Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a picturesque town steeped in the very short history of the United States. George Washington’s HQ during the American war of independence is one of the attractions. It is located almost opposite the house where the leading traitor of the period, Benjamin Church, the first surgeon general of the US Army, was held. Across the Charles river, the teas that featured in the Boston Tea Party can be tasted right where it happened.
Now the university town is in the thick of politics again. Harvard University is the epicentre of an upheaval in academia triggered by Israel’s attack on Gaza. It’s not restricted to the groves of academe. It’s a streetfight, a dogfight. Trucks were parked in busy locations, carrying posters with the pictures and contacts of students who had accused Israel of targeting Palestinian citizens, for the benefit of trolls. For weeks after the Hamas attack, when Muslim students felt threatened, a small propeller plane flew over the town every morning trailing a banner. It’s a device peculiar to the US, where products ranging from bubble gum to presidential candidates have been advertised in this manner. This particular banner said: “Harvard hates Jews.” For variety, it also directed: “Harvard, stop hating Jews!”
This advertising did nothing for Jews, but was instrumental in securing the resignation of Harvard’s president Claudine Gay, one of three leaders in higher education who flubbed a Congressional hearing about containing anti-semitism on campus. Their responses were regrettably tentative, because there can be no two ways of thinking about minority rights. Significantly, the last straw was not anti-semitism, but charges of plagiarism. In Gay’s work earlier in her career, her sources were not sufficiently credited.
The jury is divided. Traditionalists say that it’s a problem. Other academics say the transgression is trivial, and that Gay’s resignation was an immediate response to a mob attack, which left no time for normal processes of academic scrutiny to work.
Gay’s exit is hugely political because she was a black woman at the helm of an Ivy League campus, but after the event, the debate is all about plagiarism. The question: since academic production has turned into an unmoderated tsunami, is it time to re-examine the recap-and-attribute culture of scholarly work? It is in the nature of research to be incremental, and a researcher stands on the shoulders of prior leaders, but most papers on preprint servers are incremental to a small degree. It consists of heavily footnoted paraphrases of prior research, and if the footnoting falls short of standards, it can result in a Harvard president’s exit.
This tradition of recapitulation and attribution derives from the European scholastic tradition, whose literature is liberally peppered with the phrase ‘per auctorite’, which is church Latin for the modern journalistic phrase, ‘according to sources’. The preoccupations of that era in Europe seem irrelevant now (“Is the Holy Ghost a substance?”), but its investigations laid down the protocols of the academic pursuit of knowledge. One of them is the repeated reformulation of old work which was probably useful until the Gutenberg era, when books were rare and handmade. Even Herodotus borrowed freely from hearsay, and did not bother to attribute his sources.
Today, a mass market publish-or-perish academic culture is producing millions more half-learned papers than the world needs. Mostly, they recapitulate earlier work in the field in a hopefully unique language. The insistence on uniqueness has been sharpened by artificial intelligence, which has, in turn, inspired measures to contain AI-written work. But since AI creates new recaps in seconds, does the obsession with uniqueness remain relevant? Is it not possible to reference standardised recaps, and give new papers room to express what is actually new to reduce verbiage and make classification easier?
The Oxford English Dictionary is a reliable guide to the antiquity and provenance of terms. It places the first instance of ‘plagiarism’ in the early 17th century. How was the appropriation of texts and ideas treated before that? As they had been treated for millenniums, back to the dawn of humanity. Consider cookery, a technology proceeding from man’s control over fire that has enormously benefited the human race. Cookery helps groups to prolong life and useful function by widening the base of nutritional sources and making them accessible to the very old and the very young. Communal cooking is also presumed to have deepened community links and, perhaps, played a role in the development of speech.
Significantly, there has never been any demand for recipes to be unique and unplagiarised. Tomorrow’s cookery writer in the UK is free to copy off Madhur Jaffrey. You are free to riff off your grandmother’s recipe for kundru, too. Cookery is presumed to exist in the commons.
Let’s move from technology, of which cookery is an example, to literature. The Ramayan was originally an oral text and has been freely interpreted from here to Bali. Attempts to set bounds on authenticity, and to create an authorised version set in the physical space of Ayodhya—like when AK Ramanujan’s paper on the many Ramayans was taken off the Delhi University syllabus, and now, when the temple is about to be inaugurated—are misbegotten. Like great food, great stories appeal to diverse multitudes precisely because they are not canonical. The question of plagiarism does not apply to them because they are enriched by borrowings, which is not the same as theft. Rigid rules barring plagiarism need not apply to many other categories of human knowledge. In fact, they could stand in the way of collaborative creativity.
(@pratik_k)
Pratik Kanjilal, For years, he has been speaking easy to a surprisingly tolerant public