An idea is easier than explaining it
For many, plagiarizing ideas is far worse than plagiarizing words. It’s not
The best writing advice I ever got came from the late great British poet Geoffrey Hill. In a grad seminar I took with him at Boston University in the mid-aughts, he said a sentence I repeat to every composition student I’ve ever taught:
A good idea poorly expressed is not a good idea.
Hill’s dictum is roughly the inverse of Alexander Pope’s definition of “wit” in his “Essay on Criticism”: “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d.” Both Hill and Pope are getting at a vital insight not only for writers but for anyone involved in intellectual life: Lots of people have good ideas, but few are able to communicate them well. And it’s the ability to convincingly express a good idea that’s very frequently the hard part.
I keep thinking about Professor Hill’s advice as I read coverage of the plagiarism scandals engulfing (now former) Harvard President Claudine Gay and one-time MIT Professor Neri Oxman, the wife of one of Gay’s chief antagonists, Bill Ackman. Because for so many covering the story, there are two types of plagiarism: stealing ideas and stealing words. And the latter, they claim, is just not that bad.
We get perhaps the clearest example in an early story from the New York Times. The piece cites Gay’s Harvard colleague, Steven Levitsky, who says that the plagiarized passages in her scholarship “appeared to occur in sections of the papers dealing not with Gay’s core claims.” The implication is clear: If Gay’s “core claims” are intact, then maybe it’s not that big a deal. CNN’s Matt Egan is almost comically blunter, downplaying Gay’s actions by saying that she has “not been accused of stealing anyone’s ideas.”
Oxman’s “ideas” seem similarly her own; it’s only phrasing that she purloined — though perhaps more embarrassingly from Wikipedia. But her billionaire husband is unmoved by Business Insider reports about his spouse’s intellectual thievery; according to the Guardian, he reportedly “took issue with the outlet’s definition of the term plagiarism.” (Ackman went on to threaten legal action against Business Insider even though an internal review confirmed the publication’s reporting and, more tellingly, Oxman apologized for the plagiarism.)
In an excellent recent piece in the Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper is having none of it, dismissing efforts to downplay or normalize such patterns, which one recent study suggests are remarkably common. (According to another such paper, 2% of scientists admit to plagiarizing while 30% say they witnessed others doing so.) Harper worries that some of Gay’s defenders have tricked themselves into believing that “lifting entire paragraphs of another scholar’s work, nearly word for word, without quotation or citation, isn’t plagiarism.” Yet Harper too suggests that the difference between stealing ideas and stealing words is “an important and mitigating distinction.” And, frankly, I’m just not sure that it always is.
In my experience, coming up with an original idea is the easier job. Finding the words to communicate it effectively, in ways that will pass muster with other scholars and find an audience beyond them, is the much more demanding task. The central argument for my second book came to me in an afternoon. But it took me fully three years after that to write it out and another three beyond that to see it to press. In honesty, if I had a nickel for every very smart person in academia who can’t get their brilliant insights onto the page, I’d have, well, a lot of nickels.
Or we could put it another way. Shakespeare isn’t Shakespeare because he came up with the idea of a Danish prince conspiring to kill his murderous father-in-law. Shakespeare is Shakespeare because he took that idea and turned it into “Hamlet.” In sum, the play’s the thing — not the plot. And scholars believe that the Bard likely borrowed the story of “Hamlet” from his rough contemporary, Thomas Kyd, whose version ran on the London stage a couple of decades earlier.
More recent examples abound. Take my Boston University colleague Ibram Kendi. Professor Kendi didn’t invent the concept of antiracism, which had been in circulation for decades. He just found a vocabulary for communicating it that lit the world on fire and changed the ways we all think about systemic oppression.
All of this is not to say that there aren’t truly nuanced or novel arguments, innovative concepts whose theft would be a substantial sin. Gay’s research serves as a prime example. As she explains in a recent New York Times op-ed, her path-breaking work demonstrates how the success of officeholders from marginalized groups lights a path to power for members of other minoritized communities. The ideas behind her work are original and powerful, and it would be a grave misstep were another scholar to pass them off as their own. And yet we go wrong if we see a pilfered paragraph by contrast as a petty crime that we might ignore.
If the stories of Gay and Oxman have anything to teach us, it’s that we overlook them at our peril.