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.
I’m struck by how clearly you saw the possibility of a prize that you could pursue in all of this—that if you took up this campaign against Gay you could get some mileage out of it, professionally and personally. It’s so cynical, but it also seems right.
I don’t know that I did see it clearly. Once I saw that no significant plagiarism had actually taken place, my gut reaction was to jump to Claudine’s defense. Later on, other people told me, “I admire the approach you’ve taken—that you didn’t try to capitalize on this.” And then it dawned on me.
Do you think that Gay should have been fired from her job rather than being allowed to resign? And do you think that she should get to remain on Harvard’s faculty?
You’re asking me about these bigger-picture academic questions that I’m not comfortable answering. Claudine Gay was an immensely successful political scientist and university administrator. I’m off in the trenches teaching two-hundred-person undergraduate introductory classes. These questions of what should happen to Claudine Gay—we’re so far beyond my pay grade.
As a journalist, I feel like plagiarism is one of the worst possible sins I could commit. It would be an absolute nightmare if I accidentally copied someone’s work or if I were accused of doing so. Is that sense of horror there for academics? Was it there when you were at Harvard?
