“I wrote my own book, unlike Kamala Harris, who copied hers from Wikipedia.” That criticism, from vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance, was only the latest salvo in what has become known as the “the Plagiarism War.”
Like virtually every aspect of our lives, plagiarism has become politics by another means. It is hardly new. President Joe Biden admitted to plagiarism long ago. The seriousness of the allegation often depends on how sympathetic the media is toward the author.
Vice President Kamala Harris was accused of plagiarizing her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer.” Immediately, the New York Times ran a column citing a “plagiarism consultant” named Jonathan Bailey who suggested that, while Harris plagiarized from sources like Wikipedia, it was nothing to “make a big deal of it.”
Bailey took to social media Monday to confirm he had not done a full analysis of the book and that his “quotes were based on information provided to me by the reporters and spoke only about those passages.”
The response set off conservative media, which argued that the mainstream media would have had a very different response if the allegations were made against Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal.”
The fact is, an opponent of Trump could probably copy “War and Peace” word-for-word and would still be showered with literary awards in this political environment.
After Harvard President Claudine Gay became embroiled in the controversy over antisemitism on campuses, conservative activist Christopher Rufo and writer Christopher Brunet scanned her work for possible plagiarism. They found numerous examples in her work, going back to her 1997 dissertation. Soon after, Harvard’s diversity chief was accused of more than 40 incidences of plagiarism going back to her own dissertation.
The controversy leaves many professors in an uncomfortable silence, while others have pledged to weaponize reviews by targeting conservative academics in a hunt for academic wretches to hoist in retaliation. Indeed, for intellectuals who cherish the insulated world of academia, the tit-for-tat campaigns are apparently about as unnerving as a tax audit going back to your teenaged babysitting gigs.
Yet perhaps the reflexive defense of Harris could prove a positive development if critics are willing to put hypocrisy aside and embrace a new approach.
The fact is, much, if not most, non-student plagiarism is not due to a lack of ethics but a lack of diligence. It is the difference between negligent and intentional acts.
Most books and academic works take months or years to complete. Hundreds or thousands of sources can be reviewed and incorporated into a publication. In the age of computers, it is extremely easy to cut and paste your way into a plagiarism problem. Quotation marks can be lost or omitted by authors or research assistants; attributions can be omitted in basic background development. It is all too easy to lose track of original sources in production.
That fact is evident from past plagiarism controversies involving accomplished figures, including Harvard professors Lawrence Tribe and Charles Ogletree, as well as historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Steven Ambrose.
These writers have well-earned reputations that are the product of their own insights. Alex Haley’s fame was not the product of the plagiarized material in his work on “Roots.” When viewed in isolation, a paragraph or multiple references can appear damning, but these often arise in works that reach hundreds of pages.
There is a tendency to treat all such allegations as monolithic and equally culpable. Yet even homicide has lesser offenses on a range from murder in the first degree to simple manslaughter.
Moreover, there remains a striking lack of uniformity in how such allegations are treated. For popular figures like Goodwin or Ogletree, the allegations were mere speed bumps in their careers. For others who may be less popular or well connected, the same acts can result in contract terminations or even the stripping of tenure. There are no sentencing guidelines for academics and the result can turn as much on the popularity of the person as the gravity of the offense.
In the first century, the Roman poet Martial was upset when he recognized some verses in the work of another poet. He immediately declared the man a kidnapper or “plagiarius” of his words. With that, the term plagiarism was born.
Despite its ancient origins, the actual definition of plagiarism remains dangerously vague.
Even when an academic cites such work, the failure to do so in a specific paragraph or line can be charged as plagiarism. It is common to rely on the work of others for background history or cases that lay the foundation for a new approach. Harris’s defenders insist that much of the lifted material was background support for her own arguments.
Plagiarism hawks often dismiss such habits as a “pawn sacrifice,” where a writer will “put the citation somewhere else, or you put the citation in and have the exact words, but you forget the quotation marks.” While hawks may view this as a “tell,” it can also be an honest mistake or poor habit. In such cases, the academic is citing the work but fails to do so sufficiently.
Then there is the concept of “self-plagiarism,” which many of us view as something of an oxymoron. Universities are now cracking down on academics using their own material. Some of us have criticized this effort, but it is now taking root in many departments. Universities threaten action if you “recycle ideas” from earlier work.
The problem is that many academics write papers restating prior work or ideas before pushing them into new areas or further evolutions. Some writers are often starting where they left off, repeating earlier work and ideas before advancing the work further in a new paper.
The definition of the act does not establish the gravity of the act. Treating plagiarism as a capital offense ignores that there are vastly different levels of culpability.
In recent decades, academic and nonacademic work has become faster and arguably more precarious with the ease of computer storage and copying. Yet there is now technology that may counter that danger and reduce the excuse for academics. Various systems, including those that use artificial intelligence, can check work for potential plagiarism.
If these systems prove effective and cost efficient, we may need to adopt an “antebellum” and “postbellum” classification for plagiarism cases. The war over the Gay scholarship happens to fall on this very line. The availability of plagiarism software may make future violations less excusable.
Indeed, in a recent survey, more than 78 percent of faculty said that they used software to check the originality of student work. It may be time for academics to direct such programs on their own work as a check for inadvertent attribution problems.
I decided, for the first time, to give these systems a try for my new book on free speech. “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” is over 400 pages and I chose two of the leading services: Ithenticate and Copyleaks, at a cost of hundreds of dollars for a complete review.
As these systems improve and the costs drop, there may be a point where the failure to put your own work through such a source check becomes unreasonable and even unforgivable. The future of academic plagiarism may indeed fall along an antebellum line of technology.
Harris’s alleged plagiarism is unlikely to change many minds in this election. She could have begun her book with “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” and it would have been at least poignant, if plagiarized.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”