Are You Sure Your Work Is Yours?

By Baran Ghaforian News Today, originality seems harder to achieve than ever before. Humans constantly consume content — it seems impossible to be uninfluenced by it. How can you know your work is yours? Are you certain the essay you just submitted isn’t a retelling of a retelling of Hamlet in the internet’s backrooms? Are you positive it is not a blend of previous work you stumbled upon and tucked away in the depths of your subconscious? Maybe the work you copied was kept on the highest shelves of your psyche, shelves you thought were unreachable. Shelves you scoured for ideas without meaning to. Are you sure your ideas are original? Are you sure your work is yours?

Are you sure you aren’t a liar, a cheat, and a perpetrator of plagiarism?

Plagiarism is a scary word. It is a word making its way to the forefront of the news with tales of musicians snatching lyrics from their peers' hands and Ivy League officials plagiarizing research. The word echoes through high school hallways as students turn to artificial intelligence for essays and assignments. Plagiarism is everywhere, even in the prestigious halls of Harvard University: the university’s president has committed the year’s most prolific act of plagiarism. On December 10th, 2023, an editor of The American Conservative publicly accused the then Harvard president, Claudine Gay, of plagiarizing research during her doctorate. The accusations against her ranged from poor paraphrasing to pulling multiple paragraphs from her peers' research to incorporate into her work. Both academics and the general public have since widely debated the accusations Gay faced. Thosewho believed she plagiarized argued that academics should be held to the same, if not higher, standards as students regarding the issue; others believed the accusations were fabricated in refute of her political stance or her position as Harvard’s first black president. Many of Gay’s fellow academics came to her defence. According to the Harvard Crimson, a victim of Gay’s alleged plagiarism, Anne R. Williamson, was “completely satisfied” with the corrections Gay retroactively made to her work, seemingly dismissing the allegations. In a piece from the Wall Street Journal another plagiarized author, Carol M. Swain claimed, “Gay had no problem riding on the coattails of people whose work she used without proper attribution.” Swain commented on high-level academia’s tendency to “protect their own,” even when the accusations are true. Those who acknowledge the plagiarism yet vehemently defend Gay write off the allegations as trivial. They recognize her plagiarism but choose to overlook it. D. Stephen Voss, a professor Gay allegedly plagiarized, came to her defence, telling the New Yorker, “What [Gay] did was trivial—wholly inconsequential. That’s the reason I’ve so actively tried to defend her.” He also claimed that “what matters is less a few words or phrases and more the bigger scholarly ideas.” By this logic, Gay’s plagiarism was unimportant in the broader academic world. Members of the general public provided a similar defence; they focused on the difficulties of completing Ph.D. research before the internet became widespread. Writing a doctorate dissertation is a lengthy process which would be made even more cumbersome without today’s plagiarism checkers. This defence is corroborated by accusations against other Ivy League officials that have come to light decades after. Claudine Gay is not the only academic to be accused of plagiarism. Whether she was aware of the errors she made or simply failed to recognize an oversight, the allegations crippled her career. On January 2nd, 2024, Gay resigned as Harvard’s president, making her tenure the shortest in Harvard history. Whether they were false or not, plagiarism allegations are devastating to the accused and allegedly plagiarized authors. In a world as busy as this one it can be difficult to ensure your work is yours; these slip-ups may seem inevitable. It is not difficult to fall into plagarism’s trap.