Claudine Gay’s rapid downfall as president of Harvard University had many causes, including a damaging appearance in Congress to discuss antisemitism on college campuses and a withering campaign by political conservatives to remove her from office. One of their key charges, and one that captured the attention of a wide swath of the public, was the allegation that she was a serial plagiarist. In its own review of her scholarship prior to her resignation, Harvard found instances of “duplicative language without appropriate attribution” and “instances of inadequate citation.”
The claims against Gay continue, and conservative activists have promised further investigations into plagiarism within the Ivy League. Meanwhile, scholars and students have been debating how serious Gay’s infractions were, how many other academics could withstand that level of scrutiny of their own writing, and whether Harvard treated her more lightly than it would one of its own undergraduates.
We asked three experts who have researched and written about plagiarism and other academic-integrity issues to shed light on these and other questions. They are Susan D. Blum, an anthropology professor at the University of Notre Dame and author of My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture; Sarah Elaine Eaton, an associate professor of education at the University of Calgary, whose research focuses on academic ethics in higher education; and Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California at San Diego, whose research focuses on ethics and integrity in education.
How do colleges adjudicate plagiarism cases among students and among faculty? How do the processes differ?
On college campuses in the United States, those processes are generally separate, notes Bertram Gallant, an emeritus board member for the International Center for Academic Integrity, a nonprofit organization. Almost all institutions have an academic-integrity policy that lays out expectations and definitions. Some go further and offer specific guides for students. Harvard has such a guide for using sources appropriately. The Johns Hopkins University offers a course on avoiding plagiarism.
Colleges typically use one of four basic models for dealing with academic-integrity issues among students, Bertram Gallant said. Some adjudicate all cases of potential misconduct — such as theft or cheating — through student-conduct boards. Others have separate academic-integrity offices. In both models, there is typically a mix of students and administrators who review evidence, hear from the student, and decide cases. A third type is the honor-code model, in which students essentially run the councils that decide cases.
Still others have what she calls a distributed model, which leaves cases up to faculty members to adjudicate. Those are most common among community colleges. Among four-year institutions, while there’s no hard data, Bertram Gallant said she believes the student-conduct model is the most common.
With accusations of faculty plagiarism, she said, there is even less commonality. Some colleges might have a group of people on whom they can call to decide a case. A subset would be chosen, based in part on disciplinary expertise or some other relevant role. Other institutions might choose people from their faculty senate. Still others might pull together an ad hoc committee of inside and outside experts. Most research universities, she notes, follow the requirements of the U.S. Office of Research Integrity, such as having a research-integrity officer to oversee the process.
How results are reported also varies. Among students, academic-integrity and other councils that adjudicate such cases may issue annual reports that summarize cases and their findings. Names of individual students remain confidential.
The difference between intentional plagiarism and sloppy scholarship, I think, is one of the greatest debates in the plagiarism world.
When it comes to employees, it’s hard to track cases unless, as in Gay’s situation, they essentially become news stories, notes Eaton, who is editor in chief of the International Journal for Educational Integrity. “Data is usually only limited to students. I have yet to see a research-integrity report from any university that discloses misconduct from researchers or professors,” she said, adding that “most universities would be reluctant to produce such a report on the grounds that it might cause reputational damage.”
Employment laws typically lead institutions to keep the results of any investigation private, she said, though they could become public if the scholarship in question relied on funding from a government agency, such as the National Science Foundation.
Blum noted that the Office of Research Integrity in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services posts case summaries of research-misconduct findings on its website. And Retraction Watch, which is run by the Center for Scientific Integrity, keeps a list of retracted scientific papers.
How common is plagiarism in academe?
Because there is no method of tracking the outcomes of such allegations among faculty members, experts say, it’s difficult to know how common plagiarism is. Bertram Gallant points to this meta-analysis, which attempted to determine the frequency of plagiarism in scientific papers, using text-matching software. It found that 18 percent of published articles or submitted manuscripts contained plagiarism.
Among students, the prevalence of plagiarism is more easily tracked, although it relies on self-reported data. According to the International Center for Academic Integrity, 15 percent of undergraduates surveyed in 2020 admitted to “paraphrasing or copying a few sentences or more from any source without citing it in a paper or assignment” they had submitted.
As for whether many professors would be found responsible for plagiarizing in the same way as Gay is accused of if their work were closely examined — which is what some of her defenders have argued — that’s impossible to determine, the experts said. Very few academics are ever subject to that level of scrutiny.
“We wouldn’t be having this conversation if we didn’t have the political context,” said Blum. “They’re only doing it because there have been concerted efforts to target elite educational institutions, and particularly the DEI initiatives.”
What incentives and disincentives are there to pursue suspicions of plagiarism?
Among students, plagiarism is easily detected using software such as Turnitin, but underreported. Bertram Gallant notes that on the average college campus, fewer than 1 percent of students are investigated for cheating, yet surveys show that far more engage in it.
The reasons vary. Professors may not want to undergo the ordeal of a formal investigation with a student. If they are contingent faculty, they have even less incentive, given that many cases may come up at the end of the semester, when their contracts end. Instructors might also fear being responsible for ruining a student’s career.
“I think most faculty decide most of the time not to pursue it with students because it’s a lot of work and a lot of trouble,” said Blum. “It’s actually quite miserable to take a case through the process.”
Yet, said Bertram Gallant, underreporting ends up leaving institutions blind to patterns among students, to either hold them accountable or — if it’s a first offense — use the opportunity as a teachable moment to help them do better.
Among faculty members there may be even less willingness to pursue an allegation of plagiarism within an institution and among colleagues. People don’t want to poison relationships, noted Blum. “I think there’s just general American reluctance to turn someone in.”
Are students and faculty members treated differently when it comes to findings of plagiarism?
Yes, said Bertram Gallant, simply because there is more infrastructure in place to handle academic-integrity allegations against students. So there is more consistency, student to student, in outcomes.
Faculty members may also be inclined to give their peers the benefit of the doubt. Bertram Gallant sees some irony in this. Because professors are supposed to know better — and be better trained than students — when it comes to academic integrity, academe seems almost more willing to give them a pass. The thinking goes, she said, “Obviously, they know how not to plagiarize. So it just must be a mistake.”
Faculty members who are found responsible for citation lapses — as opposed to stealing another person’s ideas or research — might also be given more leeway than students, Blum said, “because there are so many dimensions of our jobs and it’s only one of them. And if you’re making contributions in other ways, you’re seen as being a valuable member of an academic community. So I think there is a little bit more tolerance. But some institutions have more tolerance than others for students as well.”
Blum said that it’s unlikely an ordinary faculty member would be fired for the kinds of plagiarism allegations that Gay faced. Their next article might be subject to more scrutiny, or they might be barred for a period of time from seeking grants, or they might be monitored more closely.
Are there gray areas when it comes to defining what plagiarism is?
In a word, yes. Research has shown that academics often can’t agree on how to define plagiarism and how to measure its severity. Where does paraphrasing end and plagiarism begin? Is leaving out a few quote marks and citations on short pieces of writing lazy authorship or intentional plagiarism? These questions roiled around Gay, but they are also everywhere in academe.
Eaton once did a policy analysis of 20 Canadian universities’ definitions of plagiarism and could not find consistency. “The difference between intentional plagiarism and sloppy scholarship, I think, is one of the greatest debates in the plagiarism world.”
The experts note, too, that answers often vary by discipline. What might be acceptable repetition of a common definition or description in one field might be frowned upon in another.
“I think that if people suddenly threw all of the faculty members’ publications through Turnitin it would shake up our understanding and assumptions and beliefs about plagiarism,” said Bertram Gallant. “There is such a lack of agreement. Study after study has shown, you show this group of faculty five works and there will not be agreement on whether those works contain plagiarism or not. So that’s fascinating, isn’t it? Even though it’s got more concrete, quote unquote, evidence than other kinds of cases of integrity violations.”
How has technology shaped debates around plagiarism in academe?
Turnitin is now commonplace on college campuses, making blatant plagiarism easy to detect if instructors are willing to run students’ work through the program. Bertram Gallant noted, however, that even there, human discernment is critical. All that these programs do is detect similarities in text. It is still up to the instructor to investigate further. “I think most professors use the tools correctly,” she said.
