Plagiarism Is Fine
There's plenty of hypocrisy and bad faith to go around in the ridiculous Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal. While Gay's accusers are right that she technically violated Harvard's plagiarism rules by copying phrases either without quotation marks or required attribution, they don't actually care about plagiarism, only scalping" Gay. What's more, their own plagiarism accusations have already started biting them back. And while Gay's defenders are right that her offenses were comically trivial, because she copied mere banalities, Harvard students are punished severely for doing exactly the same thing. In fact, some of Gay's defenders probably did the punishing.
A pox on both their houses. Plagiarism is fine, plagiarism rules are stupid, and the plagiarism police should mind their own business.
Everyone knows" plagiarism is bad, but no one can provide a coherent explanation why. Some people say plagiarism defrauds the reader. Give me a break. Readers don't care, or if they do, it's only because they've been browbeaten into believing plagiarism is wrong. Others say plagiarism is like stealing. But no one owns ideas, and no one should own the words we use to express them, either.
I'll be blunt. The plagiarism police are just intellectual landlords, demanding rent in the form of attribution. And plagiarism rules are just a sneaky way for authors to claim de facto ownership of ideas, while cloaking themselves in false virtue. When the plagiarism police cry, J'accuse!," we should respond with a raspberry.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to attribution. In fact, attribution is great, so long as it's voluntary, rather than mandatory. Authors should absolutely attribute expressions and ideas, when they think it will help readers, or even just to honor an author they admire. But authors shouldn't be required to attribute, unless they think it's deserved. Let us cite out of love, rather than obligation.
Some people worry that eliminating plagiarism rules will harm disadvantaged authors, who often don't get the credit they deserve. I doubt it. For one thing, plagiarism rules have existed for at least 2000 years. If they were going to protect disadvantaged authors, they would have done it by now. For another, plagiarism rules actually create a Matthew Effect," in which the most prominent authors get all the credit, and the disadvantaged authors get ignored. Why not adopt attribution norms that encourage citation of deserving disadvantaged authors instead of undeserving privileged ones?
You probably think I'm joking. I'm not. And I can prove it. I've published scholarly articles arguing that plagiarism rules are unjustified, authorizing plagiarism of myself, providing a plagiarism license," advocating a right of reattribution," offering to reattribute my own articles (please claim one!), using essay mills, plagiarizing every word (I stole the idea from Jonathan Lethem), proposing to teach law students how to plagiarize efficiently (in the practice of law, if you aren't plagiarizing, you're committing malpractice), and using AI to reflect on the legitimacy of plagiarism norms. I'm dead serious. Well, as serious as I get, anyway.
Think about it. We want to believe plagiarism rules protect original expressions and ideas. But AI shows us that most of what we produce is generic banalities. Why treat them like spun gold, rather than the chaff they really are?
We've now spent weeks debating how to interpret and apply plagiarism rules. If anything comes out of this idiotic scandal," I hope it's that, when it comes to plagiarism norms, the juice definitely isn't worth the squeeze. We should just admit they're a waste of time and abandon them. We should stop punishing authors for stealing" cliches, And we should especially stop punishing students for their own good." Plagiarism is also a way of learning, so we should encourage it, whenever it helps students learn more effectively and efficiently.
By the way, every word of this op-ed is plagiarized. Or maybe it isn't. I'm not telling, because it doesn't matter.