What Conclusions Can We Draw from the Forum on Plagiarism Recently Held by the Chronicle of Higher Education?

What do baseball and the study of history have in common? An appreciation of the connection between past and present, to be sure, but if a recent discussion forum on the website for the Chronicle of Higher Education is any indication, they share something far more disturbing as well. According to dozens of posts made by everyone from undergraduates to clerical staff to senior faculty, plagiarism has become higher education’s equivalent of steroid use – a growing scandal involving not only widespread cheating, but an authority structure which has ignored and even condoned the practice.

The forum followed a series of four articles on plagiarism published in the December 17, 2004 edition of the journal. The articles represented a substantial investigation into the nature and frequency of plagiarism in academia. One article considered the definition and types of plagiarism. Another examined the various means by which universities and professional organizations have addressed – or failed to address – incidents of suspected plagiarism. Perhaps the two most interesting articles documented actual cases of plagiarism, not only doing side-by-side comparisons of allegedly plagiarized passages, but identifying the accused parties by name. (Two of the accused plagiarists are historians.)

The articles drew a variety of responses from readers eager to describe their experiences with plagiarism. The group included professors who claimed that graduate students had submitted plagiarized dissertations, scholars who had found their own work published under someone else’s name (in some cases by their own graduate students), and one professor who told the astonishing story of a graduate student whose plagiarism led to a free trip abroad:

I had a grad student who intercepted a phone call asking me to present my research as a keynote overseas in a new emerging country. This student said I was unavailable and would be happy to share "our" work on my behalf. He got a free trip around the world to present many of my studies with his name on the presentation and no mention of my name.

The most numerous – and certainly the most anguished – responses came from graduate students and junior faculty members who claimed to have been plagiarized by senior faculty members. They complained that they were blackballed to one degree or another when they reported their claims to university officials. A few examples:

• “When I was in my PhD program in religious studies one prof, an ordained clergyman as well as a PhD, asked for a copy of a paper I'd written for a course in his field. It had "a more current bibliography" than anything he had, he said. Imagine my surprise when I read his syndicated column a couple months later and found it consisted entirely of parts of my paper, word for word. He was completely unapologetic and unconcerned when I called him on it. A report to the department chair, also an ordained clergy & a PhD, was futile as well. The attitude was somewhere between amusement at my naivete and irritation that I was wasting time. The barely unspoken message is that all profs steal from grad students....”

• “[M]y entire doctoral dissertation was misappropriated by my mentor and published in a top peer reviewed journal without mention of my name as an author - my mentor walked away with credit for 6 years of my research. I chose the route of fighting....I went to the ORI at the NIH and I went up the ladder all the way from the Dean's office to the Provost at my university. The university typically protected the professor and attempted to slander me to the ORI...but when that did not work they pressured the ORI to drop the case. In the end the ORI capitulated and exonerated the Professor...determining that he had the right to publish my dissertation without me because after all the mentor-student relationship is a collaboration and collaborators are co-owners with no obligation to cite the other collaborators in any publication. So the ORI passed policy that is consistent with a license of a mentor to steal a student's work”

• “After completing my Ph.D. at New York University in the area of Biophysics I submitted my manuscript based upon my doctoral dissertation to my mentor for editorial comment before submitting the article to the Journal of Biological Chemistry for peer review. My mentor was to be my co-author as is customary. My mentor declined co-authorship after having submitted the manuscript with minor changes to JBC where it was successfully published. My name was completely removed from authorship as well as any references in the bibliography to my past publications on the subject....the only mention of my name was a notation in the acknowledgment section for "generous advice". The NIH Office or Research Integrity determined that this was not plagiarism because the mentor-student relationship is a collaboration. They determined that the professor/mentor was uncollegial in his actions but that he was not guilty of fraud because any student-mentor relationship is collaborative and under IP law all collaborators are co-owners and therefore have a right to publish without attribution or credit to other collaborators.”

What these and other similar posts suggest is that plagiarism is a widespread practice which is systematically ignored or covered up by academics and professionals who fear losing well-known faculty members and the research money they generate. It is not only grad students who say so. As one professor writes:

I've spent four active decades at a class-1 research university in New England, and talked extensively with close friends at major universities all over the country about these things...Although I have been privileged to know many fine, upright scholars, by now I have concluded that the institutional culture of almost every major research university in the USA is corrupt beyond redemption. It gives lip service to honesty, integrity and simple justice, but places no real value on them. Rather, that culture values public and professional reputation, grantsmanship, money, power, and covering one's posterior at any cost...Pretty near every case of academic dishonesty that I know about, either at first hand or from a trusted person at second hand, has been successfully covered up, and the whistle-blower usually forced out (or starved out) of the field.

Are these claims representative, or even credible? An analysis of their sources yields a mixed conclusion. On the one hand, such stories are of course purely anecdotal, and thus are not a valid measure of the problem. (It is worth noting that one post does give the web address for scientific study of plagiarism within the field of economics.) Moreover, they are from a highly biased and self-selected group of respondents. If one were to publish an article on, say, home burglaries, one would naturally expect to hear from the relatively small number of people who have experienced such trauma rather than from the vast majority who have not. On top of everything else, most of the posts are anonymous, which means that their claims cannot be verified.

On the other hand, not all are anonymous, and it is possible to directly contact the authors of those which are not. Moreover, the anonymity of the posts may actually add to the credibility of the stories in one curious way. One of the primary questions raised by anonymous sources of information has to do with motivation. It is reasonable to wonder if a claim is not only untrue, but simply malicious if its source will not openly identify himself or herself. In this case, however, it is notable that with a single exception, no professor or institution is explicitly named in any of the posts. If the anonymous respondents to this forum were simply “out to get” someone or something, they could have done so without having to fear retribution.

Although this forum was not limited to the field of history, it dovetails all too uncomfortably with recent scandals involving historians. As things stand, no one can say with certainty how extensive the practice of plagiarism has become (or has always been). Perhaps, as James McPherson recently suggested in an HNN interview, it is limited to “ a few well-publicized exceptions which are not representative.” Or perhaps it is as extensive as the readers of the Chronicle of Higher Education suggest. Either way, the example of baseball bears remembering. What began with a trickle of high profile “exceptions” eventually became a flood which challenged the integrity of the game itself.