2 Comments

I know this is a year old, Brad, but I was glad to come across it as I was searching for Watt's comments. I vaguely remembered them from reading about the trial years ago, and I was sort of boggled by Watt's attitude. "C'mon, you guys, you can't expect our footnotes to actually support our arguments. That's not how history works." Ah! Well, good to know!

I was prompted to search by the current brouhaha over Claudine Gay's resignation. There seem to be a number of academics defending her failure to enclose various passages in quotation marks. I agree that some of her plagiarism is trivial, but some of it isn't. There have been a few rumblings that chime with Watt's, comments along the lines that if you subjected every academic to a plagiarism checker, *many* would fail. Is this a case of "saying the quiet part out loud", or is it simply a few bad actors projecting their own misdeeds onto academia as a whole? The sociology of academia is fascinating.

Expand full comment

In my generation, a few bad actors...

But I don't know for how many in younger generations what was impossible in mine—copy a paragraph, paste it, and then change one word in five—is how they "write" some of the time...

Expand full comment