I was in the middle of a major book project when the news about Claudine Gay’s plagiarism hit the headlines this past December. I thought I would write a short piece about it but as we know, the issue got bigger every day and I realised I was now in the thick of a much more complicated piece — one that I’d actually hoped to only start and finish in the spring, after the book was done. But there it is: sometimes you choose the timing of a project, and sometimes it chooses you. “On Plagiarism,” published today, is part of series of essays, and I’m using this document, “The Plagiarism Papers,” as a place to collect the links as I publish the separate segments.
The Harvard matter has yielded quite literally hundreds of takes, many of them insightful and — as is always inevitable in the current media landscape — most of them eventually repetitious and feeding off each other. Perhaps the best thing to come out of all this is that Harvard appears to have lost some of its, ah, Harvard-ness. An institution once held in something resembling awe is now revealed as what we can only call, reaching backwards to the aughts for a suitable phrase, a right hot mess.
But while we’ve learnt so much about Harvard (that the university wishes we didn’t know), we haven’t really understood much about plagiarism, and my series aims to add to the conversation about what the term might really mean, and more importantly, what its real consequences might be. I come at this from a Marxist perspective — and to the best of my knowledge, there aren’t a lot of others, if anyone, to approach the topic this way (feel free to correct me). A major problem with the contemporary left, such as it is and at least in the U.S, is that leftists don’t think art / creative work/ philosophy / discursive work should be even adequately compensated. This, as I make clear, is a ridiculous and unsustainable position.
One reason that “On Plagiarism,” the main essay in this series took so long is that the subject involves several related concepts that need to be properly framed or, rather, re-framed and recontextualised. For instance, “On Plagiarism” was to be about Claudine Gay and race as well, until I realised that the topic needed far more space, in a separate piece. Similarly, I found myself writing more about Doris Kearns Goodwin, and I decided that this topic too needed a separate essay. I’ll be publishing short pieces, bits from the cutting room floor, over the next few months — I needed to do that so that “On Plagiarism” stayed on track as an exploration of the topic, and didn’t end up as a novella.
Below is a list of what has been published so far, and what will be published in the near-ish future. The very last one will be my account of the specific instances where my own work has been plagiarised.
Published:
“On Originality.”
“Don’t Share Your Book Proposal.”
“The Corruption of Influence: On Dimes Square, Byline, and the New York Times.”
And, really, all my work so far on writing and publishing, found here (for starters).
Forthcoming
“On Claudine Gay and Racism in Academia.”
“On Gender, Genius, and Plagiarism or, Plagiarism’s Servant Problem.”
“Plagiarism: Some Case Studies.”
“Plagiarism: What’s Going On In Europe?”
“Doris Kearns Goodwin or, Plagiarism Has Its Rewards.”
“Does Harvard Really Exist?”
“To All the Plagiarists I Have Never Loved.”
“Big Media, Big Steals.”
Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Abbey in the Oakwood (1809–10).