On Universities and Plagiarism

There has been discussion lately about University Presidents and life on American university campuses.

American University Presidents

(1) It is always good to see overpaid university presidents justifying their high salary by leaving their posts due to their inability to perform verbal gymnastics and their failure to appear to be on both sides of every issue. [Liz Magill, Penn]¹

(2) Relatedly, another famous University President (i.e. the High School Principal) from a famous University (famous because it was what we would now consider the first high school (i.e. “colledge” in its charter) in the US) was recently fired for plagiarism: something high school, and even Harvard, students are sometimes punished for, after somehow failing to resign for the same issue as (1) above. [Claudine Gay, Harvard].²

(3) A University Chancellor says he was fired over pornographic videos made with his wife [Joe Gow, University of Wisconsin – La Crosse ]. Now, I am all in favour of anyone doing more or less anything legal they want in their private life, and am bemused by the feigned moral outrage of the Wisconsinites, but if you are a University Chancellor or whatever, surely you needed to disclose outside earnings to the Board of Regents.

The Job is to be Fired When Something Bad Happens

University President is a tough but well-remunerated job. They are there to add prestige and raise money for the university, occasionally fire a football coach, and perhaps to set direction. But the marginal change in direction from any head of a large, extant, stable organisation is small; a university head is not a corporate CEO, rarely a founder, and certainly no Steve Jobs. These folks are not special, they are interchangeable parts in the academic machine.³

If they fail at this job and beclown their employer, they should leave. The more they are defended on extraneous grounds,⁴ the worse the defeat when they are ultimately deposed. In other words, the job of the American University President is to be thrown under the bus by the Board of Regents when something bad happens at the University, especially when it is their own doing.⁵

The University of Minnesota’s Ken Keller was forced to resign as President (remaining as a member of the faculty) over costs associated with remodeling the President’s official house (Eastcliffe). Apparently the story hit newspaper headlines (as if he was remodeling his own kitchen for millions of dollars, rather than a kitchen for serving hundreds of people simultaneously), while he was traveling (in this pre-Internet, pre-Mobile phone era) and he didn’t respond for days. Obviously he took the fall for something that was probably a bit unfair.

Metropolitan State University President Sue Hammersmith retired early due to a payroll fiasco under her watch.

The list goes on.

This is unlike academic staff, who are less well remunerated but should have greater job security due to the nature of their work being controversial, and that nature needing to be encouraged.

Plagiarism and Originality

Is the real problem the copying the idea (i.e. lack of originality) or the lack of sourcing? McWhorter argues they need separate terms (sure), and that the first is more egregious. But really, very few ideas are original.⁶ Copying boilerplate text, especially self-plagiarism, is hardly the worst crime.⁷ Nevertheless it is an easily proven one.⁸

One would hope a University President would be drawn from the set of above average scholars, who has both original ideas and original words to represent other people’s ideas. Certainly we don’t generally expect University leaders to be the best scholars, because then we would be wasting those scholars in administration. (The best scholars are far more valuable to society as scholars than as even above average university administrators, though administrators are paid more). But we also do not expect them to be the worst scholars, or non-scholars, any more than a Pope should be non-Catholic or a Transit board member should be someone who never rides transit. They need at least some respect from those they purport to manage and their “customers”. The trend toward managerial interchangeability without domain knowledge is not good.

Thus contra McWhorter, I believe the real problem is the latter, lack of sourcing of quotes. LLMs, University Presidents, and undergraduates alike should source their quotes and near quotes. Copying ideas without referencing is also bad, but also pretty much an unenforceable thing. If you write the second paper about something, and don’t cite the first, shame on you, and shame on the people who cite you without giving credit to the source of the idea. We cannot however really enforce that. Maybe you, and your reviewers, didn’t see the first paper (it happens, maybe they used different terms, or published in an obscure-to-you outlet). More sinisterly, maybe you stole your idea and got to market or got a patent on someone else’s idea first … but really prove that. You would have a much harder case to prove for good reasons, idea embezzlement is not nearly as traceable as money.

Relatedly, LLMs should be allowed to freely use (read and internalise) copyrighted material, but be required to cite sources for anything that regurgitates the original if it is not common knowledge or public domain. Then sources can be compensated based on frequency of use through some fund like ASCAP. While this may be hard for a simple LLM, I would think coupling the LLM with feedback loops and web searches should help determine the degree of various sources in its output.

Whence the University

Academic staff at the University of Sydney recently went into conniptions because our University Vice Chancellor (i.e. the Australian equivalent to the US University President or Chancellor) refused to endorse an official University stand on “The Voice” referendum. Without intending to suck up, he actually made the right decision.

The University of Chicago famously has a set of Free Speech principles. Members of the UChicago community can (within bounds) say what they want.

The University itself doesn’t take political stands. It should be a forum for where ideas are explored.⁹ It establishes rules for debate, and what is acceptable mode of argument.¹⁰

I guess it’s better that once the right tries to cancel left-wing administrators for a change, that the left-wing decides to endorse free speech, than never to endorse it at all,¹¹ but it would be nice if this were all a bit less hypocritical.

Dall-E image of a female university President committing plagiarism.

1. That is, she (along with Harvard’s Gay and MIT President Kornbluth, who is actually Jewish, and has thus far survived), failed to clearly say that calling for genocide against Jews would violate the University of Pennsylvania Code of Conduct. That code says “This precludes acts or threats of physical violence against another person (including sexual violence) and disorderly conduct.” Whether a group of people includes individual persons within that group should be obvious (See Set Theory). Universities are known to discipline students for saying much less violent things, or academics discussing race in the context of preferred immigration policies, so are hardly bastions of free speech. Funders of course threatened to pull money, which is what led specifically to her departure.

2. Harvard’s Enormous Endowment (monetary, not physical, but the school stands six-feet tall on its wallet) demonstrates University of Pennsylvania founder Benjamin Franklin’s adage about compound interest ‘Money makes money. And the money that money makes, makes more money’.

3. I didn’t say the “interchangeable parts on the assembly line of the academic diploma mill”, but I thought it.

4. E.g. claiming a particular president is being deposed because of her race or gender, when she has obviously not personally suffered because of either, is a bit odd. (She in fact comes from an extremely wealthy family).

5. Metaphorically, not advocating genocide by public transport for any class of individuals. Though apparently that’s allowed for one class of individuals, just saying.

6. And though I thought of this all by myself, it is also not original. This is the problem. As Billy Joel said when describing music “All the good notes have been taken”.

7. Obviously authors who just quote an entire paper and provide the citation should be docked for lack of effort, but not plagiarism if they cited it.

8. Have I ever committed plagiarism? Not as far as I know or recall. I have of course reworded things other people have written, (things have been reworded by me, and text is occasionally rewritten, but there are only so many ways to express ideas that others have posed, though undoubtedly there are many different ways to present an idea or expression that has first been put to paper by another) and when it isn’t textbook common knowledge, give them credit. And I have openly on the blog used ChatGPT, which I think generally rewords things. I have quoted things using HTML styling and links, which can get lost over time due to digital decay. Nevertheless, I have worked with well over 100 coauthors, so I cannot vouch for every word of text.

9. ChatGPT tells me to credit:

John Henry Newman, a 19th-century theologian and educator, particularly in his work "The Idea of a University" (1852). Newman emphasized the university's role as a place for intellectual exploration rather than as an institution that imposes specific beliefs or ideologies.

10. E.g. calling for a particularly University President to be run over by a bus is unacceptable, but calling for University Presidents as a category to be run over by buses, is fine.

11. Is it better to have loved and lost cancel culture than to never have cancelled at all?