Plagiarism: will the circle be unbroken?

Plagiarism. The Claudine Gay/Harvard debacle has once again raised the issue. Joe Biden’s single plagiarism scuttled an early presidential run, but it took at least 50 separate instances to remove Gay from the Harvard presidency, though she has a near-million-dollar professorship to cushion her fall. How does someone go from a college freshman to the Presidency of Harvard on a steady writing diet of plagiarism?

It’s an issue with which I constantly struggled while teaching English. It’s caused largely by laziness, which includes an unwillingness to expend the intellectual wattage necessary to learn what plagiarism is and isn’t. Certainly, a casual relationship with morality, specifically honesty and personal integrity, is involved. Academic laziness manifests as not being willing to do any actual work, which often leads to comical plagiarism attempts, like the young man who copied a classmate’s research paper, which included a passage about the latter’s mother. The budding plagiarist didn’t bother to change her name. 

It didn’t matter how many times I explained plagiarism, how brilliantly I phrased it in terms a gerbil could understand, some portion of student writing was inevitably, obviously, plagiarized. I even told them I didn’t have to read a paper to detect plagiarism. I could smell it. That wasn’t far from the truth.

Image: Dandarmkd. Wikimedia Commons.org. CCA-SA4.0International.

Perhaps the biggest contributor, however, is so simple it’s often overlooked: writing is hard. To do it well, even for the best writers, takes time and effort, not only in thinking about what to write, but in extensive proofreading and editing over time. Trying to proofread immediately after finishing a piece is useless. The brain sees what the writer intended to write. The only cure is to put time, and mental focus, between finishing and completing a piece of writing, and the longer and more complex the piece the more vital the effort.

Unfortunately, that takes time and effort too. It’s been said authors never really finish a work. They eventually abandon it in despair. At some point, every piece must be finished, the writer must move on to something else, despairing in the knowledge it’s not as good as it could be—nothing is ever as good as it could be—but there’s no choice. It took Mark Twain seven years to complete Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I’ve always thought the ending clumsy and unsatisfying, and suspect Twain did too. Abandonment in despair.

But that’s talking about serious writers. The horrible truth is most people aren’t good writers. They may have other gifts, just not the genetic endowment to write well. I always told my students I could not make them great writers—they’re born, not made—but if they were willing to work hard, I could help them become better writers. Most didn’t. Who wants to spend a great deal of time and energy on something they know they’re never going to do well?  Who, but a driven writer, will do that?  Who has the need to do that?

Anyone seeking a college professorship, that’s who. Believe me when I say most of them aren’t good writers either, but they live in a “publish or perish” world, a world that demands original research and writing, and plenty of it. Until recently, that is.

Claudine Gays work in seriously dumbed down academic environments. The requirement for publication is still there, but merit vanished long ago, replaced by Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and Critical Race Theory (CRT). “Scholars” laboring in those played out fields aren’t plowing new ground, but rephrasing and retreading ancient racism and lazy rhetoric. Legitimate academic jargon is bad enough. “Studies” jargon is hyperbolic, angry and all but incomprehensible.

Imagine a doctoral candidate steeped for eight or so years in oppression/oppressor orthodoxy. All they’ve read, discussed, and written (little of that) is jargon-filled blather.  That doesn’t produce hard-working, original, thinkers and writers. Even if they are sort of honest, everything they’ve ever read—not much—looks and sounds exactly alike, and they’re lazy anyway, so why not filch a paragraph here, a page there, maybe rearranging a bit of word order or punctuation. No, strike that. They don’t do punctuation; it’s racist.

They hand in their dissertation. Are their DEI/CRT professors going to read it? Perhaps detect plagiarism? Unlikely. That kind of “scholarship” is as incomprehensible to them as it is to normal people. If they read it and can’t understand it, they have to admit their teaching sucks, or perhaps they’re not as smart as their student. They also have to admit their discipline is fraudulent. So they praise the writing, the insight, and brilliance of the candidate and another Claudine Gay is awarded a doctorate. The circle remains unbroken.

Author’s note: I abandoned this in despair.

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.