Is plagiarism stealing? It didn’t use to be, but it is now, mostly
Plagiarism, a sin generally associated with underperforming undergraduates, has suddenly hit the academic elite, beginning with Claudine Gay, then the president of Harvard University.
She had copied sentences and phrasings in her dissertation and published articles without the requisite attribution. As soon as conservative billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman toppled her on these grounds, Business Insider reported that his starchitect wife, Neri Oxman, lifted entire passages in her dissertation from Wikipedia.
People have been attempting to expose plagiarists — often to serve their larger agenda — for centuries. For all the righteous indignation, the accusation rarely amounts to much. History helps explain why.
A matter for laughter
In antiquity, writers and playwrights pillaged each other’s prose but rarely paid a price. Literary critic and novelist Thomas Mallon notes that literary theft “was more a matter for laughter than litigation” in the classical era.
Absent the mass circulation of written work, much less profit from doing so, any attempt at plagiarism could be dismissed as confirmation of the adage that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”
Then came the invention of the printing press. Anyone struggling to comeup with their own words now had far greater access to other people’s. Talk about temptation. Not coincidentally, a growing number of individuals then began to think of themselves as writers with a financial stake in their creations.
Suddenly, if someone else took your words, it was tantamount to theft — except that it was next to impossible to prosecute someone for it.
Mallon locates the rise of concerns over plagiarism to the literary scene of Elizabethan London. In fact, it was during this era that playwright Ben Jonson, casting about for a way to describe literary theft, came up with a forerunner of the modern word plagiarism: plagiary, derived from the Latin word meaning “kidnapper.”
The era’s writers began accusing each other of stealing each other’s work or the writings of dead authors. Shakespeare himself stood accused, though his borrowings generally weren’t of the cut-and-paste variety but rather pilfered plots and other unacknowledged sources of inspiration.
Plenty of others, though, borrowed prose word for word, and critics began flagging some of these violations. In 1687, English biographer Gerard Langbaine wrote, “I cannot but esteem them as the worst of plagiaries, who steal from the writings of those of our own Nation.”
Writing becomes property
Such sentiments eventually translated into the concept of “literary property,” paving the way for the first national copyright laws. Yet these were best suited to prosecuting individuals who reprinted entire books without permission, not those who only lifted paragraphs.
The literature of the Romantic Era, which valorized artistic originality, made plagiarism increasingly disreputable. This is not to say that writers acted any better than their forebears.
ConsiderSamuel Taylor Coleridge. He was one of the giants of the Romantic Movement and someone who habitually —and usually unjustly — accused others ofplagiarism, often to settle scores.
Yet Coleridge was himself a serial plagiarist, as Thomas De Quincey revealed in a hit job published after Coleridge’s death. As Mallon notes, De Quincey was, appropriately enough, eventually exposed as an even more enthusiastic kidnapperof other writers’ words.
It became an entirely different problem in higher education despite the relative absence of a profit motive. This was a function of the fact that the modern university, modeled on Germanic tradition, puts a premium on acknowledging existing scholarship via quotation and citation, particularly via the footnote. (This seems like a good place to tout Anthony Grafton’s book “The Footnote: A Curious History.”).
By the 20th century, plagiarism (formerly a literary transgression) became increasingly common in academia as well, as scholars helped themselves to other people’s prose without the requisite acknowledgments.
Technological changes after the printing press continued to make swiping someone else’s work even easier. The advent of word processing programs, when combined with the sudden availability of published work on the internet, contributed to the growing willingness of students and faculty to commit the sin of plagiarism.
The usual punishment
But a sin is not necessarily a crime. As Peter Hoffer has noted, plagiarism in the historical profession generally remains, as it does elsewhere in the academy, an “ethical matter, not a legal one.” Consequently, offenders are typically tried in the court of public opinion, even if they face scrutiny by professional bodies as well.
Maybe because the incidence of plagiarism has remained steady, if not grown, even the final fate of those accused of it is also familiar: embarrassment and shame, perhaps, but few of them find themselves permanently ostracized.
Skeptical? Just ask successful borrowers like Doris Kearns Goodwin, Fareed Zakaria, Jane Goodall, and last but not least, Joe Biden.