While I was blogging about something of little moment yesterday, Claudine Gay was resigning from her position as President of Harvard. I confess I hadn’t been paying very close attention, what with Christmas and other kinds of festive occasions taking up my thoughts, and so had to catch up on the latest.
There were so many great pieces, but I’d have to say that my favorite of all the voluminous content I consumed on this topic (chiefly as a means of avoiding Jeffrey Epstein news) was this reporter trying to explain what plagiarism is. The video is below, but here is his delicately tossed salad of words:
We should note that Claudine Gay has not been accused of stealing anyone's ideas in any of her writings. She has been accused of sort of more like copying other people’s writings without attribution. So it's been more sloppy attribution than stealing anyone's ideas.
Oh, I see. Taking someone else’s words is not the same as taking someone else’s ideas. It’s not theft, really, it’s just a sort of “copying” “without attribution.” Said one excessively mean Tweeter, it can’t be plagiarism because there weren’t any “ideas.” Seriously, the whole thread is so fun. And here is the whole video if you haven’t already seen it:
And then, of course, this morning the AP came out with this delightful take:
Plagiarism charges downed Harvard’s president. A conservative attack helped to fan the outrage.
This bit of the article shocked me a little:
As the figureheads of their universities, presidents often face heightened scrutiny, and numerous leaders have been felled by plagiarism scandals. Stanford University’s president resigned last year amid findings that he manipulated scientific data in his research. A president of the University of South Carolina resigned in 2021 after he lifted parts of his speech at a graduation ceremony.
Shouldn’t people in public positions face “heightened scrutiny?” Isn’t that more of a feature than a bug? Or rather, I suppose, people like Claudine Gay are entitled to be presidents of august institutions, whether or not they can write books or articles using all their own ideas and then also going to the trouble to note and thank other people for their ideas. And, gosh, is it really that hard to write a graduation speech? Isn’t it curious how, when all of us have almost the whole world’s knowledge at our fingertips, we still can’t think anything clever, but just have to repeat other people’s thoughts? I’m happy to do this, as a mere blogger, but I would hope for better things of the person who organizes the education of my children, or other people’s children, or anyone really.
This bit is also great:
In highly specialized fields, scholars often use similar language to describe the same concepts, said Davarian Baldwin, a historian at Trinity College who writes about race and higher education. Gay clearly made mistakes, he said, but with the spread of software designed to detect plagiarism, it wouldn’t be hard to find similar overlap in works by other presidents and professors. The tool becomes dangerous, he added, when it “falls into the hands of those who argue that academia in general is a cesspool of incompetence and bad actors.”
I change my mind! The word for 2024 is going to be Cesspool. If you feel up to it, you can use the whole line—“cesspool of incompetence and bad actors.” Look, I get it, it’s hard to fit everything into the day. The self-care, the commute, the doom-scrolling. When it comes time to face one’s paid occupation, sometimes it’s just too hard to do the deep work in front of you. Too bad there is all this technology now that lets those wicked right-wing activists catch you out.
As I said a few weeks ago, it’s easier to be mad at these university presidents than contemplate the horrors of October 7th, let alone what is still happening to Israeli hostages. I prefer to seize this brilliant opportunity to point out that people are not good, or, to say it another way, there is no one who does good, not even one.
You have to be a fool—or Kevin M. Young—to miss the import of the mash-up between Psalm 14 and Romans 3. God, who is the measure and definition of goodness, casts his omniscient eye over the vast array of people whom he has made, looking for even one of them who will do good. He looks for anyone who will seek after him. He goes to the heights and the depths to know the measure and thoughts of every human heart. He squints his eyes. He gives it time. He considers each generation of people. But in every case, the verdict is clear and—for anyone honest enough to see it—incontrovertible. All have turned aside; together they have been worthless; no one does good, not even one…see, I could have used “quotation marks” there but we don’t have to do that, because to properly attribute the words of Paul to Paul or God to God would just make me a tool of the right.
Personally, I find it an immense relief to constantly be able to acknowledge how bad people are. I don’t have to be a good person to see your badness. I can be a bad person myself and still be able to say that plagiarism is wrong and murder is wrong and terrorism is wrong and squandering God’s creation is wrong. It is bad to nurse bitter grudges. It is bad not to forgive other people. It is bad to be ungrateful. It is bad (sort of) to yell at your kids too much. It is really bad to think so highly of yourself that you cling to your job for three weeks even though the entire world is totally laughing at you. It’s also bad to not be able to report on this momentous occasion without blaming Harvard’s troubles on “right-wing activists.” Oh CNN Reporter of my heart, they did this to themselves. They are bad and so are you.
I’m bad too, I guess, for indulging these wicked feelings of schadenfreude. How come, incidentally, I can spell schadenfreude without difficulty, but not plagiarism? What does that say about me? …. Don’t answer that.
So anyway, have a nice day!
For one who has published articles in academic journals, creating something new to be said, laboring to attribute ideas and words to their sources, writing and rewriting, and finding friendly critics and grammar Nazis to contest one's now cherished words and concepts, and listening to said critics, then submitting a polished and repolished manuscript to an editor then to peer-reviewers - all without pay, hours invested with the hope of simply being published. Then, to discover that someone lifts one's words without attribution is simply stealing one's life, one's time, one's labor, one's blood, sweat and...
Schadenfreude--bless those Germans with their harshly perfect portmanteaux!--is one of my besetting sins!