The playbook of self-appointed anti-plagiarism warriors

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Plagiarism, a sin generally associated with underperforming undergraduates, has suddenly hit the academic elite. First came the news that Claudine Gay, then the president of Harvard University, had copied sentences and phrasings in her dissertation and published articles without the requisite attribution.

As soon as billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman toppled Gay on these grounds, Business Insider reported that Ackman’s high-flying starchitect wife, Neri Oxman, plagiarized her dissertation, lifting entire passages from Wikipedia. Furious, Ackman fired back, trumpeting that Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the German company that owns Business Insider, copied parts of his own dissertation.

Ackman claims to be “just fixing things” in higher education, but it’s really turned into a sorry spectacle, which makes each development feel like something unprecedented is happening. It’s not.

Attempts to expose plagiarists — often advanced to serve some larger agenda — have been commonplace for centuries. Yet, for all the righteous indignation, such accusations and counteraccusations rarely amount to much. History helps explain why that’s the case.

In antiquity, writers and playwrights pillaged each other’s prose but rarely paid a price. Literary critic and novelist Thomas Mallon, whose book on plagiarism should be required reading for anyone tempted to borrow other people’s writing, notes that literary theft “was more a matter for laughter than litigation” in the classical era.

This is perhaps understandable: Absent the mass circulation of written work, much less profit from doing so, any attempt at plagiarism could be dismissed as confirmation of the adage that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” Copying became further normalized during the Middle Ages when monks charged with preserving knowledge spent much of their time transcribing what others had written.

Then came the invention of the printing press. Anyone struggling to come up with their own words now had far greater access to other people’s. Talk about temptation. Not coincidentally, a growing number of individuals then began to think of themselves as writers with a financial stake in their creations.

Suddenly, if someone else took your words, it was tantamount to theft — except that it was next to impossible to prosecute someone for it.

Mallon locates the rise of concerns over plagiarism to the literary scene of Elizabethan London. In fact, it was during this era that playwright Ben Jonson, casting about for a way to describe literary theft, came up with a forerunner of the modern word plagiarism: plagiary, derived from the Latin plagiarius, meaning “kidnapper.”

The era’s writers began accusing each other of stealing each other’s work or the writings of dead authors. Shakespeare himself stood accused, though his borrowings generally weren’t of the cut-and-paste variety but rather pilfered plots and other unacknowledged sources of inspiration.

Plenty of others, though, borrowed prose word for word, and critics began flagging some of these violations. In 1687, English biographer Gerard Langbaine wrote, “I cannot but esteem them as the worst of plagiaries, who steal from the writings of those of our own Nation … .”

Such sentiments eventually translated into the concept of “literary property,” paving the way for the first national copyright laws. Yet these were best suited to prosecuting individuals who reprinted entire books without permission, not those who only lifted paragraphs.

The literature of the Romantic Era, which valorized artistic originality, made plagiarism increasingly disreputable. This is not to say that writers acted any better than their forebears.

Consider Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was one of the giants of the Romantic Movement and someone who habitually — and usually unjustly — accused others of plagiarism, often to settle scores. Yet Coleridge was himself a serial plagiarist, as Thomas De Quincey revealed in a hit job published after Coleridge’s death. As Mallon notes, De Quincey was, appropriately enough, eventually exposed as an even more enthusiastic kidnapper of other writers’ words.

It became an entirely different problem in higher education despite the relative absence of a profit motive. This was a function of the fact that the modern university, modeled on Germanic tradition, puts a premium on acknowledging existing scholarship via quotation and citation, particularly via the footnote.

By the 20th century, plagiarism (formerly a literary transgression) became increasingly common in academia as well, as scholars helped themselves to other people’s prose without the requisite acknowledgments.

Technological changes after the printing press continued to make swiping someone else’s work even easier. The advent of word processing programs, when combined with the sudden availability of published work on the internet, likely contributed to the growing willingness of students and faculty to commit the sin of plagiarism.

But a sin is not necessarily a crime. As Peter Hoffer has noted, plagiarism in the historical profession generally remains, as it does elsewhere in the academy, an “ethical matter, not a legal one.” Consequently, offenders are typically tried in the court of public opinion, even if they face scrutiny by professional bodies as well.

Which brings us back to the question of the propriety of these public reckonings. Any instance of theft should be called out and examined, but the way self-appointed prosecutors of plagiarism have gone about it has hardly redounded to the benefit of their own reputation.

And maybe because the incidence of plagiarism has remained steady, if not grown, even the final fate of those accused of it is also familiar: embarrassment and shame, perhaps, but few of them find themselves permanently ostracized. Skeptical? Just ask Doris Kearns Goodwin, Fareed Zakaria, Jane Goodall, and last but not least, Joe Biden.

Stephen Mihm, a professor of history at the University of Georgia, is coauthor of “Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance.”