Plagiarism Is the Next 'Fake News'

The 2024 culture wars have begun in earnest, coalescing around the unexpected and extraordinarily messy topic of academic integrity. Last week, Harvard's president, Claudine Gay, resigned following accusations that she had plagiarized parts of her dissertation. Though Gay, Harvard's first Black president, admitted to copying text without attribution, she identified the accusations as part of an ideological campaign by right-wing political activists to "unravel public faith in pillars of American society." The allegations against Gay wouldn't be the last. The same week, Business Insider published a pair of articles reporting that Neri Oxman, a former professor at MIT, plagiarized some of her academic work.