Plagiarism Is the Next ‘Fake News’
The 2024 culture wars have begun in earnest, coalescing around the unexpected and extraordinarily messy topic of academic integrity.
Last week, Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, resigned following accusations that she had plagiarized parts of her dissertation. Though Gay, Harvard’s first Black president, admitted to copying text without attribution, she identified the accusations as part of an ideological campaign by right-wing political activists to “unravel public faith in pillars of American society.”
The allegations against Gay wouldn’t be the last. The same week, published a of reporting that Neri Oxman, a former professor at MIT, plagiarized some of her academic work. Oxman is the wife of Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge-fund manager who helped lead the public campaign to oust Gay from Harvard; these stories highlighted the apparent hypocrisy of his plagiarism fixation. In retaliation, Ackman published a series of lengthy on X, saying he intends to launch to be behind the allegations against his wife, although he recently , “We do not know for a certainty that is behind this”) as as ’s journalists. “No body of written work in academia can survive the power of AI searching for missing quotation marks, failures to paraphrase appropriately, and/or the failure to properly credit the work of others,” Ackman wrote. Elsewhere, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who played a central role engineering the allegations against Gay, $10,000 toward a “‘plagiarism hunting’ fund.”
