The Claudine Gay controversy is rife with bad faith from multiple quarters, in addition to real issues of complaint about genuine issues of concern. I focus on only one here, plagiarism, including the bad faith of it and Harvard’s bad faith response to accusations of it in the scholarship of Gay.

After an obviously hurried and inadequate investigation by an anonymous committee of outside scholars, Harvard declared that it found examples of “duplicative language without appropriate citation.” Does one have to serve on the board of the Harvard Corporation to rediscover one of the definitions of plagiarism and forget the word for it? The Corporation, in retaliatory threat unbecoming an institution of higher learning supposedly committed to the advancement of knowledge, had actually threatened, through lawyers, to sue one of the newspapers that reported early accusations and instances of Gay’s plagiarism.

Some in recent days have resorted to labeling Gay’s transgressions as some purportedly less serious, more exculpatory offense of “word plagiarism,” in contrast to “idea plagiarism,” as if, William Carlos Williams notwithstanding, words don’t carry and convey ideas – ideas that, in intellectual life, even as exposition only, frequently warrant their provenance be communicated through “appropriate citation.” The two attached images represent examples of this very issue in Gay.

In the first instance, you see duplicated language highlighted. At the end of the first sentence of Gilliam’s original, we see parenthetical citation of three sources. Note that the words of that sentence aren’t presented in quotation marks, so Gilliam is offering those words as his own. He isn’t citing words. But he considers the idea of that sentence – politics as a vehicle for upward mobility among racial and ethnic minorities – to have a provenance in the work of others that he needs to credit. What is meant here by “politics” is unclear: Simple interest? Simply voting? Activism? Running for office? The paper’s greater context undoubtedly has made that clear.

It’s the kind of idea that most people might consider a kind of truism, expressed as an opinion about the world drawn from their experience of it. But a political scientist will need to substantiate the claim. I presume that the sources political scientist Gilliam cites present narratives from studies and even data sets that provide evidence for the claim. That work is not his, so he cites and credits it.

Gay not only duplicates Gilliam’s language, with the kind of minor alteration of it that is generally indication of conscious activity, but she drops the multi-source citation, another apparently conscious act. To be clear, Gilliam presents what he offers, via citation, as the idea of others, and he does so in language, absent quotation marks, he presents as his own. Gay plagiarizes Gilliam’s words by failing to quote them and credit him, and she also plagiarizes the idea of multiple other scholars by failing to credit them, as Gilliam did.

In the second instance, we find almost identical activity but with two interesting differences. In neither case does Gay quote nor attribute the language she uses to Gilliam. After the first sentence, she duplicates his citations as well – with one addition. Given my skepticism now, were I on an investigative committee, I would review that additional citation for its legitimacy and relevance.

The second sentence of this passage again mostly duplicates the key language of Gilliam – the idea conveyed is identical – yet the cited sources are almost entirely different. (Gurin is cited in both Gilliam and Gay but from a different paper.) That is a very curious duplication of language and idea from the work of another scholar obviously being plagiarized yet with an almost completely altered set of citations. Again, were I on an investigative committee, I would scrutinize it.

The greater area of concern in all this is not Gay but rather Harvard and its influence on higher education and the nation.