oh, that’s freakin’ great. I never even considered that.

      “Plagiarism Checkers Proliferate. Fraternities Hardest Hit.”Report

   2. The problem with a lot of software though is that it considers stock technical phrases to be examples of plagiarism.Report

      1. You, and Phillip below, touch on the most salient point. These programs are just elaborate spell checkers. Some text flagged as plagiarism is cut and dried, other instances aren’t plagiarism at all.

         I’ve never read Gay’s stuff, and likely never will, but I’d be interested in what her fellow scholars think, not the opinion of someone who’s made his life’s work in attempting to destroy public education in this country.Report

         1. https://www.reddit.com/r/academia/comments/193gb70/a_comprehensive_summary_of_claudine_gay_and_neri/

            Deep, deep dive on all this.

            Of the 47 accusations, we have the following:
            Acceptable, not plagiarism: 38
            Borderline: 9
            Plagiarism: 10

            Also her PhD dissertation had 15 instances where she copied text directly from wikipedia.

            Conclusion by the author is… weird. He says a lot of this is media exaggeration and it wasn’t instrumental to her academic career.Report

   3. I say unleash it and let the chips fall where they may. Laying low the halfwit grievance studies professors and the smarmy Thurston Howell types would be a great good for our society and I fully support it.Report

   4. Both sides of the aisle? Given the ideological split in the university, and the fact that most academic feuds are left-winger versus left-winger, it’s hard to see this in terms of party politics. Anyway, this is a line of attack that’s always been on the table.Report

      1. I was speaking more about outside agencies. Just another tool for people with a bug up their ass over some perceived slight to use in “correcting” the record.Report

   5. My children in High School and College have told me their papers are checked for plagiarism.

      The technology has been there for a while and it’s been used for a while.
      Just not against Harvard Professors.Report

      1. We use it in our professional societies – which are international – to check papers being submitted for presentation at large annual meetings. it tags about 10% of submissions. Many are simple translation issues as the authors are not native English writers. Some is outright theft of intellectual property masquerading as new scholarship. The rest turn out to be honest errors where a citation is given elsewhere in the paper but not followed down the whole thing.Report

         1. This makes me think about the level of detailed citation in my law review article, which was pretty in line with how all law review articles wind up getting published.

            Nearly every sentence is footnoted until you get to the section marked “Conclusion.” Lots of citations to id or, if you prefer, ibid. (I used to know the fine distinction between those two but no longer care.) That avoids the “here’s three sentences that are all drawn from the same source but how do you know where original writing ends and reference to citation begins” issue; every sentence is marked, sentence by sentence, as having come from the same source. It makes the final document a bit difficult to read but that’s how you do it if you’re as concerned about attribution as, say, a law review editor.

            What’s amusing is a lot of the cites are to case law, which is not copyrighted. But we want to make damn sure we know when you’re reporting on research and when you’re attempting actual original thought!Report

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