An academic author and former Harvard professor defended former Harvard President Claudine Gay after her plagiarism scandal, arguing citation mistakes are commonly found in academic work. "Essentially, what I have to say is what a lot of people have said. What she did was a minor infraction of the rules," Dr. Marshall Poe told Fox News Digital. Poe spent years teaching Russian and Eurasian history at elite universities like Harvard and has published interviews with thousands of scholars for his podcast platform, the New Books Network. An academic author himself, Poe argues true "idea theft" in academia is exceedingly rare, and he doesn't believe Gay was guilty of it.

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.

If you squint and tilt your head, you can see some similarities in the blurry shapes that are Harvard and OpenAI. Each is a leading institution for building minds, whether real or artificial--Harvard educates smart humans, while OpenAI engineers smart machines--and each has been forced in recent days to stare down a common allegation. Namely, that they are represented by intellectual thieves. Last month, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo and the journalist Christopher Brunet accused then–Harvard President Claudine Gay of having copied short passages without attribution in her dissertation. Gay later admitted to "instances in my academic writings where some material duplicated other scholars' language, without proper attribution," for which she requested corrections. The two cases share common ground, yet many of the responses to them could not be more different.

Alon Yamin, co-founder and CEO of the AI-based text analysis platform Copyleaks, is helping to combat plagiarism in education, especially in light of the recent Harvard scandal. Following the controversial accusations against the school's former president Claudine Gay, Yamin emphasized that tackling the issue of plagiarism is more important now than ever, especially with the rise in AI. "A year ago, many people considered plagiarism a moot point following the expansion of AI. What was there to worry about if AI was writing everything? But as we've seen in the news over the last few months, plagiarism hasn't gone anywhere. It seems to be as prevalent as ever," Yamin said to Fox News Digital.