One of the more disturbing outcomes of the late 2023 congressional investigation into the prevalence of antisemitism on America’s college and university campuses was the discovery of widespread plagiarism. No sooner was it clear that Harvard president Claudine Gay may have committed publishing piracy nearly 50 times over the course of her career when stories began breaking about the frequency of similar transgressions at Columbia, Brown, and elsewhere.
Yet as gravely as plagiarism is (or at least should be) treated within scholarly circles, its impact is typically limited to distorting a reader’s perception of who first expressed some important idea or observation, not the accuracy of the secretly copied material itself. It would be far more consequential if academics were either intentionally or unconsciously misrepresenting facts that could seriously mislead average citizens as well as compromise the usefulness…
