The Social Danger in Allowing Academic Dishonesty to Fester
The fall from grace of Harvard’s president Claudine Gay has opened a wide-running discussion of academic integrity at our major colleges. If the president of one of the most venerable universities in America, if not the world, had plagiarized her way into prominence, how did this reflect generally on higher education?
One of the people who had pressed for Gay’s ouster was Bill Ackman. Then, after Business Insider accused Ackman’s wife of plagiarizing her dissertation, Ackman threatened a plagiarism review of faculty and administrators at M.I.T. Since then, there have been calls to find out just how widespread academic dishonesty is among the intellectual elites with the help of AI.
I have been following this closely because it is an area where I have some experience. On three occasions I was called upon to revise my former college’s Honor Code and the procedures used for identifying plagiarism and other forms of cheating. This led me to a fairly extensive study of how various schools address academic dishonesty.
Over the years I found that there were some faculty who saw cheating as a problem; others were in denial. Although it was clear that most students were honest, there was a small but not insignificant group that was not.
Through research and experience adjudicating cases of cheating I noted three distinct classes of academic dishonesty. First were the casual errors – failure to cite properly. More often than not these derived from ignorance of accepted standards. Hardly any students come out of high school knowing how to cite their sources. And, in my experience, many college faculty are too lazy to teach them. The reality is that every student needs to learn the standards appropriate to their discipline (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.). A friend calls this “disciplinary piety” – in any given field it is necessary to learn and respect the forms. Scholars who have been properly drilled in the forms cite out of habit. It is not something they have to think about doing; conscientious scholars hit the “insert footnote” tab automatically by instinct. The second class are panic cheaters. This is where most cases of plagiarism fall: Students wait until the last minute to write a paper and then start Googling. One of my favorite cases was a student who turned in an essay in a gen ed course in which the phrase “property of the paper store” appeared frequently in the middle of the text – very sloppy cut and paste job.
Even without AI, these cases are easy to spot. When one is reading the usual undergraduate word salad and then comes across a passage in lush Victorian prose, suspicions are raised. A quick internet search of a short passage usually reveals the source within seconds. No AI required.
In my experience, these are brief moral lapses and generally, students prove contrite once caught. More serious are serial plagiarists. In these cases, the students feel no moral obligation to be honest. Sometimes it’s purely cynicism; in other cases darker forces are at work. The worst forms of cheating include coordinated activity – a parent paying for someone to write their kid’s paper for instance – or willful destruction of course materials or equipment. “Razoring” – cutting articles out of journals so other students can’t see them – used to be common at law schools. Here is one place where digitalization has made cheating more difficult.
A serial cheater plans out the dishonesty. They also persist in the behavior even when caught. The most egregious cases were in required courses, either gen ed or gateways courses in majors. Cheating was very common in composition, western civ, and general chemistry.
Serial cheaters generally placed little if any value on the life of the mind. They were in college to get certification, not to learn. Now I understand that this is a common view. Increasingly we see demands that all college curricula should be focused on “marketable” skills. To that I would say that Adam Smith strongly disagreed with that sentiment. Especially when it comes to required courses, the average student does the work mainly in the spirit of simply getting it over with. Nevertheless, serial cheaters are driven by something other than mere sloth. They are driven by ambition and are disdainful of their instructors and classmates. The worst offenders exhibit sociopathic tendencies.
The dedicated cheaters were often harder to catch because, like all sociopaths, they were very comfortable being dishonest. Lying was their first response in any given situation. Stealing papers from roommates, stealing data from lab partners, fudging data – everything was fair game. Serial cheaters tended to congregate in pre-professional majors. Several of the worst I know of (who avoided getting caught) are now attorneys and doctors. The combination of ambition and disdain for ordinary moral standards – a Machiavellian world view – served them well. And in my experience some of them enjoy trying to game the system. They revel in the thrill of the chase. This brings me to the issue of AI. I am familiar with various programs used to catch plagiarism. Reading the data is something of an art but look at enough cases (and I have reviewed thousands) and you get a feel for what is and what is not serious plagiarism.
The programs look for matches with other papers in the databases. A properly researched and cited paper will not, however, register zero matches. On the contrary, because of citation conventions (footnotes, bibliography) a good paper should have a match rate of at least 10%.
The concern arises once the match rate exceeds 15%. Now that may be because the author includes lots of long quotes (that no one ever reads – I mean, what do YOU do when you come across a long block quote in a text?). Bad student papers are often nothing more than a run of undigested quotes from the readings stuck together with little analysis. In those instances, we are dealing with sloth rather than complex sins of fraud.
This is where the case of Neri Oxman, Bill Ackman’s wife, is interesting. Accused of having plagiarized part of her dissertation she admitted to having left out quotation marks in four paragraphs. Was this intentional dishonesty or simply sloppy editing? Most scholars I know would freely admit to having made similar lapses at some point in their writing. Carelessness is different from plagiarism. Here is where one must consider the extent of the borrowing.
If 20-30% of a paper matches others in the database, we can see the line being crossed from carelessness or sloth to genuine academic dishonesty. Anything above 30% is almost certainly intentional plagiarism. Even so, establishing intent is tricky. This is where the human eye is essential. Extended passages lifted without proper citation, attempts to scramble words or break up long quotations to make them “appear” to be original writing are all indications of fraudulent intent. One would like to think that cheating is something educators would like to eliminate. A former colleague described how in his time at Washington and Lee University, cheaters would be stuck in a cab bound for the train station, never to return. That sort of thing doesn’t happen nowadays, although some of the more draconian honor codes at women’s colleges come close. Unfortunately, academic dishonesty is not treated seriously enough. Many faculty flatter themselves, thinking that “their” students would never cheat. Administrators frequently do not support strong prosecution of cheating because they don’t want to offend the paying customers.
An obvious question is: who cares? Does cheating really hurt anyone? I would argue it does. If it is allowed to fester, academic dishonesty undermines student morale. Why work hard when the cheaters get ahead? Matters are made worse when some groups (athletes, for example) are not held to the same standards as everyone else. The essence of tyranny is arbitrary rule, and when rules are applied selectively and unevenly it intensifies the feeling that the game is rigged. When college and universities wink at academic dishonesty it breeds cynicism and disdain for the culture of higher education. Public confidence in education had declined dramatically. The revelations of wide-spread dishonesty at the highest levels has only increased popular suspicion of the university as one of the most prominent institutions in American life. I’ve heard faculty and administrators make apologies for academic dishonesty. Sometimes these apologies arise from the moral position of sympathy for the underdog (or undergrad). Less prepared or less privileged students cannot be held to the same standards. In some cases this makes sense – a student who has never been taught the basics citation is hardly to be blamed for gross errors. But serial plagiarists exploit the good will of the sort of people who are uncomfortable enforcing rules.
Others faculty and administrators make excuses because they fear the wrath of parents and advocacy groups. I have no sympathy for such folk. In loco parentis doesn’t mean coddling entitled brats. The academic enterprise is supposed to build up character – that is the original meaning of “edification” (aedificatio). Sniffing at academic dishonesty does the opposite. The sort of people who cheat as undergrads continue to do so. And the effects can be seen not only in the academy, but in business and politics.
There is a significant social danger in allowing academic dishonesty to fester. I can think of nothing worse for society than a leadership class full of sociopathic serial cheaters. Along with other events of the past decade, the recent scandal at Harvard suggests we are already there.
conscientious scholars hit the “insert footnote” tab automatically by instinct
When *I* was a kid, we had to walk to school through the snow!
The fundamental problem is that there’s a class war going on. Like, the people who are taking the most joy in attacking the plagiarizers are from Team Evil and that means that Team Good has to defend Claudine Gay. It’s not that bad. Everybody does it. The Harvard Extension School doesn’t have *REAL* Harvard people in it.
If we discussed plagiarism 20 minutes prior to the Gay revelations? Everybody would have been on the same page. But the fact that the Gay stuff came to light at the agency of Rufo means that we now have to hem and haw and prevaricate about it.
It’s a war, man. Do you really want to give Team Evil a win?Report
You know what? Gay didn’t do anything that probably 90% of academics across subjects haven’t done before. Is it 100% straight up? No. Nothing g ever is. There is no profession where the people doing the thing get it right 100% of the time. So why anyone prior to this would have expected perfection is beyond me.
And it’s a distraction. From an all out assault on education from the right. Which is the real issue we should be grappling with.
But this needs exactly no more air then it has been given.Report
See?Report
“Gay didn’t do anything that probably 90% of academics across subjects haven’t done before.”
Assumes facts not in evidence. Even with the word “probably” in there.
“And it’s a distraction. From an all out assault on education from the right.”
Would it be fair to assume that you see everything in the world as either a criticism of the right or a distraction from a criticism of the right?Report
No.Report
Two things can be true at once.
Gay committed plagiarism, and the right needed to attack a symbol of their cultural impotence..
The last line in the essay:
I can think of nothing worse for society than a leadership class full of sociopathic serial cheaters. Along with other events of the past decade, the recent scandal at Harvard suggests we are already there.
Is lifted straight from a screed by a left wing radical circa 1972.
Its a standard cliche in modern liberal circles to lob charges of vast malfeasance and bad behavior by corporations and police. But its only been in the past decade or so that I’ve seen this sort of sweeping indictment of our entire society from the right.
It tracks with what I’ve been saying how the right has found itself on the wrong end of the “Long March through the institutions”, where the pillars of America society- the government, corporations, military, media and entertainment- are now seen as enemies.
Conservatives now find themselves on the outside of what hippies called “The Establishment” and like the hippies, reject the entire edifice as beyond saving and in need of being burned to the foundations.Report
Not true at all. Some of the right’s most virulent critics of this sort of thing come from the Ivies. They went willingly to burnish their entry into the elite part of society. They are doing this to both cover their tracks and to make sure no one else can duplicate their feat.Report
Of course conservatives send their kids to the Ivies. What, like they’re going to send their precious offspring to Hillsdale, or some creationist college?
Its the experience of being socially shunned at the Ivies which infuriates them and reminds them of their outsider status. Hawley, Cruz, Rufo…these guys are those pledges you see in the first scene of Animal House, politely steered to the reject corner.
And its the same all through American society.
Decades ago a Roger Sterling might have asked, “Have we hired any Jews/Gays/Blacks?” to which a Don Draper would retort “Not on my watch!”
But today a conservative graduate with an MBA from Harvard has to sit through a Powerpoint given by a black woman showing their new media campaign featuring a rainbow flag.Report
But today a conservative graduate with an MBA from Harvard has to sit through a Powerpoint given by a black woman showing their new media campaign featuring a rainbow flag.
Not anymore! Now it’s a Jewish guy giving the presentation. And slides 12 and 13 have been removed.Report
Gay wasn’t fired for Plagiarism; she was fired because she fumbled a simple question on genocide and then her administration fumbled a simple question on Plagiarism… the first fumble alienated many of her donor stakeholders, the second many of her faculty stakeholders.
Answering simple questions in Public is the sine qua non skill required of chief executives.
Along the way the fumbles exposed interesting side stories that came to light about how she climbed the greasy pole… but mostly that was because she fumbled the easy questions and lost her stakeholder support.
But again, ultimately she was fired because she couldn’t effectively say that you can’t call for genocide at Harvard.
Remember, no-one is stripping her PhD and she’s still going to teach at Harvard (temporarily, I’d expect).
On the main point of the original post [professional] plagiarism is a ‘bigger’ deal in the word-smithing disciplines whereas replication is a bigger issue in the [soft] sciences. I think the taxonomy of Students who plagiarize is solid; the erosion of trust in both cases, though is similar… credentialling through college and credentialling through publications are driving a lot of sub-optimal behaviors throughout.Report
So, embarrassing the organization is cause for firing, you say?
Scientist cited in push to oust Harvard’s Claudine Gay has links to eugenicists
Christopher Rufo, credited with helping oust school’s first Black president, touted critic associated with ‘scientific racists’
A data scientist promoted by the rightwing activist Christopher Rufo, the Manhattan Institute thinktank, and other conservatives as an expert critic of the former Harvard president Claudine Gay has co-authored several papers in collaboration with a network of scholars who have been broadly criticized as eugenicists, or scientific racists.
Rufo described Jonatan Pallesen as “a Danish data scientist who has raised new questions about Claudine Gay’s use – and potential misuse – of data in her PhD thesis” in an interview published in his newsletter and on the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal website last Friday.
He did not tell readers that a paper featuring Pallesen’s own statistical work in collaboration with the eugenicist researchers has been subject to scathing expert criticism for its faulty methods, and characterized as white nationalism by another academic critic.
…
The paper Pallesen co-authored repeatedly cites Kevin MacDonald, a retired psychology academic whose antisemitic publications argue that Jews engage in a “group evolutionary strategy” that explains their financial and cultural successes, and that antisemitism is an understandable reaction to this phenomenon.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/14/christopher-rufo-jonatan-pallesen-eugenics-racism-claudine-gay-harvard
Huh. I wonder if “Not proudly touting the work of Neo-Notsees” is a sine qua non skill required of chief executives.Report
So Rufo.
Is a fan of a data scientist.
This data scientist wrote a paper that cited another scientist.
This other scientist also wrote a paper that cites a different scientist that is, reportedly, anti-Semitic.
What they aren’t telling you is that this third scientist was in Sleepers with Kevin Bacon.Report
Rufo’s data “scientist” wrote this:
The 2019 paper is entitled Polygenic Scores Mediate the Jewish Phenotypic Advantage in Educational Attainment and Cognitive Ability Compared With Catholics and Lutherans. It argues that the high cognitive abilities of Ashkenazi Jews are “significantly mediated by group differences in the polygenic score” – that is, genetically caused. They speculate that “culture-gene coevolution” may influence “Jewish group-level characteristics” like high cognitive abilities.
We can see why Rufo thinks so highly of the guy!
There is a significant social danger in allowing academic dishonesty to fester. I can think of nothing worse for society than a leadership class full of sociopathic racists.
Where does Rufo work, and why is his employer tolerating this? Are they unaware, or supportive of this sort of thing?Report
Was the data in the paper accurate? Like, did it replicate? Hey, I could google that.
Huh. Reddit talked about the original paper back in 2019. Apparently, the findings were replicated in the UK.
I have no idea why people are trying to publicize these papers instead of just trying to cover them up.Report
Believe you me, I want this on the front page of the NYT every day for six weeks.
“Conservatives Believe That Some People Are Just Better Than Others”Report
This conflates a couple of things in an interesting way.
If you see “intelligence” as, necessarily, virtuous in and of itself, any finding that someone is more intelligent than someone else is, necessarily, discovering that s/he is more virtuous than another.
So there has to be a concerted effort to say that intelligence can’t be measured and, besides, there are multiple intelligences and, besides, I knew a smart guy but he got addicted to heroin so I guess he wasn’t *THAT* smart was he? and so on.
Deny that it can be measured.
Because, if it can be measured, then we’re saying that this group might be “better” than that group.
If, however, you see “intelligence” as something similar to “height”, it can be measured but it’s not evidence of any particular virtue.
Short guys get irritated at the whole “when his height begins with 5” meme template that chicks pass around every few months but, other than that (admittedly low status act), we all know that height doesn’t mean much.
But people who would see height as virtue in and of itself? Man. They’d have to find all sorts of ways to deny that height is virtuous when discussing differences between groups. “No, it is not the case that Danes are better than Chinese people. That hasn’t been true since the 70’s anyway and it was entirely due to malnutrition.”
But if you don’t see “intelligence” as something that makes someone “better” than someone else, you don’t have that problem.
If you do… and if you do to the point where you cannot even imagine someone else thinking otherwise… man. That’d be crazy.Report
Someone could also point out that the idea of some races or ethnicities being more intelligent than others is a fringe idea not supported by the scientific community.
And we can then ask why there is so much of a concerted effort by laypeople who flat out don’t understand what they are reading, to cling tenaciously to a conclusion not supported by science.
Its not like these people discard the consensus of opinion on geologists and support fringe ideas of a hollow earth.
They only discard the consensus of scientists when there is an idea which confirms their biases.
Its almost like they think intelligence is a virtue or something.Report
Oh, Chip.
It can’t be measured. Do we even have a definition of what “intelligence” is? Since we don’t, it doesn’t exist.
Q.E.D.Report
Will Gay be a more competent President if Rufo or Oxman pay a price?
If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re trying to make room for folks at Harvard to make calls for Genocide of the Jews. Is that what you’re working to protect? Seems sketchy to me. Or maybe I’m not reading your conspiracy board correctly?Report
You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. *That’s* the *Chicago* way! And that’s how you get Capone. Now do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that? I’m offering you a deal. Do you want this deal?Report
Congressional hearing: Mr. Rufo, is it your opinion that Jews, in general, have and I quote, “high cognitive abilities?”
Rufo: Well, I have no particular statistics on that; but we welcome all Jewish students at New College; in fact, in light of the anti-semitism rampant at Harvard and other Ivies, all of the public colleges in Florida including, I’m happy to say, New College has an expedited process to welcome Jewish transfers from any college — not just Ivies — where they may no longer feel safe. This was sponsored by Governor DeSantis.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/floridas-public-colleges-are-told-to-ease-transfer-for-jewish-studentsReport
No conspiracy needed.
As I have said repeatedly, two things can be true:
1. Gay committed plagiarism;
2. The right needed to take down a powerful black woman.
And by the way, the whole “Jews have higher cognitive ability” is no different than “Black have natural rhythm”.
Its meant to sound like a compliment, but its outright racism.Report