The Real Problem with Plagiarism

Harvard president Claudine Gay stepped down from her post in January over allegations of serial plagiarism. Gay’s critics allege that she had been a “diversity hire” — that is to say, Harvard had not hired Gay for her distinguished academic resume, but because she would be the first black president of Harvard. Since then, a number of other high-profile Harvard academics have been accused of plagiarism as well.¹ One of the accused is even a psychologist who researches dishonesty.²

This scandal has reinforced the perception that academia is increasingly willing to compromise its academic standards in the name of a rival set of values. But whatever Harvard’s reasons for hiring Gay, and whatever the actual effects of diversity ideology on academic standards, universities do seem to have lost interest in working to protect academic integrity in relation to other priorities.

The important question is why. The answer reveals an academic scandal that is much deeper than cheating professors. It goes to the core of academia’s attitude toward morality as such. 

Inverted educational priorities

The deeper scandal is revealed by the seemingly inverted priorities of today’s universities.

Harvard College, for example, has an Office of Academic Integrity with a staff of eight, and an honor council of student volunteers dedicated to reviewing student plagiarism charges. (Most other divisions of the university, and most other universities, have no such office.) But Harvard has twelve diversity offices, one for each campus unit, with a total of over seventy permanent staff (not including faculty committees and various student fellows).³ It has at least four offices related to gender equity, with another sixty-seven staff.⁴ This of course doesn’t include the numerous academic departments devoted to the study of race- and gender-themed topics. This further illustrates Harvard’s vastly more intense commitment to the value of diversity. 

What explains this inversion? Some may think it’s perfectly justifiable for universities to prioritize these programs because racism and sexism are social evils that must be combatted. But why has this task been elevated above all other moral issues, including academic dishonesty, at a university? Universities are ostensibly devoted to excellence in education, and plagiarism is anathema to the educational value of the pursuit of truth. Indeed, Harvard’s celebrated motto is Veritas not Diversitas. Why then does it seem to invest so little energy in the honesty of its own faculty and students, and so much in other efforts that seem less central to the very mission of an educational institution?

One too-easy answer to this question is that academic leaders are simply hypocritical — they say that they value honesty and integrity for the sake of appearances, but they are happy to tolerate infractions when it is expedient to do so. However, if we pay attention to the way academics actually think about ethics, there is reason to think that many of them are practicing what they preach about honesty and integrity. The real scandal is what they preach. 

How ethicists dismiss or neglect honesty

Following the Claudine Gay scandal, two prominent philosophers’ reactions on the issue of the morality of plagiarism emblematized the dominant academic view.

A few days after Gay’s resignation, University of Chicago philosophy professor Agnes Callard tweeted an essay she had written in 2019 titled “Is Plagiarism Wrong?”⁵ Her answer appears to be “no.” Callard argues that by punishing plagiarism, “academia has confused a convention with a moral rule.” Quoting from Shakespeare and pretending his words are yours doesn’t deprive him or his heirs of any money, so we don’t owe any moral obligation to the people whose ideas we use. Proscriptions against plagiarism are really just the house rules of an academic cartel aimed at flattering the vanity of scholars who can’t otherwise profit from their work. By Callard’s lights, universities shouldn’t prioritize plagiarism, because it’s not a moral issue in the first place.

It’s not as if Callard is a lone voice opposed by a consensus of peers who otherwise agree that plagiarism ought to be condemned. Even a reliable critic of academic orthodoxy seems unwilling to do so in moral terms. In an article for UnHerd, Kathleen Stock accused academic leftists of failing to take plagiarism seriously — not only had they initially declined to hold Gay accountable but they were also lax about student plagiarism.⁶ Stock suggests that to deter such conduct “the punishment for plagiarism should be unfashionably medieval.” But Stock also argues that because the original author of a plagiarized work “doesn’t lose anything of value,” plagiarism “isn’t that grave a moral sin, as sins go” and it can therefore “be detached from any deeper character flaws.” She argues that “the infringement is intellectual not moral,” and approvingly quotes another philosopher who says, “Sanctioning plagiarism is not about getting even on moral grounds, it’s about building a better academia to live in.”

When even defenders of “medieval” punishment for plagiarism insist that it’s not a serious moral issue, it reveals a widespread assumption in spite of differences over the details.

A search of the Philosopher’s Index (the authoritative database of academic philosophical publications) indicates little academic interest in exploring the ethics of plagiarism. Of the three hundred or so articles on “plagiarism” indexed since 1961, only about six grapple with the morality of plagiarism, and of these, only two make clear arguments for why plagiarism is wrong.⁷ The rest, like Callard, challenge the view that there is a clear-cut moral issue at stake.⁸

Most moral philosophers will probably acknowledge that honesty has at least something to do with morality, but they place it on the sidelines of the big moral questions. A recent book by philosopher Christian Miller tells the story in its title: Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue. Miller finds scant evidence of philosophers’ recent interest in the subject.⁹

Why is the question of plagiarism and the broader issue of the moral status of honesty so neglected?

The wider cultural assumption empowering the academic attitude

An important clue to the cause of philosophers’ neglect comes from an assumption shared by Callard and Stock: that acts rise to the level of immorality only when they actively harm an identifiable, highly sympathetic victim.

The same assumption is revealed by the list of moral issues that do energize contemporary ethicists. If we are to judge by a casual survey of ethics textbooks, the most important topics are “abortion, torture, charity, meat eating, prostitution, organ markets, climate change, poverty, gun control, procreation, reproductive rights, and so forth.”¹⁰ Each of these topics concerns an alleged conflict of interests between parties. In the dominant view, the role of moral philosophy is to identify a villain and a victim in that trade-off, and the obligation of the would-be villain is to give up their interest for the sake of the victim.

We find a similar view at work in academic policies and institutions. Academic integrity offices are rare and understaffed compared to diversity offices because the latter aim to rectify the scourges of racism where there are (at least, allegedly) classic victims and villains. As John McWhorter has argued in his book Woke Racism, contemporary “antiracism” is motivated by the notion that “one’s central moral duty is to battle racism and the racist” in the name of the sanctified weak and oppressed.¹¹ The same goes for concerns with sexual discrimination, harassment, and assault.

The victim–villain conception of morality doesn’t just animate academic policies and institutions, it permeates the entire activist culture on campus. The paradigm of the contemporary activist is the protester who seeks to “speak truth to power.” The power in question is, more often than not, whoever is perceived to be the oppressor of some victim class, whether it is the working class, women, people of color, the transgendered, endangered species, or the Palestinians.

Plagiarism doesn’t obviously affect any of these groups, so it doesn’t warrant scrutiny — let alone protest — by today’s academic culture. Revealingly, the rare cases of plagiarism that do generate outrage are cases of alleged “cultural appropriation,” in which, the cultural innovations of minorities are copied by non-minorities.¹² In cases like these, the objects of imitation are thought (rightly or wrongly) to be “exploited” by an oppressor, and one scholar has even described the process as “racial plagiarism.”

University administrators and protesters are not necessarily getting their ideas directly from ethics professors (although it’s not unheard of). It is more likely that contemporary academic ethicists are distilling and refining the wider philosophical culture that is independently influencing administrators and students alike. And in that wider attitude, morality generally concerns the obligations we owe others for altruistic reasons, while selfish benefit is always suspected of deriving from the exploitation of others. This attitude ultimately comes from the Judeo-Christian ethic of humility and sacrifice. (It’s no surprise that McWhorter sees contemporary “antiracism” as a new religion.¹³)

It is therefore hard to accuse today’s academic culture of hypocrisy since, in an important sense, it really does practice what it preaches.¹⁴ The moral quest to root out villains and victims needs DEI programs and not better plagiarism detection.

Cheating oneself

But the fact that academics are not hypocrites doesn’t justify their lack of interest in plagiarism. The moral view that they are practicing is simply wrong.

Plagiarism isn’t morally wrong because it’s a form of theft — a student who hires someone to write her paper hasn’t stolen any property from anyone, but it is still wrong. It’s cliché to say it, but profoundly true, that it is wrong because the plagiarist is cheating himself. Not only is he failing to develop his own skills, but he must now deal with the possibility of being exposed as a fraud. As Stock points out, the plagiarist misses the point of getting an education (let alone of being a professional scholar): to develop one’s own thinking and communication skills and to learn new things about the world.

Contemporary ethicists refuse to acknowledge that cheating oneself may have moral valence because they have an artificially narrow conception of the subject of ethics.¹⁵ Ethics was not always equated with rules for selfless sacrifice. In the ancient world, moral virtues like honesty (and courage, temperance, and pride) were seen as strengths essential to living a flourishing life. We need a code of values to guide the choices that direct the course of our lives, whether those choices concern others or ourselves. That’s especially true if we want to create positive-sum relationships with others rather than just see ourselves as either exploitative villain, noble victim, or self-effacing servant.

If one doesn’t appreciate the moral significance of cheating oneself and failing to develop one’s own intelligence and character, it’s easy to develop a blind spot for the real victims of plagiarism who don’t always fit the classic stereotype of the helpless downtrodden martyr. Professors who spend time grading fraudulent papers, and parents and taxpayers who pay their tuition, are being cheated out of time and money invested on the assumption that their resources would actually help someone learn, not just help to bestow a falsified credential. If someone doesn’t care about the moral virtue required to develop character and expertise or to earn wealth, he won’t believe it is morally outrageous to cheat others out of their time and money. While such victims might not be easy for someone with conventional ethical views to identify, they are real and unjustly ignored.

Justice is also a moral virtue, and it demands that we identify the real villains and real victims of injustice, not just the stereotypically downtrodden. Universities should care about what it takes to educate future citizens concerned with justice (social or otherwise). The primary purpose of a university is education, and the value of truth should be central to its mission and plan to build the character of future citizens. This means that the cultivation of honesty should be central to an education, not peripheral.

Students who profess to care about justice but not about the truth will end up with neither. Which is why they grow up to lead witch hunts not genuine moral quests.

An edited version of this essay was originally published in Quillette on May 8, 2024.

Image credit: Boston Globe/Boston Globe via Getty Images.

1. Tilly R. Robinson and Neil H. Shah, “Top Harvard Diversity Officer Sherri Charleston Faces Plagiarism Allegations,” Harvard Crimson (January 31, 2024); Tilly R. Robinson and Neil H. Shah, “Harvard Extension School Administrator Accused of Plagiarism in Anonymous Complaint,” Harvard Crimson (February 13, 2024).
2. Cathleen O’Grady, “Embattled Harvard honesty professor accused of plagiarism,” Science (April 9, 2024).
3. My count of Harvard diversity offices derives from this data:
   • Harvard College, staff of 9
   • Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, staff of 9
   • Medical School, staff of 24
   • T.H. Chan School of Public Health, staff of 6
   • Business School, staff of 7
   • School of Dental Medicine, staff of 2
   • Kennedy School of Government, staff of 2
   • Graduate School of Design, staff of 3
   • Divinity School, staff of 2
   • Graduate School of Education, staff of 2
   • John A. Paulson School of Engineering, staff of 3
   • Law School, staff of 7
4. My count of Harvard gender equity offices derives from this data:
   • Office for Gender Equity, staff of 13
   • Harvard Office for Dispute Resolution, staff of 12
   • Faculty of Arts and Sciences Title IX program coordinators, staff of 19
   • Harvard College Women’s Center, staff of 23

5. Agnes Callard, X.com, January 4, 2024, referencing Agnes Callard “Is Plagiarism Wrong?,” ThePointMag.com, November 20, 2019.
6. Kathleen Stock, “Plagiarism Is Not a Sin,” Unherd.com, January 12, 2024.
7. These include Richard Reilly, Samuel Pry, and Mark Thomas, “Plagiarism: Philosophical Perspectives,” Teaching Philosophy (September 2007, Vol. 3(3)), 269–82; and Brook Sadler, “The Wrongs of Plagiarism,” Teaching Philosophy (September 2007, Vol 3(3)), 283–91. Most of the rest are social-scientific studies of the pervasiveness of plagiarism and attitudes about it.
8. These include Robert Briggs, “Shameless!: Reconceiving the Problem of Student Plagiarism,” Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities (2009, Vol. 14(1)), 65–75; Phil Jenkins and Joan Forry, “Grading Plagiarism as a Moral Issue,” APA Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy (Spring 2014, Vol. 12 (2)), 5–10; Joel Hubick, “A Philosophical Response to Plagiarism,” Teaching Philosophy (December 2016, Vol. 39(4), 453–82. A final article challenges common arguments for why plagiarism is wrong but doesn’t offer a positive alternative view of its own: Mathieu Bouville, “Why Is Cheating Wrong?,” Studies in the Philosophy of Education (2010, Vol. 29), 67–76.
9. Miller notes that he’s found only one other book published on the subject since the 1970s, which itself laments philosophers’ neglect of the topic at the time. He also finds “almost no articles in mainstream journals in analytic philosophy on the virtue of honesty in at least fifty years” (Christian B. Miller, Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), ix–x.). This is in spite of the fact that this same period of time has seen the rise of the new normative approach called “virtue ethics.” Miller himself mostly focuses on defining what honesty is, not on explaining why honesty is a moral virtue and dishonesty a moral vice, or why we should care to practice this virtue and avoid this vice.
10. Michael J. Sigrist, “Why Aren’t Ethicists More Ethical?,” Blog of the American Philosophical Association, December 10, 2019.
11. John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed America (New York: Portfolio, 2021), 48.
12. Ligaya Mishan, “What Does Cultural Appropriation Really Mean?,” New York Times,September 30, 2022.
13. Ben Bayer, “The Old Morality of the New Religions,” New Ideal, January 4, 2023.
14. Symbolically, the Harvard honesty researcher, Francesca Gino, argued that dishonesty was an advantage that helped one become more creative. She also seems to have been directly practicing her own theory. But since her dishonesty took the form of copying others, it’s questionable just how creative this really was. See her (now retracted paper) “Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity,” Psychological Science (April 2014, Vol. 25 (4)), 973–81.
15. Ben Bayer, “Why Scientific Progress in Ethics Is Frozen,” New Ideal, January 13, 2021.