Plagiarism is not a sin

It’s said that these days universities are echo chambers, but perhaps nobody expected it to be demonstrated quite so literally. At the beginning of the month, Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned following weeks of plagiarism allegations. Some of these were unambiguous: whole paragraphs replicated with minimal alteration in a way that couldn’t easily be explained away as accidental. Other proposed cases were less manifestly intentional but nonetheless suggestive, including the fantastically bizarre claim that Gay plagiarised some lines of her dissertation’s acknowledgement section — the bit where, traditionally, authors fulsomely thank those people instrumental in their personal intellectual journey. Apparently this manager-in-waiting wasn’t even able to find the words to thank her own parents without borrowing a few lines from somebody else.