A colleague pointed me to this post by Phillip Magness reporting several cases of copying-without-full-attribution by history professor Kevin Kruse. I’d never heard of either of these people, but a quick google reveals that Mangess is an economist who studies 19th century America, and Kruse studies 20th century American history, and both of them write frequently about current political controversies. Even if these particular people are somewhat obscure, the topics they talk about are of interest to me and many others.
You can read the above-linked post to get the background on the plagiarism. As is typically the case with these things, the details are more sad than anything else: somebody wanting to get credit for thinking something through but not wanting to put in the work.
The question I want to pursue here is: how prevalent is this sort of thing? I have no idea. In his post, Magness writes:
Such examples suggest a recurring problem in the history profession, which traditionally relies on close textual readings and citation-heavy discussions of other historians as it scrutinizes and interprets the past. . . . In Kruse’s case, the passages from Bayor and Sugrue may portend more serious problems in the academy.
Then he adds:
In an age of declining academic rigor, certain works seem to get a pass—provided that they promote particular ideological narratives that enjoy a following among elite academics and journalists.
I don’t get that last bit. I mean, sure, we can assume that the vast majority of academic historians in this country are on the left, politically, so it would make sense that most academic history plagiarists should be on the left too, just from base-rate considerations. But I don’t know that anyone’s getting a pass. What seems more likely to me is that anyone—left, center, or right—who gets more attention is also more likely to see his or her work scrutinized.
Or, to put it another way, it’s a sad story that perpetrators of scholarly misconduct often “seem to get a pass” from their friends and employers and academic societies, but this doesn’t seem to have much to do with ideological narratives; it seems more like people being lazy and not wanting a fuss. Sometimes you do see particular work getting a pass from one side or the other for ideological reasons—for example, see the cases discussed here, here, and here—maybe the most ridiculous case was Lancet running that horrible gun-control paper, which surely arose from political bias. Unfortunately, though, it seems that non-ideological work also often gets that “pass”—people just often don’t seem to want to hear the bad news.
So, I’m agreeing with Magness in his concerns about prevalence of bad scholarship (here I’m thinking of high-hype, low-quality work in general, not just plagiarism and flat-out fraud) and its tolerance by elite academics and journalists (Harvard, PNAS, Gladwell, NPR, Freakonomics, etc.), but I don’t think this is mostly about ideological narrative; it’s just business as usual. Academia wants continued production, and the news media—partisan or not—want exciting findings, and it’s easier to produce more and get more exciting findings if you’re willing to cheat. In the case of strong partisans like Kevin Kruse or Mary Rosh, you get a kind of Venn diagram intersection, but to me the fundamental problem seems more with the processes of science and science communication, with any ideological patterns more of a base-rate effect.
P.S. OK, this plagiarism story is more entertaining: “about as brazen as plagiarism can get, short of scrawling your name over J.K. Rowling’s on a hardback copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and trying to sell it as your own work, to J.K. Rowling’s editor, while that editor sits at a table eating lunch with J.K. Rowling.”
Stephen Ambrose was many things, but to think that he shared with Kevin Kruse the propensity for similar “ideological narratives” is quite entertainingly wrong.
Also, is this really an “age of declining academic rigor”? I get that that’s the narrative, but the horror stories from fifty years ago are impressive as well.
Total:
Yes, I think that Magness got wrapped up in his particular example and over-generalized, without fully realizing he was actively generalizing. I do that too sometimes!
I read Magness’ piece and it is unconvincing. There are a couple of passages that are very similar, but there are only so many ways to word something. One passage that Magness points out is a sentence where Baylor and Kruse list of prominent civil rights leaders who lived in Atlanta. Well, if you asked me to list prominent civil rights leaders who lived in Atlanta, I would come up with a very similar list. Another example is a passage in which Kruse & Baylor are talking about a packedI committee room. How many ways are there to say that the committee room is filled to capacity. I don’t know what the standards are for proving plagerism, but similarity of boiler-plate passages doesn’t seem fair. These were not passages introducing some novel idea are unique interpretation of some historical facts. If we care about plagerism, we ought to keep in mind why we care. We want people to get credit for their unique contributions and we want to keep track of the source of intellectual contributions.
Steve:
Without getting into the details of the Kruse case, let me just say that concerns about plagiarism aren’t just about “unique contributions.” This came up a few years ago in our discussion of the work of political scientist Frank Fischer: scholarly work is not just about unique contributions, it’s also about synthesis of the existing literature, and copying-without-full-attribution is often associated with a garbling of that literature. We also saw this with statistician Ed Wegman, sociologist Karl Weick, and chess writer Christian Hesse.
In short: copying-without-full-attribution is associated with laziness, bullshitting, and flat-out errors, all of which degrade scholarly discourse.
For more on this general point, see our article, To Throw Away Data: Plagiarism as a Statistical Crime.
I don’t mean to defend plagiarism, but I think pulling a few quotes out that seem boiler plate just doesn’t prove plagiarism to me. I need more evidence.
In listing civil rights leaders with a tie to Atlanta, would you list the same number (9) in the same order?
The first three examples of plagiarism cited in the linked blog post are inconsistent with how you seem to want to view this.
Sorry, this is a reply to Steve.
Kruse lists 10. Bayor lists 9. They are not in the same order.
Bayor: “W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter White, Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney Young, John Lewis, Andrew Young, Vernon Jordan, Ralph Abernathy, and Julian Bond lived within its borders.”
Kruse: “W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter White, Martin Luther King, Sr. and Martin Luther King, Jr., Whitney Young, John Lewis, Andrew Young, Vernon Jordan, Ralph Abernathy, and Julian Bond—have lived inside its limits at one time or another.”
Kruse adds King Sr., otherwise they are the same names and in the same order. Here’s a list of civil rights leaders from Atlanta: https://discoveratlanta.com/things-to-do/famous-civil-rights-leaders-in-atlanta/. There are lots to choose from.
Also, “lived within its borders” and “lived inside its limits” are very similar. Here are a few other ways to say that: “called it their home”, “lived there”, and “spent time their”. When discussing where people have lived, most people do not discuss borders or city limits, so when you see someone using that kind of language (especially after what is essentially the same list of names), I’d say that at least raises some red flags.
Here’s another example that Magness gives (just in case people here don’t click the link).
Sugrue: “The intricate dynamics of personal and group interaction—and their interplay with structural forces—are most visible only at the local level. I have chosen a case study precisely because it allows for a rich description and analysis of the processes that are all too often left in the realm of generalizations such as discrimination, deindustrialization, and racism.”
Kruse: “The intricate dynamics of personal and group interaction—and their interplay with structural forces—are most visible only at the local level. I chose to conduct a case study precisely because it allows for a rich description and analysis of the processes that are all too often left in the realm of broad generalizations—racism, discrimination, backlash, ‘white flight.'”
Seems suspect, no? I would certainly tell my students that this was plagiarism.
“I don’t know what the standards are for proving plagiarism, but similarity of boiler-plate passages doesn’t seem fair. These were not passages introducing some novel idea or unique interpretation of some historical facts.”
+1, very well stated. Most accusations of plagiarism involve the background or intro section, and there is generally no indication that the accused author is trying to take credit for a boilerplate description of what happened in the past. In fact, most disputes seem to involve different ideas about what is required, with one or both sides becoming indignant that their definition of plagiarism is not universally accepted. Examples where someone is truly stealing someone else’s inspiration seem to be surpassingly rare.
The solution is attribution:
“Jones (1992) listed the prominent civil rights leaders who lived in Atlanta:”
Jones did the work. Give Jones the credit.
We don’t provide attribution for a list of state capitols or other fixed items. But “prominent civil rights leaders” aren’t akin to lists of capitols. Someone did the research to come up with the list. If you obtained the information from them rather than researching them independently, credit them.
Anyone who studied the history of the civil rights movement would be familiar with all of those names and that they came from or lived in Atlanta. It is general knowledge in the same way that the capitols of states are. If I wrote about the civil rights era, and I included the phrase, “the student activist John Lewis who was nearly beaten to death on the Petus Bridge”, I wouldn’t necessarily provide a cite especially if I had discussed the incident previously with citations. But, how many different ways are there to say, “the student activist John Lewis who was nearly beaten to death on the Petus Bridge”. I imagine many authors have written that phrase. That can’t be enough for an accusation of plagiarism.
“We don’t provide attribution for a list of state capitols or other fixed items.”
Sure. But let’s make this a little harder.
Suppose I begin a paragraph in my psychology paper “Since the earth rotates around the sun…”. If I don’t credit Copernicus is that plagiarism? If not, why not? What if I want to state that the earth is round and I cannot figure out who first wrote it? Should I be disciplined for plagiarism of some unknown astronomer?
I would suggest that a person who cannot instantly answer these questions to their own satisfaction has never really considered the scope of the concept of plagiarism.
I don’t know a single person that I could say was a “prominent civil rights leader” in Atlanta at any time in the past. I could guess MLK or MX. Were they in Atlanta at X time? I have no idea.
Stop at any construction anywhere outside Atlanta. Ask the workers: can you name the prominent civil rights leaders in Atlanta at such and such a time? Then ask how many state capitols they can name – probably not that many but at least some! :) Ask them whether the sun rotates around the earth or vice versa. These things are not just taught but drilled in grade school. The list of nine prominent civil rights leaders in Atlanta at Time X is not taught in grade school.
On the one hand I agree that it’s not a thing to make a huge deal about. On the other hand, it’s pretty easy to attribute it and avoid the whole issue.
The poster child for ideology clouding a demand for accuracy is Michael Bellesiles, though that saga is now 20 years behind us. I took that to be Magness’ reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arming_America
And, yet he was exposed as a fraud. Awards were taken away from him. What did ideology have to do with it, if the ideology didn’t protect him from being exposed. He invented his data. Most readers wouldn’t be capable of figuring that out until other historians looked into it, which takes time and a lot of effort.
He got the Bancroft Prize. It wasn’t historians that outed him for the most part (although a few were critical). It was outsiders like Clayton Cramer. As Pauline Maier said: historians had “ceased to read carefully and critically, even in the awarding of book prizes.”
The ideology in fact got him exposed… I’ll give you that. But that’s because the claim was otherwise so surprising. A somewhat less ideologically pure theory would probably be in print to this day, Bancroft Prize sill firmly attached.
Jonathan:
This reminds me of when the American Political Science Association gave their Enduring Contribution Award to Frank Fischer for work that he’d plagiarized, and this came after his plagiarism had been revealed.
I sent a bunch of emails and tried my best to get the APSA to revoke the award, but they refused. They just didn’t care. From the last email I received on the matter:
Even beyond the problems of giving an award for misconduct, this all seems unfair to whoever was runner-up for the award that year. But, hey, who wants to rock the boat, right? Had Fischer’s work been strongly ideological (on the left or the right), then maybe there would’ve been more of a push for APSA to clean up their act.
On the other hand, Ed Wegman is a bit of a right-wing figure as well as being a plagiarist, and this didn’t motivate the American Statistical Association to take away the award they’d given to him.
On the ideological point, in case you haven’t been following it, Magness is partly referring to recent histories of the public choice movement, like Nancy Maclean’s biography of James Buchanan, that was largely torn apart by libertarians and conservatives in blogs and op-ed pages for inaccuracies and yet was a finalist for the National Book Award.
And yet, the left wing site VOX published a very critical piece on Maclean’s book calling it a conspiracy theory with no evidence. Maybe the credulity with which some people show to bold claims is not ideological at all.
There was some acknowledgement of the books failings, but that didn’t stop it from being a finalist for the National Book Award and being favorably reviewed in the New York Times.
“Maybe the credulity with which some people show to bold claims is not ideological at all.” I dunno… isn’t that the whole thing about confirmation bias and belief preservation. Reasoning is not always influenced by ideology, but when it is, ideology is a strong influence indeed.
Jfa:
This is related to the last paragraph of my above post. Why We Sleep got favorable reviews too, even though it’s riddled with scientific and factual errors. It has no political content; that didn’t stop influential people from (a) not noticing its major problems and (b) ignoring its major problems when they were told about them. Similarly, when we and others pointed the Freakonomics team to problems in work they’d promoted, the reaction of the Freakonomics team was defensive; they did not respond with “Hey, thanks for pointing out those problems!” Again, nothing political here, just a typical attitude of credulity and not wanting to back down on commitments. So, again, I see these problems happening with left-wing work getting a free pass by left-wingers and right-wing work getting a free past by right-wingers, but all this as part of a general phenomenon of bad work getting a free pass by lots of influential people.
Sometimes, plagiarism is inadvertent and unintended. Somehow, in this blog I am credited with the statement, “You should always shoot a dead horse because you can never be really sure it is dead.” It truly is a maxim to live by–rather like, “take two and hit to right”–but actually, I got it from a coworker in England back in the 1960s. I never before bothered to “own up,” so consider this my confession, my attempt to set the record straight. I feel better already.
Paul,
No, it’s “One should always beat a dead horse because the horse is never really dead.” You beat the horse, you don’t shoot it.
You should know this; it’s your line.