Chris Rufo Is Exploiting The Fact That Academic Plagiarism Norms Are Absurd
from the fix-plagiarism-by-fixing-the-norms dept
Let’s be honest, Christopher Rufo is the ratfucking king. While I don’t agree with him about anything, when it comes to dirty tricks, nobody does it half as good as him, he’s the best. Whenever Rufo releases a new report, the “woke” tremble, and pray he’s targeting someone else.
Rufo’s current crusade is focused on academic plagiarism. About a year ago, he started accusing prominent progressive academics – mostly Black women – of plagiarizing parts of their scholarship. His method was brilliantly simple, essentially just comparing the academic’s work to their sources and highlighting the similarities. Lo and behold, a lot of academics appear to copy banal observations and statements of fact without using quotation marks or attributing them to a source.
Anyway, Rufo gets results. His report accusing Harvard President Claudine Gay of plagiarizing parts of her 1998 dissertation, among other works, helped precipitate her resignation. And his recent report accusing Vice President Kamala Harris of plagiarizing parts of her book 2009 Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer from press releases and Wikipedia, among other sources, was immediately picked up by the New York Times.
The genius of Rufo’s grift is that he’s right, at least according to his targets and their supporters. Academics universally define plagiarism as copying words or ideas without proper attribution, and they’ve gradually convinced just about everyone else to accept their definition, including journalists. What’s more, they’ve made plagiarism the academy’s only capital crime, punishable by expulsion or worse. Just ask any student hauled into the academic star chamber called an “honor council.”
The only problem is that academics and journalists alike are massive hypocrites, who enforce their own plagiarism norms against themselves almost entirely in the breach, and even then only reluctantly. When students plagiarize, there’s no excuse, but somehow when academics plagiarize there are always mitigating factors, even though you’d think academics are far better situated to avoid plagiarism than their students.
I’ll be blunt. The copying Rufo identified is absolutely plagiarism, as academics and journalists define it. Students are punished on the regular for doing exactly the same thing. And if it’s wrong for students, it has to be wrong for their professors as well. The wrongness of copying without attribution can’t depend on who’s doing the copying.
But why is plagiarism wrong?
Gay, Harris, and the other academics targeted by Rufo copied expressions notable only for their banality. If that’s plagiarism, then plagiarism is a joke. Press releases and Wikipedia were created to be copied. Nobody cares about attribution, because it just doesn’t matter. In fact, there’s no reason to attribute most of the facts and ideas used in a scholarly work, unless attribution will help the reader. And that goes for professors and students alike. No one should suffer for violating pointless plagiarism norms.
Unfortunately, just about everyone is deeply invested in the moral legitimacy of plagiarism norms, especially academics and journalists. It’s incredibly hard for people to question the moral justification of plagiarism norms, let alone whether they should be enforced. Everyone just assumes that plagiarism is wrong, so plagiarists should be punished.
Give me a break. All of the plagiarism Rufo identifies is remarkable only for its banality. For years, no one noticed the copying, because no one cared about it. And they were right not to care, because it didn’t matter. We should just extend the same grace to students, where it matters even less. A student copied, so what? If they copied well, they learned a skill academics and others use all the time. And if they copied poorly, their grade will reflect it. No need for further punishment.
Rufo’s brand of fugazi is brilliant, because academics are incapable of seeing their own bullshit, let alone seeing through it. When you come for the king, you’d better not miss. Unfortunately, Rufo’s academic opponents couldn’t hit a barn door. If they want to beat Rufo’s plagiarism charges, they have to embrace them.
The obvious solution is to tell scholars – and everyone else! – to provide quotations and citations only when they’re actually helpful to readers. If academics want to win the war with Rufo, they’ll have to abandon plagiarism norms, in order to save them.
Brian L. Frye is the Spears-Gilbert Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky.
Filed Under: chris rufo, citations, claudine gay, copying, kamala harris, plagiarism, politics, ratfucking
Comments on “Chris Rufo Is Exploiting The Fact That Academic Plagiarism Norms Are Absurd”
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Wow, didn’t expect to read on TD a piece noting how awesome Rufo is and how disgusting and loathsome most academics are! 😀
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I didn’t expect to be abducted by aliens either, but that also didn’t happen, so I didn’t otherwise think it was relevant to mention.
I once had to write a one page paper because I had plagiarized myself.
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Rewrite
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Wait, what? You had to rewrite a paper because you failed to give yourself credit for something, making others falsely believe you had written something you wrote? 🤦♂️
This could easily be avoided if academics never read anything and wrote their papers from an entirely new constructed language.
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What did I just read?
Did a crypto bro get access to write TD articles? Is this an early April Fools joke? What the hell did I just read? It has real “do you even lift bro” vibes but for plagiarism. Or like a Libertarians assertions about age of consent laws. Just cringe all around.
I’m curious if the Author feels the same way when practicing law. Only provide documentation when they think it’s helpful to a judge, not because those are the rules. I’m sure judges will love dealing with non-attributable junk because the lawyer decided it wasn’t worth sourcing.
Trying to make a broader point of plagiarism rules from a politically motivated hack is not the mind-expanding thing the author thinks it is. There’s no point to be made, no lessons to be learned. It’s trolling, plain and simple.
Re: RE: What did I just read?
I was joking but just looked this guy up and wouldn’t you know he’s a crypto bro shilling NFTs. Is there a “How to talk like a crypto bro” course they all take? They all sound the same FFS.
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It is hilarious that you think Brian is a “crypto bro.” He is not. He’s a law professor who uses trolling as a form of making a point about absurd things, and that includes his various adventures in crypto/NFT stuff.
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so he’s a cryptobro
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Sure, the same way Groucho is a Marxist.
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There’s a difference here, and it should be obvious, you yourself pointed it out:
Plagiarism is a social construct, whereas courts (the legal system) have laid out rules that submissions (documentation) must be thorough, and well sourced. In fact, without that quoting of sources, there’d be no such thing as ‘precedent’, which as I see it, would make a helluva mess of the entire legal system.
There are no such rules for society to “obey” in re plagiarism. It’s your choice as to whether that’s a good or bad thing. But more to the point, Mr. Frye was rather baldly stating stating that what’s good for the gander should also be good for the goose, i.e. there should not be a “rules for thee, but not for me” attitude toward plagiarism. I got his message, why didn’t you?
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Obviously no one can be expected to actually read such a poorly-sourced blog post!
/s
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A while back, the same author wrote a similarly insane post on Techdirt arguing that plagiarism is Good, Actually.
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Oh, it’s that guy. That explains a lot, then.
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There’s a critical difference between the Law and Academia.
Academia cares mostly about how much of your work is original, you can make write a paper that reaches mindbogglingly wrong conclusions, and they’ll won’t care as much about that as long as its your own work.
The Law cares more about how good your actual argument is, not so much about not who came up with it.
— Tom Lehrer, Lobachevsky
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Not many of us folks old enough to remember Tom…
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You just made me very, very sad 🙁
I’m sorry, Brian, but you used the word “The” in your article, therefore you’re plagiarizing the billion other people who used that word before you.
Speaking totally anecdotally, this idea that people are rampantly plagiarizing was not my experience in academia. Might vary based on field etc
That said:
It’s fine to have different standards for reasons like pedagogy. A common example is “self plagiarism”.
No one gives a shit if you “copied” yourself, but it can matter in terms of learning. If you simply resubmit an essay, you’re not actually engaging in the learning process they’re trying to teach you (one can argue you did it in the past, but that may have been focused on different issues/techniques; also, reps matter, etc)
It’s not any different than say, forcing an exam with no calculator, or being closed book. The restriction exists for testing/learning reasons, not because you won’t have access to a calculator in real life. Or skipping showing your work, etc.
Academia could arguably be better at communicating the nuance
There’s an easier solution, which is to stop platforming a ratfucker who you know is operating in bad faith. You really don’t have to hand it to him.
The second is to actually live up to the standard you’re claiming. You shouldn’t be vulnerable to this sort of ratfucking to begin with.
I haven’t looked into the Harris bullshit, but of the few examples of seen from Gay’s work, she definitely crossed the line. This isn’t just hypocrisy, she did actually fuck up, and it would be acknowledged as a fuck up.
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Comment posted early (sorry if the above is a bit rambly, I wasn’t finished editing it. Whatever, it got the gist across), but
Copying Wikipedia absolutely would not be considered acceptable, and I would absolutely ding a colleague for doing so.
Or no one checked. Part of why plagiarism is treated so harshly is because it’s not physically possible to fact check every statement, and it therefore impacts trust.
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Not sure what your argument is, but “plagiarism is bad” doesn’t really cut it, sorry.
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FTFY. YW. 😝
I spent four years in university learning the difference between copying and plagiarizing.
Short answer: attribution. But that’s the TL;DR version.
It’s kind of like Kleenex: if the concept being written is common knowledge, even if just in the circles you’re writing for, then you don’t need to cite sources. Citing sources is for novel content or logic or connections that you’d be passing off as your own that actually come from someone else — in other words, you’re attempting to get academic credit for someone else’s work.
Finding that a public statement or Wikipedia article lines up with an uncited statement in a paper or book isn’t usually plagiarism — it’s just a “known thing” that’s stated by multiple people in multiple places (or, sometimes, the same person in multiple places).
That’s part of the reason why you’re NOT supposed to cite Wikipedia, because any content in Wikipedia is supposed to just be a rephrasing of content gathered from somewhere else; there’s not supposed to be original thinking or writing in Wikipedia articles. So if it’s common knowledge for Wikipedia, it’s common knowledge wherever else it’s written too.
Of course, this ignores papers that are written for one audience and then shared in other circles where the “common knowledge” isn’t so common — and it ignores highschool students who are being asked to write something Wikipedia-like as an exercise in writing just copy/pasting a Wikipedia article and changing a few words.
But Brian Frye’s base assumption in this piece is just as wrong as Christopher Rufo’s. Just because something is repeated without citing doesn’t make it plagiarized unless you’re in elementary school.
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It’s cool that you came up with your own definition of plagiarism.
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So if I say that stating the sky is blue without citing the cave dweller (or whoever) who first came up with that observation isn’t plagiarism, I’m redefining plagiarism? How are things over there in Fantasyland?
Amen
It’s always such a pleasant surprise to see people arguing this point on TD. Reminds me of how copying news articles used to be the norm. We have to go back!
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I’m a scissors & glue man myself. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4169818
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Loving the tacit admission that Chris Rufo is entirely correct in his plagiarism accusations but deserves condemnation because he’s targeting the “wrong” people. Entire paragraphs using the work of other scholars with zero attribution is not “banal observations.”
For the record, I do kind of agree with the rest of Brian’s article. The problem with plagiarism as it stands now is that the punishment is so harsh that they “over-cite” in their papers, which makes for a cumbersome reading experience. Whenever students are writing a paper they’re constantly panicking that whatever solution the university uses for plagiarism detection won’t attempt to ruin their lives. It can make essay writing a genuinely insanely stressful experience when it should be a time of critical analysis that benefits the student.
Academics not being able to see in front of their own noses is a time-honored tradition of academia. I would say a good chunk of the academics I’ve worked with have had arrogance that borders on and sometimes even exceeds narcissism. They can afford to live completely divorced from reality because their entire career is convincing universities to give them funding for their seven year underwater basket weaving research. Even if their research is for some kind of actual public benefit, they generally conduct it with the end goal of pleasing other academics in journals. It’s the world’s biggest circlejerk.
Fundamentally, journalism and academia share a similar weakness: an obsession with pedantry and a regrettably frequent willingness to cravenly exploit minor success for future noteriaty. It probably has something to do with the desire to feed themselves and retain the possibility of surviving in the US medical system.
Journalists and researchers seem to occupy a space, shared with athletes, where the merely mundae make sub human income, while the notable can be wildly rewarded, so it’s absolutely no surprise there’s an impressive volume of… grifted….work produced, especially considering the emphasis on ethics both professions seem to espouse.
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word for word
they copied word for word, and made it look like those were their words. that is plagiarism. this article sounds like making excuses for cheaters.
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So no problem with Musk and his claims of all his accomplishments achieved by other people.
Glad to know we won’t be reading that whining here anymore
Same goes for majority of commenters here who have no problem with plagiarizing apparently
“They weren’t plagiarizing, they just neglected to cite their source” MM
Academia and Scholarship
When I was going up for a promotion, I had a professor who didn’t like that I was young and already achieving his same rank. He reviewed my materials and claimed that I had self plagiarized. He was pointing to a study I had published and then the follow-up to that study (i.e., a part 2). Inevitably, I referenced the first study and relied on the work I had done previously to extend it for the new study. He could see that my literature review, in parts, relied on the exact same sources. New literature didn’t exist between the month I submitted one paper and when I submitted paper 2. The “essence” of what I published was what I found and reported, and that was completely new. The review committee agreed with me. Far too often, we use plagiarism as a gotcha. I think the author here gets it partly right in that sense, but I don’t think we should abandon our efforts to detect and punish plagiarism. The banal stuff should not be punished the same way as plagiarizing the essence. Slap on the wrist versus serious punishment. We have yet to figure out how to differentiate these things, though.
Terrible take by Techdirt
I’ve worked in academia for years, and have read TD for most of them. This is the worst take I’ve ever read here by a very wide margin.
“It’s okay not to cite your sources” is an idiotic stance. Anyone who’s been to grad school should be extremely familiar with the practice of citing everything. That includes statements that, outside of academia, would seem to just be common knowledge or common sense.
You cite EVERYTHING that’s not an original thought or you’re a plagiarist. People who fail to do so have no business being in academia, and it’s disgraceful that the author here has decided that plagiarism is suddenly okay just because the person calling it out is an undeniable asshole.
I might as well add that citing any and all sources for any and all facts in a paper isn’t just some random tradition that exists just for fun. It’s a mark of academic rigor, and not doing it vastly increases the chances of outright academic fraud.
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On some of this stuff the source IS cited; it’s just that parts are quoted verbatim without quote marks. I think the seriousness of that depends on the quantity.
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Which means everyone is a plagiarist.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
– Cardinal Richelieu
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It’s a shame you didn’t take proper credit for this non-argument.
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Oh, wow. You’re so invested in the crappy article you wrote you’re attacking people who argue substantively against any part of it by responding with tu quoque fallacies. Nice trollin’.
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Yeah I have no idea how Brian thinks this will come across. It reads like cope by someone who got kicked out of grad school for plagiarizing and is now trying to argue that stealing the work of others is totally ok as long as it’s just a little bit.
Rufo’s only crime was making it so that Claudine Gay and others he correctly accused of plagiarism were held to the same standards as their students. Trying to imply it was about race is dumb. We should not coddle minorities simply because they are non-white.
On a website with authors that are constantly citing their sources, Brian’s article feels like an uncharacteristic contradiction. They really need to get better guest columnists because the two I’ve seen this month have been pretty bad at arguing a coherent point.
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FYI, the wife of the guy who cost Gay her livelihood herself committed plagiarism, so your racist hero is a hypocrite. How do you like them apples?
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I don’t read the Guardian on principle.
It is possible for Claudine Gay to have plagiarized her doctoral defense and other academic articles she wrote. It is also possible that the wife of Rufo also plagiarized. Both of these things can be true. Trying to say that something is less bad because an unrelated thing happened is intellectually dishonest. I don’t know why American liberals assume you’re on the same wavelength as they are 24/7 but I don’t actually know who Chris Rufo is, I’m speaking based on my experience actually working in academia.
Also, Stephen, please stop commenting as signed out when you reply to an older comment of mine. It’s just weird.
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Clearly, since the wife I spoke about was Neri Oxman, who is married to Bill Ackman, not Christopher Rufo, as you could have found out were you not so ignorant. Also, I never even attempted to make any case that Claudine Gay’s alleged plagiarism was better or worse than Oxman’s plagiarism, I only stated that it was hyocritical of Ackman to attack Gay on that basis when his own wife was guilty of the same academic offense. Finally, I am not Stephen, but it is certainly interesting to discover that he lives in your head without paying any rent for the privilege.
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I apologize that my not reading tabloid rags upsets you so.
His wife is her own distinct person that has no relation to the actual facts at hand. Again, it is possible for two things to be true at once without diminishing each other.
My apologies. All American liberals talk the same and have the same few insults and talking points they hash out over and over so it’s easy to get you all confused.
Your every accusation is a confession, you heckin’ chud.
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It’s important to cite original statements and especially original research and data. Original thoughts are something entirely different. If you internalize the thoughts of another, then those thoughts are your own. Very little of what anyone thinks is original. We learn to speak by creating variations on the sentences we’ve heard before.
This is directed more at Sean’s comment (above), but I wanted to make it a general assertion for all to read.
It happens that we’re speaking to the philosophy of earning credit for original expression versus taking undeserved credit for someone else’s expression. My particular thoughts on that are in line with Issac Newton – “If I see further than others, it is that I stand on the shoulders of giants.” (And Newton cribbed it from Bernard of Chartres who said it more than 400 years prior!) We all build from known knowledge, almighty few of us can conjure up something entirely off the charts in terms of ‘new’. For the most part, the proper word is ‘improved’. (Cell phones are good example here.) Where we truly get ‘new’ is in the heretofore unseen combination of various pieces of everyday life.
But the bottom line is this; we’re squabbling over who said what first. A good example would be Murphy’s Law (and the ensuing corollaries). No one knows who Murphy was, nor when he was alleged to have formulated his primary law, but we all quote it at will.
And ironically, this business of giving credit for a discovery to the wrong person is named “Stigler’s Law of Eponymy”. That law states the very thing I’ve just said – the wrong person is granted the status of discoverer of something when it fact he/she was not such. Stigler himself recognized that he was also subject to this very fact, and did a fair amount of research on prior recognition of this condition. And still his name was attached. Go figure.
Re: if there is any way to assemble them wrong
Ed Murphy was an engineer who was concerned that things which could be assembled incorrectly in the field probably would be so assembled. He urged other engineers to design components which could not be mistakenly interchanged.
Evidently [somebody](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_A._Murphy_Jr._ knows who he was. Wikipedia does not always tell us who that was.
re: Terrible take....
You’ve missed the forest for looking at all of the trees. It was stated above that the point of the article was the absurd double standard to which students versus academics are held, vis-a-vis plagerism. The fact that the example was centered on higher education was not the critical juncture, that was only an example. The real problem is that old bug-a-boo, “Laws for thee, but not for me.”
Rufo is correct to point that out, it’s a thorn in the paw of society that prides itself on equality. Frye’s problem is not that Rufo is somehow exploiting that problem, it’s that Rufo is doing so in a rather impolite manner. I’ll agree with that assessment.