How plagiarism became the latest weapon in the culture wars.
Plagiarism accusations are being wielded like weapons right now — and the multi-headed plagiarism controversy involving Claudine Gay, Bill Ackman and his wife, and Business Insider is a particularly bizarre one.
It began with Gay, who stepped down from her position as Harvard’s president, ostensibly because critics found instances of (real) plagiarism in her work, but really because people didn’t like her congressional testimony on antisemitism at Harvard. Shortly thereafter, Business Insider published accusations of plagiarism against designer and former MIT professor Neri Oxman. Oxman is married to Bill Ackman, a major Harvard donor who vocally participated in a public campaign led by right-wing activists against Gay. Ackman, in response, announced that he would be launching his own plagiarism investigation into every person currently serving on MIT’s faculty, administration, and board.
[Related: The culture war came for Claudine Gay — and isn’t done yet]
Very few people involved in the mudslinging seem to cherish longstanding commitments to academic integrity, but they are more than willing to act as though they care about plagiarism a lot — or, alternatively, that plagiarism is no big deal — when it serves their political purposes.
As this latest battle of our neverending culture wars rages, it’s worth taking a step back and looking at some basic principles. Why is plagiarism a big deal? What does it mean to argue about it?
What even is plagiarism, anyway?
Plagiarism has no straightforward and universal definition
We’ll start with a basic working definition.
“Plagiarism is the use of someone else’s words or ideas without giving them credit,” says Susan Blum, an anthropology professor at Notre Dame and the author of My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture. “But when you actually operationalize, that’s where this slipperiness comes in.”
Most people agree that it’s straightforwardly plagiarism to copy and paste someone else’s work whole cloth and slap your own name on it. Most people also agree that it’s plagiarism to copy someone else’s sentences or phrases, whether we’re talking about a middle school essay, a doctoral dissertation, or a newspaper article.
But what happens if those phrases are clichés? What if they’re definitions? What if they’re widely accepted facts phrased in commonly used language? What if we’re not even talking about words but about a specific chord progression or a bit of software coding? It gets tricky fast.
“We all think we are talking about the same thing when we say the word, ‘plagiarism,’ but that isn’t necessarily the case,” writes Sarah Eaton in a blog post. Eaton is an education professor at the University of Calgary who studies academic ethics. “From my research, I can say with certainty that there is no singular or universally accepted definition of plagiarism.”
One of the biggest variations we see in how people talk about plagiarism comes from the different conventions in different disciplines within academia. Blum says that after she published My Word in 2009, academics in quantitative fields like engineering would tell her that it was common in their areas for people to plagiarize large chunks of their literature reviews. In these disciplines, what counted was the originality of your own research, not the originality of your summary of other people’s research.
Blum found this shocking. If a substantial part of someone’s work is expository, she says, “I would expect them — especially a professor — to follow the professional forms of citation.”
The distinction Blum’s engineer is making between plagiarizing your literature review, which he says doesn’t matter, and plagiarizing your research, which he says does matter, echoes a larger distinction between how academics think about plagiarism and how many others, including journalists, think about plagiarism.
In journalism, it’s common for outlets to report on the same story, and they don’t always credit the outlet that broke it in the first place. “You can’t claim to own the news,” says Rod Hicks, the director of ethics and diversity at the Society of Professional Journalists.
Hicks argues that, for a journalist, it’s hard to prove a plagiarism claim that doesn’t involve someone using your language verbatim. For an academic, on the other hand, plagiarism claims are most serious when they involve stealing other people’s research and ideas. For what it’s worth, that’s not what either Gay or Oxman have been accused of. Everyone agrees their ideas and research were original — it’s their words that weren’t.
Meanwhile, there’s also a widespread understanding that if you do enough nonfiction writing, you’ll end up with some sort of error of attribution somewhere in your work. Ackman, who called plagiarism “very serious” when talking about the charges against Gay, seemed to change his mind after his wife was accused of similar plagiarism.
“It is a near certainty that authors will miss some quotation marks and fail to properly cite or provide attribution for another author on at least a modest percentage of the pages of their papers,” Ackman posted on X. “The plagiarism of today can be best understood by comparison to spelling mistakes prior to the advent of spellcheck.” (In Ackman’s analogy, the new spellchecks are the AI filters that can read for plagiarism.)
“I worked as a proofreader for a long time, and I have never seen something published without errors,” says Blum. “There’s almost always some kind of error, especially in the bibliography. If you’re going to reduce all of professional writing ethics to something mechanical like this, you are bound to turn up a lot of instances of error.”
The fact that a certain number of errors are unavoidable does not mean that all academics accept the level of plagiarism Gay committed as normal. In an article for the Atlantic, Ian Bogost ran his own dissertation through iThenticate, one of the new AI plagiarism filters. The filter at first told Bogost that 74 percent of his dissertation was copied — but after Bogost went through each match in his similarity score, he found that most of them were from iThenticate comparing his dissertation to a book he wrote based on his dissertation. Once Bogost had eliminated the bogus errors, his similarity score went down to zero.
“Does this imply that Gay’s record is unusual among professors? Not in and of itself,” Bogost wrote. “But it does at least refute the case that this was nothing more than academic jaywalking, or, in its purest straw-man form, that everybody does it.”
Bogost is gesturing at one of the arguments that emerged on the left after Gay was accused of plagiarism: an argument over whether what Gay did was incredibly common and hence no big deal, or whether it was straightforward plagiarism that should be taken very seriously.
The split went all the way down to the sources from whom Gay copied. One of them, Gay’s old lab mate D. Stephen Voss, compared Gay’s infraction to “driving fifty-seven miles per hour on a fifty-five-mile-per-hour highway”: technically against the rules, but nothing so egregious that it deserves outsized punishment. Meanwhile, Carol Swain, whose work was also copied by Gay, publicly called for Gay to be fired and announced she was considering her legal options. “I don’t know what to make of the scores of black and white professors who have either redefined plagiarism or stated that Gay’s misappropriation of their work is fine and dandy with them,” Swain posted on X.
The debate here speaks to the murky way that the accusations against Gay emerged. Gay certainly copied from other people. But Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist who brought the accusations to light, is the same guy who stirred up the crusade against critical race theory, and he openly did so as part of a larger conservative battle against elite colleges. Under those circumstances, for the left to join the calls for Gay to step down could feel like playing into the hands of the right. On the other hand — well, she does seem to have plagiarized, whether you consider this case to be a technicality or not. So how do you handle that?
If history is our guide, the academy should respond in earnest. Blum points to the case of historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who in 2002 was ousted from the Pulitzer board and from her position as a regular guest on PBS NewsHour over a plagiarism scandal. Goodwin blamed the problem on her habit of transcribing quotes out longhand from other sources and then getting confused when she assembled her notes into a book.
“She was found guilty of forgetting the quotation marks around quotations,” says Blum. “Because she was not following proper citation guidelines, she was punished. I mean, she’s rehabilitated, it’s not fatal. But it was tangible.”
New technology has made plagiarism accusations easier to come by than ever before
It seems almost accidental that Rufo and his right-wing allies went with plagiarism as their weapon of choice.
“Any activist campaign has three points of leverage: reputational, financial and political,” Rufo explained in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “For some institutions, one point of leverage is enough, but, for a powerful one such as Harvard, the ‘squeeze’ must work across multiple angles.” The plagiarism accusations were just leverage that happened to be particularly easy to acquire.
Plagiarism accusations are easier to come by now because of the rise of AI plagiarism detectors, which make it easy to comb through decades’ worth of text and compare it to a vast library of existing work. Ironically, those detectors themselves were built by what might be considered plagiarism. (“As far as I can tell, [AI is] just stealing,” Fran Lebowitz told Vox in October.)
We know for sure that Open AI’s ChatGPT was trained on a vast corpus that apparently includes pirated texts. Multiple high-profile authors have now sued Open AI for copyright infringement, including Jonathan Franzen and George R.R. Martin. In December, the New York Times sued OpenAI as well, arguing that ChatGPT is responsible for the “unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.”
This argument has persisted for a long time. In 2007, a group of students sued the early plagiarism detector Turnitin, alleging that it was plagiarizing their work. Turnitin, after all, works by archiving every student paper that’s uploaded to run through its filter, and then it charges schools for the use of that archive. The students argued — unsuccessfully — that Turnitin was making money from their intellectual property without their permission.
Blum says that every era has its own panic about how innovations are endangering intellectual property. “When I first started looking into plagiarism, there was a lot of stuff about how students didn’t have to go to the library anymore and copy things by hand. You could just scrape it off the internet and insert it,” she recalls. “There was a lot of discomfort about this new technology.”
Word processing and Google, a lethal combination, made language infinitely copyable and plagiarism incredibly easy to do, both intentionally and accidentally. Academia had to alter the way it thought about plagiarism to keep pace with the new tools. It developed new tools of its own, like Turnitin, and started spending more time on classroom conversations about how serious plagiarism is.
Today, one of the great innovations of AI’s large language models like ChatGPT is that they have made text into something not just copyable but synthesizable. The technology of the moment is manipulating texts in ways with which our current ethical frameworks are not built to reckon.
We don’t have precedents to tell us how to think about whether or not it is plagiarism to take every book ever written and use it to teach a neural network how to talk. We don’t have blueprints for dealing with what it means for someone to be able to go through your entire life’s work with a fine-tooth comb in a matter of days.
Our systems aren’t set up to deal with these problems, but these problems are also not going to go away. Our new tools are available to both good-faith and bad-faith actors, and that means we are at the beginning of a very messy new era indeed.
Beijing has branded incoming president Lai Ching-te a “troublemaker” for his pro-sovereignty stance.
Taiwan’s election results are in, and voters chose Lai Chiang-te in a three-way race as the candidate who best represented what they’re looking for in a leader — that is, the status quo.
Lai, the current vice president and head of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, declared victory Saturday with just over 40 percent of the vote, crowding out his opponents, Hou Yu-ih of the Kuomintang (KMT) and Ko Wen-je of the Taiwan People’s Party. It’s the first time in Taiwan’s democratic history that a political party has won a third term in office — and Lai has repeatedly told voters he’ll preserve outgoing President Tsai Ing-wen’s policies to preserve Taiwan’s democratic system and its sovereignty. While we don’t know what China’s response will be or when it will happen, there is expectation among some China experts that it will be “assertive”.
Though Taiwanese voters have a variety of concerns — including economic and social priorities — the primary question in a presidential election is how each candidate will manage relations with China, which claims Taiwan as its own. Though Lai is not specifically calling for independence from the mainland, both his predecessor’s stance and some of his past comments in favor of independence have gotten him branded a “troublemaker” by Beijing.
The Chinese Communist Party has harbored the hope that Taiwan, where the nationalist Kuomintang fled following the Chinese civil war in 1949 and 1950, would unify with the mainland and accept CCP rule. Lai’s win means that goal — at least by peaceful means, under the island’s own volition — is still quite far away, if it is to happen at all.
During Tsai’s eight-year tenure, Taiwan asserted its independence from the mainland by strengthening its relationship with the US, to the ire of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Though the US was already Taiwan’s main security partner, more symbolic acts like former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island in 2022 and Tsai’s trip to the United States last April infuriated Beijing, which in both instances performed military drills in Taiwan’s vicinity and enacted punitive diplomatic measures.
Though China has not yet responded to Lai’s win, Beijing has said that the election was illegitimate, given that it sees Taiwan as part of the mainland. China also attempted to spread disinformation in favor of Hou, the KMT candidate, which it sees as more deferential to the mainland.
Lai won with only 40 percent of the vote, and the DPP has lost its parliamentary majority, indicating that voters feel some measure of frustration, likely regarding social issues like the economy and high cost of living.
Still, “I think the main headline is continuity over change,” Andrew Scobell, a distinguished fellow with the China program at the US Institute of Peace, told Vox.
What Lai’s win means for Taiwan’s standing in the world
Tsai’s tenure saw the loss of some of the island’s diplomatic allies — countries that had ties with Taipei rather than Beijing. Her 2023 trip to the Americas included stops not only in Washington, but in Latin American countries like Guatemala, too, in an attempt to protect those relationships from Beijing’s economic diplomacy. That policy has drawn Costa Rica, Panama, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Nicaragua into China’s diplomatic orbit over the past 16 years.
China has often engaged in economic coercion in some form or another, whether it’s to encourage cash-strapped Latin American and Caribbean nations to recognize Beijing, or to tacitly control important infrastructure in places like Sri Lanka.
Efforts to turn Taiwan’s remaining diplomatic allies are likely to continue under Lai — but so are Taiwan’s efforts to cultivate powerful friends.
Taiwan under Tsai shored up its relationship with the United States, as well as creating closer ties with Japan and European nations; all three candidates emphasized the importance of the US-Taiwan relationship, with little daylight on their foreign policy.
Where Lai broke away with his competitors, and particularly Hou, was in his framing of Friday’s election as a choice “between democracy and autocracy,” as David Sacks, a fellow for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations said in a panel discussion Wednesday.
All the candidates indicated that they would continue Taiwan’s defense partnership with the US and would would increase the island’s defense budget, which currently stands at $19.1 billion, or 2.6 percent of GDP, indicating, as Sacks said, broad agreement that relying on dialogue with Beijing or Xi’s “goodwill” isn’t enough to keep China from trying to take the island by force. While Lai signaled that he’ll raise that percentage, it’s not yet clear by how much.
“The Tsai administration has gotten much more serious about how Taiwan can best defend itself against China,” Scobell said. “They’re grappling with, ‘How do we stop China from landing on Taiwan?’ But if they end up getting there, thinking of how Taiwan can resist.”
That’s not to say that cross-strait dialogue is out of the question under Lai, Sacks said.
“It’s certainly not like he doesn’t want dialogue with Beijing, he said that the door is open and he’s willing to talk on an equal footing.” However, “I don’t think it’s unfair to say that his top priority is really strengthening ties to the United States, Japan, and other democracies. And cross-strait communication is something that’s nice to have, but not something that you must have.”
Though foreign policy is important, it’s not the only issue voters care about
The economy and cost of living are also important to Taiwanese voters, though perhaps less so than the existential threat of war or takeover by China.
Taiwan is dealing with a serious real estate crunch, as Margaret Lewis, a law professor at Seton Hall who focuses on human rights in China and Taiwan, told Wednesday’s panel. “Younger voters [are] more concerned about things like the price of housing,” Lewis said. “It’s very expensive to buy housing. So there’s talk about sort of preferential loans to first-time homebuyers, especially under a certain age.”
Lai has pledged to increase the number of affordable housing units under the plan outlined by Tsai, as well as building new housing units and encouraging further participation in a government-sponsored subsidy program for landlords, according to Focus Taiwan.
Another problem is Taiwan’s sluggish economy; wages have failed to increase with the cost of living, and China’s economic retribution — banning key exports and banning Chinese tourism to the island in an effort to both punish Taiwan and encourage residents to favor more dialogue and cooperation with the mainland — is likely to continue after Lai’s win.
Taiwan must also diversify its economy away from its focus on semiconductors, of which it is the world’s largest manufacturer. As Vox’s Joshua Keating wrote earlier this month:
“The world’s reliance on these chips is so great that it has sometimes been called Taiwan’s ‘silicon shield.’ The idea is that the global economy, very much including China itself, is simply too reliant on Taiwan-made semiconductors to risk any action that might take the supply offline. But as the invasion of Ukraine has shown, countries can be willing to incur severe economic costs to accomplish what they see as major geopolitical goals — and reunification is about as fundamental as it gets for China.”
Ultimately, the economy is not just a domestic issue but a foreign policy and cross-strait issue, too — which points back to relations with China as Taiwan’s main concern. And Lai’s democratic and sovereignty bonafides are certain to garner an angry response from China, on multiple fronts.
Though Scobell predicts an “assertive response” to Lai’s win on Beijing’s side, he said it’s likely to happen in the coming weeks or months, not in the next few days.
“We’re going to see a reaction from China; the question is, when and how,” Scobell said. “Whereas five, 10, 15 years ago, it was fairly predictable — the kinds of things that Beijing would do. But I think it’s increasingly difficult to predict what is going to happen and when it’s likely to happen.”
It’s an escalation in the region, but we’re not actually headed to outright war with Iran.
The United States and the United Kingdom on Thursday night launched strikes against targets in Yemen used by Houthi rebels to antagonize the global shipping industry in the Red Sea, raising fears of further escalation of the simmering conflict in the Middle East over Israel’s war in Gaza.
The strikes, which were followed up by an additional, smaller salvo against a radar site Saturday, were the most significant action the US has taken against the Houthis — a militant group in control of much of northern Yemen, who are funded and trained by Iran, and who sympathize with the Palestinian cause — thus far. Their Red Sea operations, they say, are protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, which has killed more than 23,000 Palestinians so far. In other words, the US/UK strikes are both part of and responding to the ongoing regional conflict that has included operations like targeted US attacks in Iraq and Syria for months. And as Thursday’s strikes demonstrate, that ongoing conflict shows little sign of slowing.
US officials said the airstrikes, as well as missiles launched from ships and at least one Tomahawk cruise missile launched from a submarine, hit 60 targets, including Houthi weapons depots, drone and missile launch sites, and radar outposts. “These targets were very specifically selected for minimizing the risk of collateral damage,” a senior Pentagon official told reporters Thursday night. “We were absolutely not targeting civilian population centers. We were going after very specific [capabilities] in very specific locations with precision munitions.”
Houthi attacks on commercial vessels have been ongoing since mid-November, and have had serious effects on global trade. They have successfully deterred shipping giants like Maersk from traveling through the Red Sea and Suez Canal, an important route for trade between Asia and Western countries. The group claims it only targets ships headed to or affiliated with Israel to protest that country’s war in Gaza, though it seems to be abandoning that principle as the attacks continue. The Houthis have carried out at least 27 attacks since November 19, and though they don’t typically cause casualties or damage, many companies have deemed the Red Sea route too risky and chosen to take the longer, more expensive route around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, driving up prices for consumer goods. The US began threatening retaliatory strikes against the Houthis over the past week, after the group ignored a “final warning” from the US, and continued its attacks on ships.
In addition to the UK, Australia, Bahrain, Canada, and the Netherlands also took part in coordinating the strikes, though their roles in the operation are not yet clear. But regional partners, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, expressed concern about maintaining stability in the region and the possibility that the situation could spiral even more out of control. Some within the US government, like Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Val Hoyle (D-OR) questioned the constitutionality of the move, and Jeremy Corbyn, former leader of the UK’s Labour Party, denounced it. The US Department of Defense has not yet released information about casualties and continues to assess the success of the strikes. The Houthis claim the attacks killed five of their troops and wounded six others.
The Houthis, for their part, have promised to retaliate, saying that “all US, UK interests have become ‘legitimate targets.’” And according to James Jeffrey, chair of the Middle East Program at the Wilson Center and former special envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, while Thursday’s strikes hit some significant targets, “they certainly didn’t take down the Houthis’ ability to launch these attacks into the Red Sea.”
So while there might not be a risk of confrontation between the US and Iran, there are likely more — and potentially larger — tit-for-tat attacks to come.
Expect continued, simmering hostilities in the future — but not an all-out war
While the strikes represent an escalation on the part of the US and its allies — marking a move from rhetoric to violence — they are unlikely to lead to a full-fledged war with the Houthis, or their sponsors in Iran, and may not change the reality on the water. The Houthis could continue to antagonize ships in the Red Sea, despite the known consequences, because they have much to gain by doing so — and little to lose, Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Vox.
“It’s hard to [eliminate targets] that the Houthis find valuable,” he said. “You can spend a lot of money trying to destroy some very cheap installations.”
What’s more, the US-led strike (and any future actions against the group) can be interpreted as the Houthis being elevated on the global stage, giving them a legitimacy and prestige they previously lacked. That symbolic victory is only strengthened by the perception among some supporters of Palestine and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad that the Houthis are the only force willing to take big risks on behalf of the Palestinian cause. “They’ve become consequential when few other groups are, and they’ve done it from a pretty low base,” Alterman said.
A large part of the reason Thursday’s strikes probably won’t lead to an all-out war with Iran, according to Ali Vaez, the Iran director at the International Crisis Group, is that “there is only so far [Iran’s] command and control extend across its network.” Whereas Hezbollah in Lebanon is in lock-step with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, there’s a spectrum of control that Iran has over its proxy groups. “It has the least amount of control of the Houthis,” Vaez said. And with its actions in the Red Sea, the Houthis are establishing themselves on their own terms, “painting themselves not as Iranian proxies,” Alterman said.
Iran has no appetite for an expanded conflict, Vaez said. But looking out over the wider region over the past week, it’s clear that lower-level conflict is already occurring on several fronts — in the Red Sea, in Lebanon, and in Iraq. So rather than Israel’s war in Gaza leading to a larger war between global and regional powers, it currently seems more likely the conflict could take the shape of “open-ended hostilities that you can’t find a reason to stop,” Alterman said.
Update, January 13, 11:27 am ET: This story has been updated to include details of further attacks by the US and UK.