Plagiarists: Should They Stay Or Should They Go?
Former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s serial plagiarism is just the tip of the iceberg. Within days from now, thousands of internet sleuths who are scouring dissertations for plagiarism will have uncovered a shocking number of academicians who have obtained their doctorates by fraud. [1] The questions we should now be asking are, “What can be done?” and “What should be done?”
Harvard answered this question by retaining Claudine Gay on faculty and letting the former president keep her $900,000 a year salary. This is one answer. Another is to fire any academic who has plagiarized either their dissertation or any subsequent peer-reviewed paper. So, terminating one’s employment is another answer. A third answer is revoking the PhD of the plagiarist. This is almost never done, but there have been a few instances where people have had their PhDs retracted in the case of plagiarism.
When news of the Claudine Gay scandal broke, my first reaction was that the doctorates of those who had plagiarized should be revoked. That option seemed reasonable because if the degree was obtained fraudulently thus by definition it was not legitimately earned and thus it should not be retained. There’s no exact analogy, but it’s vaguely similar to revoking a medal in a sport if someone cheated (Rosy Ruiz) or a Grammy if someone was awarded it for songs they pretended to sing (Milli Vanilli) but did not actually sing.
I have since changed my mind. My current opinion is that plagiarists should be exposed but there should be no consequences to their misdeeds. I think this is the best option because it will further delegitimize PhDs and other terminal degrees and it will radically delegitimize colleges, universities, and other academic institutions. The reason I am advocating that there be no consequences—especially in the most egregious instances of plagiarism—is because academic institutions and entire bodies of scholarship are irremediably corrupt and there are few better ways to make that corruption visible than to retain people who have fraudulently obtained their credentials. Harvard’s treatment of Gay after learning she is a serial plagiarist is case and point. (Harvard’s internal “investigation” found Gay innocent of plagiarism before they even conducted the investigation.)
I’ve been screaming about the crisis of ideological capture of academic institutions for nearly a decade, and with the Grievance Studies Affair my colleagues and I attempted to alert the public to the problem and consequences. But the Grievance Studies Affair was too ahead of its time, and being prematurely exposed by the Wall Street Journal prevented us from paving an infrastructure to make it easy for the public to navigate. Years have passed and Critical Social Justice orthodoxy has permeated our institutions, which have further refined DEI mechanisms to punish dissenters and ideologically cull enemies. And here we are. Our engines are knowledge production have become vehicles that replicate the dominant moral fashion while truth, intellectual integrity, academic rigor, and evidence-based public policies have been the casualties.
There is no other solution but to make the corruption conspicuous and retain disgraced administrators, professors, and presidents. This is also why I was opposed to Claudine Gay’s firing: She was the president Harvard deserved. A grossly under-accomplished, ideologically uncompromising diversity hire who is a serial plagiarist and overtly hostile to meritocracy. I genuinely cannot think of a more perfect person to represent the values of Harvard. And so it is with PhDs who have obtained their position and status by fraud. I can think of no better representatives of corrupt academic institutions than those who fraudulently obtained their credentials. [2]
[1] To be clear, there are specific, universally agreed-upon criteria for what constitutes plagiarism—as opposed to sloppiness or lack of intellectual rigor. Plagiarism is taking another’s intellectual work and claiming it as your own. It is an egregious violation of ethics.
[2] This comes with the added potential benefit of the feds hitting universities with R.I.C.O. statutes and seizing their endowments.
When I left the conference room in December 1981 after defending my doctoral dissertation I was once again a nervous wreck. Somehow after answering the first question, I calmed down and thought I had answered all the questions competently and correctly. (Later that evening my dissertation director informed me that I was wrong in at least one instance.) I sat down and chatted a bit with the receptionist/secretary whose desk was by the conference room. After a few minutes there was laughter coming from the room and she informed me that that was a good sign, there is no laughter when a dissertation is rejected.
That evening I asked Leland Yeager (my dissertation director) about the laughter. He told me that the Economics Department at the University of Virginia requires the dissertation director before concluding the committee’s meeting to ask, “Does anyone have reason to believe that there is any plagiarism in this dissertation?
The question began to be required after it had been discovered that a student of future Nobel Laureate James Buchanan (1986 prize in economics) had plagiarized his doctoral dissertation by copying almost an entire paper written by Buchanan. This discovery did not occur until a few years after the defense. The student’s degree was revoked. The paper work my dissertation director submitted included answers to two questions: How many dissertations have been successfully defended and how many degrees granted? So at that time the number of dissertations approved was one more than the number of degrees awarded.
That James Buchanan would miss his student copying pages of one of his papers puzzled me until I refereed a paper that plagiarized me. I did not notice, but the other referee did. But in my case, it was only an entire paragraph. The author of the paper blamed his/her graduate student.
The Grievance Studies Affair revealed deep flaws in peer review as currently practiced, especially in disciplines that function largely as fronts for idea laundering. Now we are seeing how this laundering sits side-by-side with fraud. The fact that it is not common practice for universities to run all theses and dissertations through a tool such as Turnitin, and for publishers of books and journals to do the same, is telling. It is a systemic rot in the social sciences and humanities comparable to the natural sciences' failure to require preregistration of hypothesis testing.
We faculty need to hold ourselves to the same standards that we hold our students. Check that. Given grade inflation, especially among the Ivies, maybe we need to go back and simply establish standards. No wonder so many are afraid of generative AI; it actually is capable of generating something that is quasi-original.