Once upon a time, long before ChatGPT and social media roamed the virtual earth, I was a 25-year-old adjunct English instructor at a Bay Area community college. Grading a student’s final paper, I discovered that she had plagiarized, lifting paragraphs verbatim and without attribution from a New York Times article. Actually, now that I think of it, I’m sure that this student was far from the only cheater in the class, and she was likely not the only one I busted, but she is the one I remember because her case was, for me, uniquely difficult.
The difficulty lay not in the complexity or severity of her offense—the plagiarism she’d committed was boilerplate, exactly what the laziest scriptwriter alive would think up if they were crafting a drama about academic cheating. No, the difficulty lay in the fact that the student was, by my best guess, about 70 years of age, old enough to be my grandmother.
Here I found myself, of highly questionable maturity in my own right, leaning over the desk of this kindly looking older lady, explaining that this obvious cheating would not be tolerated. It was an awkward disciplinary process, that’s for sure.
Over the years, it’s been my responsibility to dole out 0/100 grades to more than a few cheating students. The reprimand is always the same: “Just rewrite it, OK? Cite your sources this time. See, here’s how.” Almost always, the students comply.
Looking back on that meeting with the elder plagiarist, I think that there are worse things—not just in the world but in college—than a student of some years, studying in what is clearly not her first language, being suddenly faced with an essay exam and finding herself at loose ends both academically and ethically.
Would plagiarizing part of one’s dissertation—as Harvard University professor and former president Claudine Gay is alleged to have done—be considered one of those worse things? Yes, because it’s a dissertation, which implies not only higher rewards but also a higher level of scholarly rigor than the work of a community college student I found myself reprimanding during the Paleolithic era. But the difference in scale of the offenses is much less than the difference in the level of attention paid to each would lead one to believe.
Prestige matters, even if it shouldn’t. Whatever happens at Harvard, from how students tie their shoes to how they protest America’s military support of Israel, will get more attention than anything that happens at a community college, no matter how significant.
Details also matter, and among the details that matter in the story of Gay’s plagiarism scandal and its connection to her stepping down from the university presidency is the fact that Gay was not found, like my student, to have copied whole passages out of the New York Times, but rather to have sloppily mirrored the works of fellow researchers. As her accusers showed, Gay changed out a word here or there without altering the substance of others’ ideas or citing them at all. When these instances of intellectual “redistribution” were initially uncovered, she made a series of corrections to the dissertation passages in question. In the world of my classroom, that would’ve been enough to keep things moving. But my classroom was not subject to congressional testimony over a university’s allegedly tepid response to alleged anti-Semitic student protests. That Gay’s testimony firmly aligned with long-standing, quite sensible university policy mattered little in the maelstrom of pro-Israel politicking that followed the October 7, 2023, massacre of more than 1,300 Israelis by Hamas militants and the subsequent slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians by the Israeli military. In that messy, heated moment, no offense, big or small, would be let to slide.
The same held true only days after Gay’s forced resignation, when Neri Oxman was revealed by Business Insider to have plagiarized several passages of her dissertation, placing whole paragraphs from Wikipedia into her work verbatim and without attribution. Oxman is a former MIT professor and wife of billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who was among the critics calling for Gay’s removal at Harvard. Ackman is currently defending Oxman’s honor by threatening to sue everything moving at Business Insider and at Harvard.
There’s an ongoing theft greater than anything involving the particular people in this plagiarism panic, which is that at the same time that political operatives are trying to take down academics for plagiarism to score political points, a technology is enabling the greatest theft of word and image in history: ChatGPT.
A “large language model” predicated on scraping the internet for the intellectual property of authors, ChatGPT is “ingesting huge amounts of written texts and reproducing their patterns, content, and information,” according to Matteo Wong in the Atlantic. In a political welter where every accusation, seemingly, is the nightside of a confession soon to be brought into the daylight, there is something incredibly ironic about canceling individual actors like Gay and Oxman as we all enable this leviathan larceny.
For all the popularity and panic that surrounds it, from an educator’s perspective, ChatGPT is only the most recent threat to academic integrity.
“You can tell students are cheating,” a Cabrillo College professor tells me. “[But] I’m like, Students have always cheated! They always find ways to cheat. I’m not so worried about that.”
Indeed, in 2019, a few years before the advent of ChatGPT, the New York Times published an investigation into the racket of American college students paying to have their term papers written for them by online essay-writing services. Journalists Farah Stockman and Carlos Mureithi discovered that on the other end of the essay-writing websites, thousands of kilometers distant from their more privileged and less capable customers, sit scores of Kenyan ghostwriters doing the intellectual dirty work for America’s college students. Dig a little, and apparently ye shall find that a lot of the good grades and fancy degrees bestowed on our students, not to mention whatever professional spoils accrue therefrom, are in fact owed to unacknowledged African labor. Hmm…
The Cabrillo professor, citing their overseas teaching experience, points out that there are, in fact, “different cultural norms about plagiarism.” Plagiarism itself, they note, “is a particular American trope,” an outgrowth of our capitalist, property-based culture. “We are very attached to ownership. I feel like AI is kind of leveling the playing field, where it’s giving students a chance to negotiate the ownership of what they might produce.”
Indeed, as I learned in doing the research for my dissertation, Western standards around copyright and intellectual property developed over time, one important flash point being the conflict between the Enlightenment-era French intellectuals Diderot and Condorcet. In brief, Condorcet, a well-heeled aristocrat, inspector general of the Monnaie de Paris, argues in his Fragments sur la Liberté de la Presse that because society stands to benefit from intellectual production, individual intellectual property rights cannot be maintained. While acknowledging that authors need to be able to make a living, Condorcet contends that ultimately this claim “is not derived from the natural order and defended by social force; it is a property of society itself.”
Anybody who has completed a dissertation in the University of California or California State University system is familiar with this philosophy: because California’s public university systems are taxpayer funded, the reasoning goes, the research product (i.e., the dissertation) is the property of the public. By law, upon graduation either your dissertation is immediately open-sourced, placed online for anyone to access, or you may have it embargoed for five years, after which time it is open-sourced.
In contrast to this socialist view of scholarship, Diderot, who was a working writer, argues in his Lettre sur le Commerce des Livres, on the financial necessity of the bookseller to turn a profit and “put bread on the table tomorrow,” for the diametrical opposite: the exclusive right of the author to claim their work as their property. “What property can a man own if a work of the mind—the unique fruit of his upbringing, his evenings, his study, his age, his researches…does not belong to him?” Diderot writes.
Over the years, our laws have sided with Diderot, enshrining intellectual property as a right, but the professor I spoke to is correct that these Western norms and ideas around plagiarism are not the same the world over.
They are also right that deeply motivated students can legitimately use ChatGPT as a launch point from which to refine and “negotiate” their own unique intellectual production. It might also be argued that our social agreement around property rights is itself faltering, given the public’s acquiescence to OpenAI, ChatGPT’s parent company. The fact is, OpenAI isn’t socializing its own profits but rather is making a private killing, another instance of corporate profits privately held as the problems they create are socialized.
If no line in the sand is drawn on artificial intelligence’s widespread intellectual property theft, it becomes problematic to draw one within academia, among the very people whose work is being pilfered by OpenAI.
The political opportunism at the heart of the attacks on Claudine Gay becomes apparent when we see her downfall as part of a campaign by political conservatives, some of whom pushed for the Hollywood studios to replace writers and actors with artificial intelligence technology during the recent strikes. These people couldn’t care less about who owns words and ideas—words and ideas exist for them only as means to their political ends.
In reading through the problematic passages of Gay’s dissertation, I see more than anything the unmistakable evidence of a scholar who is, at base, not a writer’s writer but an academic-administrator, a hybrid that commands more power in the modern university than any creator of words ever will. It may come as a surprise to those looking from the outside in, but most academics aren’t writers in the way that novelists, memoirists, and journalists are. They’re not masochists who trouble over their sentences compulsively, losing hours from their day as they refine to razor precision the rhythm of a single line here, another one there. They’re smarter than that and have better things to do with their time. Also, they’re paid better, which is a subject for a different article, one more concerned with labor politics than with exact expression.
Writing takes time, and it requires us to inhabit our own minds, quieting the noise of life long enough to craft and arrange clearly articulated ideas one word at a time. Like real learning, writing is inefficient and is primarily a formative rather than a productive process. If you want to become a good writer, you need to draft and draft and draft your work, turning it slowly and deeply into something worthwhile. If you want to teach a student to write well, you need to submit their work and their mind to this same discipline, draft upon draft. And more and more, this quiet, patient processing is anathema to us. We’re on the verge of outsourcing the entire enterprise of writing to AI that has been built from the textual remnants of archived human efforts, the depressing (if logical) conclusion of this intellectual downturn.
One can muster the outrage machine for Claudine Gay or Neri Oxman depending on which political side one chooses, or one can even take them both to task for their misdeeds, minor though they are in comparison with the AI colossus. But canceling them both is unlikely to increase academic integrity. It won’t stop the next English 1A student, young or old, from using ChatGPT or a Kenyan ghostwriter to compose their paper for them. If anything, given the trend and drift of our times, there’ll be many more works that mirror—reflecting and refracting—the efforts of others.
For what it’s worth, the best writing appears when we revise, which begins with turning the mirror onto ourselves.•
Keenan Norris’s latest book, Chi Boy: Native Sons and Chicago Reckonings, was published in 2023. He is the author of the novel The Confession of Copeland Cane, which received the 2022 Northern California Book Award, as well as the novels Lustre and Brother and the Dancer. Native to the Inland Empire, he now lives in San Leandro, California.
