CLAUDINE GAY AND THE HAIR-RAISING HISTORY OF
CELEBRITY PLAGIARISM
James A. W. Heffernan
On January 2 of this new year, after just six months and two days in office, Claudine Gay resigned from the presidency of Harvard. For almost three months, the first Black person ever to hold this office had survived the little war on Ivy League university presidents waged by Republicans bent on routing their supposed tolerance for anti-Semitism on college campuses, But on December 21 the New York Times reported that in Dr. Gay's 1997 doctoral dissertation, Harvard found two examples of "duplicative language without appropriate attribution"--on top of the two published articles that Harvard had already found in need of additional citations.
Findings such as these prompted many calls for Gay's resignation, including an especially cogent one from John McWhorter, a Black linguist who teaches at Columbia and regularly writes for the New York Times, and still more evidence has finally made the guillotine fall. But in light of this regrettable story, it seems high time to re-examine the whole concept of plagiarism itself. Setting aside the new seductions of AI and ChatGPT, which really offer a whole different can of worms that I have not enough space here to open, consider some notable cases in the history of plagiarism before AI came along just over one year ago.
In the vast spectrum of crimes and sins ranging from the gravely mortal to the trivially venial, plagiarism is hard to place. On one hand, most American institutions of higher learning treat it as a major offense. According to the new Honor Committee Constitution (of July 1, 2023) at the University of Virginia, for instance, plagiarism is "copying a passage straight from a book, a website, generative AI, or any other source into a paper without using quotation marks and explicitly citing the source" or "paraphrasing without citing your original source", and students found guilty of plagiarism may be sanctioned by punishments rising from "amends" or suspension all the way up to "permanent removal". The penalty was once more severe. Back in the mid-sixties, when I was an Instructor in English at UVA, all students found guilty of plagiarism were "separated": expelled with no hope of ever returning.
In our own time, it may also be helpful to build against the ever rising tides of plagiarism an ever rising seawall of books like Tim Roberts' Student Plagiarism in an Online World (2007), which strives to explain how to combat the seemingly irresistible temptation to copy and paste--or now chatbox--one's way to a submittable paper. But like all the institutional rules against plagiarism, books such as these hardly explain why--in the world after college--plagiarism is so often met with little or no consequences or even calmly accepted as a matter of course.
The awkward fact is simply this: as defined by the custodians of Honor at Harvard, Dartmouth, the University of Virginia, and comparable institutions, plagiarism is routinely practiced by some quite distinguished people who are seldom if ever seriously punished for it.
To get a running start with one of the glorious dead, take Abraham Lincoln, who was easily one of the finest writers ever elected U.S. President. While we can be reasonably sure that he wrote all by himself such classics as the Gettysburg Address, we now know that for his First Inaugural of March 4, 1861, Honest Abe had the unacknowledged help of William Seward, his new Secretary of State, who furnished not only one of its paragraphs but also the original version of what became one of Lincoln's most famous phrases: "the better angels of our nature".
Lincoln was of course a minor plagiarist. For at least since 1932, when Samuel Rosenman coined the phrase "new deal" for Franklin D. Roosevelt (Rosenman, Wikipedia), U.S. Presidents have regularly and extensively relied on speechwriters whose contributions are widely recognized but seldom if ever acknowledged by the president himself. Just imagine that in accepting the Democratic nomination of 1932, FDR had pledged not "a new deal for the American people" but "to quote Samuel Rosenman, a 'new deal' for the American people." So far as I know, however, nobody ever accused FDR of failing to cite his sources.
Or consider a man revered by many as a second Lincoln, a man whose birthday is now nationally celebrated each year on January 15 (well before Lincoln's), a man canonized for his saintly practice of civil, non-violent disobedience in the great cause of civil rights for all Black Americans. The man who famously declared from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963 that "I have a dream" to change the world--and did.
Now consider a celebrity plagiarist of our own time--an altogether notable woman who remains very much alive as well as revered for her work on American history, a woman who won the Pulitzer Prize for a book about the Roosevelts in 1995. But a few years later, Doris Kearns Goodwin's 1987 biography of the Kennedy family--The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys--was found to contain up to fifty (that's FIFTY) passages pilfered from a lesser known biographer named Lynne McTaggert. Besides reaching "a financial settlement" with her secret source, Goodwin has since admitted to plagiarizing other authors as well, and of course she was acutely embarrassed by the revelation of her misdeeds. Yet while she apologized for them, would any such apology from any student caught plagiarizing at Harvard, where she then sat on the board (aka Harvard Corporation) have satisfied its deans? On the contrary, I suspect that her feckless excuse--"it was simply a mistake in technique," in "the mechanical process of checking things"--would have left them incredulous. Nevertheless, she was defended by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the late supernova of Harvard luminaries, who gallantly (if not quite convincingly) declared that Goodwin "did not, she does not, cheat or plagiarize," that her work exemplifies "the highest standards of moral integrity" (qtd. Richard Posner, The Little Book of Plagiarism 93).
Curiously enough, nothing I've read so far about the Gay case has even mentioned the far more serious case of Goodwin. Yet in defending Gay, Harvard has doubled down on just the kind of thing that Schlesinger wrote on Goodwin's behalf. On December 22, 2023, Isabel Vincent reported in The New York Post that "Harvard cleared its president Claudine Gay of plagiarism before it even investigated whether her academic work was copied" (emphasis mine). What Harvard did or claimed to have done, however, was to get some of Gay's plagiarees--authors (not incidentally all Black authors) whose words she had allegedly borrowed without acknowledgement--to say that she had done nothing wrong. Then, threatening to sue The Post if it ran a story about Gay's plagiarizing, a lawyer for Harvard named Clare Locke wrote as follows to the paper in late October of 2023, after The Post had asked Harvard for comment on The Post's findings:
In an extraordinary rebuke of The Post's preferred conclusion, some of the authors whose work was allegedly plagiarized have come forward to expressly reject the false conclusion proffered by the The Post. These denials are far more well-informed than the facile comparison of similar phrases, because they are the product of a review of the entirety of both the relevant works as well as grounded upon decades of work in academia.
Locke here mentions only "some of the authors," none by name, and furnishes no other evidence to exculpate President Gay.
Gay herself doubled down on self-exculpation even as she resigned. Though fully half of her publications are now known to be contaminated by plagiarism, her letter of resignation dated January 2, 2024 offers not a single word of apology for her own misdeeds but instead casts her as the wholly innocent victim of racism: "it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor -- two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am -- and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus." And in her follow-up oped of January 3, she admitted only that she "made mistakes"--"instances in my academic writings where some material duplicated other scholars' language, without proper attribution. I believe all scholars deserve full and appropriate credit for their work. When I learned of these errors, I promptly requested corrections from the journals in which the flagged articles were published, consistent with how I have seen similar faculty cases handled at Harvard" (emphasis mine). Really? So if Harvard professors are caught plagiarizing--no matter how often--the only price they have to pay is to clean up their messes?
If indeed the rich differ from you and me because they have more money, as Hemingway once allegedly told Fitzgerald, the same evidently applies to celebrity plagiarists and plagiarizing presidents of Harvard, who--if they happen to be Black--can also play the race card. Just as U.S. presidents differ from you and me by having speechwriters, Doris Kearns Goodwin could hire political consultants to salvage her reputation, re-burnish it with the aid of celebrity colleagues, and even buy her way out of a lawsuit and retrieve her reputation after a few spasms of embarrassment. Likewise, Harvard can hire lawyers to build a threatening case--however unsupported by evidence--against any allegations of plagiarizing by its president.
And speaking of Pulitzer Prize winners, consider the fascinating case of Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose, a novel first published in 1971.
By the time he died in 1993, Stegner had made himself the "dean of western letters" by founding the Creative Writing program at Stanford, where he mentored such now celebrated writers as Edward Abbey, Thomas McGuane, and Larry McMurtry. In 1972 his own Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize. But in that very year the Huntington Library Press published the letters of Mary Hallock Foote, a nineteenth-century author whose stories Stegner had been teaching since the late 1940s to his own creative writing students.
Soon after Foote's letters were thus published as her Reminiscences, a novelist named Sands Hall discovered that Stegner had used Foote's letters extensively in Angle of Repose, whose very title he also took from one of them. Since Stegner had gained permission from two of Foote's granddaughters to use her letters as he wished, and since the letters were not copyrighted at the time he used them, he broke no laws in making their words part of his novel, which nominally fictionalizes Mary Hallock Foote as a character named Susan Burling Ward. But besides mining the true story of Mary Foote's life as the wife of a mining engineer who worked in the American west, Stegner filled approximately ten percent of his novel with words copied almost verbatim from Foote's letters (Jackson Benson, Introduction to Angle of Repose [2000] xxv), and what he has thus taken, of course, is now copyrighted under his own name. Furthermore, his way of acknowledging his debt to these letters is so casual and oblique that you could hardly even guess what he had done with them. Designating Foote's granddaughter, Janet Micoleau, only by her initials, he writes in his Author's Note:
My thanks to JM and her sister for the loan of their ancestors. Though I have used many details of their lives and characters, I have not hesitated to warp both personalities and events to fictional needs. This is a novel which utilizes selected facts from their real lives. It is in no sense a family history.
Let us test for a moment the limits of our generosity toward a famous writer. Perhaps, just as Luis Borges's Pierre Menard imagines himself creating ex nihilo a fragment of fiction that just happens to reproduce verbatim a passage from Cervantes' Don Quixote, Stegner imagined himself re-creating the words of Mary Hallock Foote by the simple act of ascribing them to his own fictional heroine. But could that hairline bridge over the gulf of plagiarism ever support so much as a feather's weight of skepticism? Echoing the verdict of Sands Hall, Roxanne Robinson has grimly concluded that "Stegner stole from Mary Hallock Foote's legacy and contaminated his own" (The New Yorker, June 1, 2022). I feel bound to second that verdict.
Nevertheless (and there is always a nevertheless on this topic!), while plagiarism is often either unflagged or inadequately punished, especially when practiced by Pulitzer Prize winners, it remains a fascinating subject for writers of all kinds, and it is safe to predict, I think, that some of our most original novelists will never cease to hug the shores of plagiarism by shamelessly mimicking--and of course often mocking-- their precursors. Late in 2021, the Prix Goncourt--France's most prestigious literary prize--was awarded to a 32-year-old Senegalese novelist named Mohammed Mbougar Sarr for a novel inspired by the true story of a Malian writer accused of plagiarism after winning France's second highest literary prize, the Renaudot. Out of this story Sarr conjured a brand new bird. Feathered like an upstart crow in a variety of pilfered styles, Saar's La Plus Secrète Mémoire des Hommes (The Most Secret Memory of Men) has been called by Le Monde "a great book."
But how, you may ask, can this whole aviary of literary pilferings--whether the sources are copied or imitated, cited or not-- help us to wipe out the plague of plagiarism that now afflicts so many students (and now and then some of their teachers) in our digital age? For a start, I think, we might offer an occasional class or even a whole course on the difference between copying and creative imitation, with examples drawn from published books and articles as well as student papers.
One big reason why students plagiarize is that they have never learned how to copy. So here's what I say to my fellow academics, especially teachers of literature like me: to combat covert copying, assign overt copying. Taking your cue from the playbook of an Elizabethan schoolmaster, ask your students first of all to choose, copy, and paste short passages from whatever work of literature you are teaching and from whatever secondary source or sources you wish them to read The first paper in the course, then, would consist of nothing but quotations flanked by quotation marks, with parenthetical citations or footnotes clearly identifying the source. Without consciously composing anything, then, your students will begin to learn the art of selecting quotations, which is essential to the art of writing about literature, and writing about literature is indeed an art, even though it sometimes bears the humble name of "English comp."
Having submitted their sets of quotations and at least begun to learn the mechanics of citation, students can then be asked to comment on one or more of the passages they've chosen to quote. For the last dozen years of my time at Dartmouth, I used this kind of assignment in a seminar on Ulysses. For each session of the course, I asked my students not only to read a chapter but to choose any one brief passage for any sort of comment they chose to make. Some of these comments--made by students scaling this El Capitan of a novel for the very first time--were so insightful that I pencilled them into the margins of my copy of the novel and have used them in public lectures on it while also (most of the time!) acknowledging their source.
After commenting on individual passages, students can be asked to start writing about ways of linking these passages to each other, and from there, dear colleagues, can you not see them progress to actually composing a critical argument? Whether or not they can take that final step, they will have learned exactly what it means to copy a text for purposes of quotation and/or paraphrase, and how to distinguish that from writing their own words.
Besides learning how to choose and copy passages of text, students need to learn that the internet can dramatically expedite legitimate research, Of course the internet is often portrayed as something like Joyce's Nightttown: a digital redlight district where shady ladies stand in portals all over the screen luring callow youth into lowlit lairs so as to seduce them into copying and pasting their way into "writing" their papers. But youth--and above all young men--have always had to wrestle with temptation. Way back around the year 370 of our era, sixteen centuries before the internet was first woven, an Algerian-born teenager named Augustine spent his hormonally overcharged adolescence swimming through the fleshpots of Carthage. If this horny kid could grow up to write some of the greatest works of Christian literature we have, why can't our students learn to pluck the strings of the internet instead of simply letting its Siren song lure them onto the rocks of plagiarism?
To mix metaphors, the internet is not a Sirens' isle but an inexhaustible reservoir of information and scholarship for anyone bent on critical inquiry, including of course all of us. It's a reservoir that can be tapped by our fingertips at any hour of night or day. Fifty-plus years ago, when I started my life as a scholar, I had to spend at least several days riffling through card files and prowling library stacks just to gather the materials I needed to write an article. Now without even leaving the desk in my home office I can retrieve whatever I need to know about such things as Doris Goodwin's plagiarizing, FDR's speechwriter, and the place and date of Saint Augustine's birth.
But of course I cannot pretend that the vaccine of my copying assignments will work for all students, or that even if it works for a time, it will immunize them for the rest of their writing lives. To write anything at all is to realize that we cannot take verbal flight without borrowing at least some of our feathers from others, whether or not we say just where they came from. And which of us can say for certain that we have always identified the bird from which every single one of our feathers came? Perhaps the best way to start at least reducing the incidence of plagiarism is to admit that its temptations lurk around the edges of every act of composition, including--and very much including--our own.
James A. W. Heffernan is Professor of English Emeritus at Dartmouth College. His latest book is Politics and Literature at the Dawn of World War II (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), which has just been noticed by the New York Review of Books.