Rufo, Plagiarism and the Strange Death of US News Media
The subject of plagiarism is back in the news again. The President of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, has been accused of plagiarising a number of short passages in her 1997 Doctoral thesis and in a number of subsequent articles. This has led to a considerable splash in the US press and has even led a congressional committee to investigate.
I covered my thoughts on plagiarism in a previous blog post regarding the allegations made against Kevin Kruse — who, incidentally, has been cleared by his Doctoral institution, Cornell, of wrongdoing. Given the current media interest in these academic matters, it is worth re-hashing and expanding on my position again. I argued that the accidental inclusion of short, inconsequential snippets of other people’s text, without either proper attribution or the use of quotation marks, does not amount to academic misconduct. Not everyone shares my view, however. According to the American Historical Association (AHA), such errors do amount to plagiarism.
The AHA considers plagiarism to be the failure to properly acknowledge the work of another, regardless of intent. The Modern Language Association also takes this position in the sixth and most recent edition of its MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. Other writing guides and college handbooks similarly maintain that plagiarism can be, and often is, unintentional. Claiming otherwise provides easy absolution for sloppy work and convenient cover for plagiarists, since intent to deceive is often impossible to prove. An instructor does not need to consider intent until after he or she establishes that plagiarism has occurred, when it becomes important in assessing sanctions.
This is a faintly ludicrous position as intent really does matter. Academic misconduct is framed almost as a criminal act. Academic integrity is governed by codified statutes drawn up by universities; those suspected of breaching them are subject to charges of breaching that code and investigated; academic misconduct hearings are held, and a panel is convened to judge the merits of the case. Those found guilty of misconduct are potentially subject to disciplinary action — up to an including expulsion in the case of students and dismissal of academics.
In the case of plagiarism, even the word implies criminality. “Plagiarism” is derived from the Latin plagiarius meaning ‘kidnapper’. The idea being that the words and thoughts of another individual have been plundered from their rightful owner. Yet in law, there is the concept of mens rea (also Latin meaning guilty mind). In criminal court it is usual that it is necessary to prove the crime occurred (actus reus) AND that the individual had criminal intent. Imagine you are filling your shopping basket at your local store; you get to the self-service checkout and fail to pay for an item. If caught the prosecution would need to prove that you not only took the item without buying it but that you intended to do so.
Now, imagine being a PhD student, working away in the library for weeks, often months and even years at a time. You fill many pages with notes each day. It’s getting late and a librarian is standing over your shoulder tapping his watch indicating that you need to leave. So, you quickly scribble down what you’re reading, pack your bag and hurry to the exit and forget all about it. But disaster strikes! In your haste you forgot to use quotation marks!
Now fast-forward several months, possibly even years, and you are revisiting your notes as you write-up your thesis. You decide to use this accidentally lifted passage of text it in your work. You cite the author and work; you even name them in the main body of your text introducing the snippet. Do you recall that it was a quotation and not one of your usual paraphrased notes? If not, according to the letter of the AHA’s position, despite crediting them, you have just committed plagiarism. You have kidnapped the words and ideas, stolen them from their original author.
This is where means rea or intent comes in. As noted above, if found guilty the consequences could be very severe, as an academic you could lose your job and your reputation may be left in tatters. But in the scenario described above there was no intent to steal. Despite some particularly heavy-handed, zero-tolerance university guidance, which state that the university does not consider intent, in reality most academic institutional regulations leave loopholes.
Let’s take Cornell, where Kruse did his Doctoral work, as an example. ‘The Essential Guide to Academic Integrity at Cornell’ states that students must not ‘Knowingly representing the work of others as one’s own.’ According to Isaac Schorr, in a discombobulating piece for the right-wing magazine National Review, this ‘does not identify “intent” as a “key criterion” for determining whether a student has plagiarized.’ Yet, it plainly and obviously does. How can a student intend to plagiarise when they do not realise they have copied material in the first place? And how can a student steal work, in full knowledge of what they are doing, and not intend to do it? “Knowingly” in this context is essentially and obviously synonymous with “intent” and suggestion to the contrary is, frankly, absurd nonsense.
Clearly then intent does matter when it comes to plagiarism, and it is a point of natural justice that it should. Apparently, the finer points of elementary comprehension are lost on the writers and editors of National Review. Either that or something more sinister is going on and sadly it is, which brings us back to Claudine Gay.
Gay had recently been in the news when she, with other leaders of elite US institutions, in inadvisably bureaucratic fashion, failed to define calls to annihilate Jews as harassment. Naturally, a part of the woke, liberal, intellectual elite, this brought her onto the radar of right-wing L’Enfant Provocateur, Christopher Rufo. Within a matter of days, Gay was accused by Rufo, a rising political figure with an influence on US media and social media vastly disproportionate to the value of his “hot takes”, of plagiarism based on very little actual substance.
Having seen many instances of student plagiarism, I very seriously doubt allegations based on the evidence Rufo provides would go very far. However, now Harvard are investigation it might be the case that some real smoking gun turns up. Who knows or cares? The facts don’t matter to Rufo and never did. So it doesn’t really matter to me.
The more important question is why a disreputable individual like Rufo can say ‘jump’ and the US media and academic institutions respond, ‘how high?’ Why did this “story” reach the heights of the US press? Why are Congressional committees investigating?
Rufo’s claim to fame was to deliberately misrepresenting Critical Race Theory [CRT] — hitherto a relatively arcane product of US legal scholarship which made some ripples across academia — and transforming it into the bête noire of the political right. His objective was to turn any discussion of race which comments on race in the US into a culture war issue and to associate and, thus discredit, “the left” in doing so. In 2021, he claimed he and his followers had ‘decodified the term [CRT] and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.’ Rufo, or at least a wider right-wing group of AstroTurfers among whom he numbers, entierly succeeded. His “work” has become part of the standard right-wing talking points of the wider political right discourse.
The attack on Claudine Gay is no different. It is the product of an entirely bad-faith actor. For Rufo, this was always political and never about intellectual fidelity. It was always about kicking up a fuss until the media took notice, first to destroy Gay and then academia. He has gleefully revealed as much.
We launched the Claudine Gay plagiarism story from the Right. The next step is to smuggle it into the media apparatus of the Left, legitimizing the narrative to centre-left actors who have the power to topple her. Then squeeze.
Rufo’s entire strategy is predicated on five factors. 1. His many followers buy into (or are gullible enough to swallow) this and that they will send it viral. 2. The US fringe-right wing media take it up. 3. They generate enough noise to propel the matter to the major media outlets. 4. US Universities investigate, and in doing so legitimise the entire enterprise. 5. US Republicans see it as a means to energise the base and a new front in the culture war and make it into an even bigger news story.
It is that simple, the US media and Higher Education could simply ignore Rufo as the bad faith actor that he is. They could, but will not and do not. Even though Rufo has told them precisely who he is, what he is doing, how he does it, and how he is taking everyone for complete fools.
Update 5 Jan 2023: Rufo has since taken to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to congratulate himself that his Culture War strategy succeeded in ‘squeezing’ gay out of Harvard’s top job. His objective was not academic integrity but opening a front in the war aimed at ‘stopping America’s cultural revolution’.
Conservatives ‘must begin with a clear-eyed understanding of how to wield power and reshape institutions in the real world. … The successful campaign to topple Harvard’s president is about much more than Claudine Gay. It is about the great conflict between truth and ideology, colorblindness and discrimination, good governance and failed leadership — a conflict that, if we are to preserve America’s core principles, conservatives must win.’
