To the Editor:
Your recent article, “‘You Hand Them a Knife’: After Claudine Gay’s Ouster, Historians Worry About Weaponization of Plagiarism
(The Chronicle, January 9) is provocative for all concerned with the ouster of Claudine Gay and with the pandemic of plagiarism. You idenyify a “deep anxiety over the present,” triggered by political attacks on the profession, and legislative efforts to scrap tenure and restrict teaching about race and gender. Ironically, couching the discussion of Gay and plagiarism within a broader political context echoes her error before Congress that got her into hot water. Gay sidestepped a direct answer, invoking “context” in response to Rep. Elise Stefanik’s (R-N.Y.) question related to campus speech and rules of conduct. She apologized, explaining the “context” clouded what should have been a direct answer — calls for violence and genocide have no place at Harvard.
Regardless of political “context,” plagiarism has no place at Harvard, or any institution of higher education producing respected scholarship. The creation and preservation of academic standards for scholarship form the roots of reputation at any academic level — doctoral students, professors and presidents. When critics uncover violations of our standards and claim “hypocrisy,” it serves us poorly to say “Look over there! They want to undermine our institutions, and eradicate DEI programs! They are using citations, footnotes, and quotation marks in a culture war against us!” These arguments use “context” or contextual forces in an attempt to weaken accusations of plagiarism. We too weaken our standards when we split hairs and say….well maybe there was some systematic, inadvertent plagiarism, but no misrepresentation of research findings. These are two different things. Plagiarism can appear in any article without misrepresentation of research findings. It is still plagiarism, still sloppy, careless, and dismissive of scholarly standards…not what we want the public to associate with academic products.
I have participated in research ethics reviews of doctoral students and colleagues to determine violations of ethical standards. We were keenly aware of the difference between inadvertent, isolated cases of plagiarism (which seldom warrant an ethics review), and a pattern of systematic carelessness. In today’s academic institutions, buffeted by economic perils, enrollment challenges, and now rising political wars, we cannot ignore — or diminish — our vulnerabilities. We must take this seriously and as a matter of integrity for academics, administrators, and students whom we invest in and cultivate as the next generation of venerable scholars.
The opposite of defensiveness is to admit that the basic standards of scholarship may be eroding from within, and to offer a full-throated defense of our academic standards. Academia has enjoyed a considerable margin of error for research conduct over the past few decades, as recent national reports have documented widespread misconduct in many fields. The contextual forces raised in your article are, of course, of greatest importance for our academic institutions, but our best defense against threats to academic freedom and our institutions remains our integrity and commitment to ethical behavior. Perhaps not every academic needs to scrutinize everything written in the past, but they might want to renew a commitment to ensuring that their future work is beyond reproach. Instilling habits of careful scholarship — without ethical “holidays” — is essential for our young scholars in the pipeline.
Perhaps a call for a plagiarism audit of all faculty members is far-fetched, but our institutions are in an era of hyper-scrutiny, and it is our turn. In the airline industry a single defect in the fuselage can ground 100 planes. In politics, a single fumbled question echoes in the media and can derail a campaign. In the health-care industry, laxity in standards of care can shut down a clinic. It is up to us to avoid the treacherous arguments that may be closing in — if one university is producing unreliable science, then down with them all!
Carol A. Kochhar-Bryant
Professor Emeritus
George Washington University
Residing in Reston, Va.
