What Happens When Academics Get Away With Plagiarizing

The truth may be buried, but it is there.

Source: Michael Carruth / Unsplash

Well before the sad news earlier this year that prominent figures in education had admitted (or fiercely denied) they had plagiarized in work that was pivotal in advancing their careers (despite evidence proving this), I had been thinking about the pressure to "succeed."

But first, a story.

In the seventh grade, I had glanced in “the direction of” my neighbor’s paper during an English test. The teacher swooped in and plopped me in the back row, where humiliated, I finished my exam. I felt completely vulnerable, yet I knew how lucky I was to be given a second chance. I never told my parents, who would have been furious. I was an average student at best. From then on, when a test was set before me, I stared straight ahead. It did not occur to me that kids who were smarter than me cheated—and figured out how not to get caught. Is that what success is?

Research that appears in the journal Science and Engineering Ethics found that 2.9% of researchers had either falsified, fabricated, or plagiarized their work. The study authors said that participants (12% of them) had expressed concern regarding questionable research practices of others and that 15.5% of researchers “witnessed others who had committed at least one (research misconduct), while 39.7% were aware of others who had used at least one.” That's a lot of people engaging in some form of "cheating." And that's just in one study.

My parents elevated the notion of a degree, of attending college; not doing so was forbidden. They held academia in high esteem, perhaps feeling "less than" compared to the bookish, "sophisticated" smartness of certain others. But also, they wanted more for their kids. Neither of my parents went to college; my mother left school with a seventh-grade education, and my father finished eleventh grade. I wonder, were they alive today, what they would say about dishonesty in academia? I think they'd be shocked and disappointed. I relate to that, and having one's illusion and naïveté about an institution (of higher learning in general) shattered.

Are ethics codes written to be broken? It just doesn't make sense. Why do people who repeatedly cheat get to keep their jobs and receive promotions? The title of this article in the Harvard Business Review has one answer: Why Do Toxic People Get Promoted? For the Same Reason Humble People Do: Political Skill. This article was based on the following research that appeared in the journal Personality and Individual Differences: Dark Personality, Job Performance Ratings, and the Role of Political Skill: An Indication of Why Toxic People May Get Ahead at Work.

Most Google searches yield results warning students not to plagiarize. I thought academic dishonesty by the tenured and chaired was a rarity. But many articles with some instances of the tenured stealing from their students prove otherwise.

But there is an upside for me, for the part that has held the belief that those who rise to the top did it solely, completely, and fully on their own merit, smarts, and originality. Leonard Cohen wrote, "There is a crack, a crack in everything; That's how the light gets in." This shattered illusion of the intellectual community's best and brightest has certainly been a fracture and rupture for me, and though it has not affected me personally (meaning, it happened to someone I know), it has been personal, in a most unexpected way.

No longer must I or anyone feel like we are standing still while others ascend around us. In other words, not everyone is as they appear.