“From my perspective, what she did was trivial—wholly inconsequential. That’s the reason I’ve so actively tried to defend her,” a political-science professor said, after his paper was included in a list of works that Claudine Gay allegedly copied from. https://t.co/UNLMaPb5bo
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) January 22, 2024
THE NEW YORKER
[…] Many professors have come to Gay’s defense, arguing that the attacks against her were orchestrated by right-wing activists aiming to discredit her because of her work on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and because of her response to October 7th. Perhaps surprisingly, one of her defenders is a professor she allegedly plagiarized from. D. Stephen Voss, an associate professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, knew Gay when they were both graduate students at Harvard. He was her teaching fellow, or T.A., and they worked in the same lab. Voss was a co-author of a 1996 paper that was included in a list of works that Gay allegedly copied from, which, according to the Washington Free Beacon, was compiled in an anonymous complaint to Harvard. One of the two paragraphs in question is pretty technical, describing the methodology of the paper; there are overlapping phrases, but they’re indirect. The other paragraph is a nearly verbatim copying of three or four sentences that Voss and his co-author wrote, with a few words changed.
I spoke with Voss about what it’s been like to get dragged into Harvard’s drama and why academics have been so divided over how to describe Gay’s actions. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Was what Claudine Gay did plagiarism?
What I teach my students, and what most people in the social sciences teach their students, is that borrowing either large chunks of text or a paragraph’s exact logic constitutes plagiarism. So, yes, that’s technically plagiarism.
Why do you append “technically” to the front of “plagiarism”?
I use the analogy of speeding. If you’re driving fifty-seven miles per hour on a fifty-five-mile-per-hour highway, that’s technically speeding. But we don’t expect law enforcement to crack down any time behavior crosses over the line. The plagiarism in question here did not take an idea of any significance from my work. It didn’t steal my thunder. It didn’t stop me from publishing. And the bit she used from us was not in any way a major component of what made her research important or valuable.
So how serious a violation of academic integrity was this?
From my perspective, what she did was trivial—wholly inconsequential. That’s the reason I’ve so actively tried to defend her.
Does the scope of the allegations change your assessment at all—the fact that it wasn’t just material from your paper that she copied, but multiple instances across her work?
I have carefully tried to avoid speaking to the accusations of serial plagiarism, rather than the part that involved me. I have a conflict of interest, both in the sense of having past associations with Claudine, which might make people think I’d be biased toward her, but also because my work was getting attention. I stood to gain from faking moral outrage over it. So people might think I have a conflict of interest in the other direction.
