Quite a few high-profile careers in higher education have been upended as of late amid questions of academic integrity. Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who had served as president of Stanford University for seven years, stepped down in 2023 after it was determined that he had falsified information for a dozen academic papers. The latest casualty is Claudine Gay, […] … learn more→

Plagiarism is a serial killer that killed the career of thousands of students in almost every corner of the world. Avoid plagiarism throughout your academic career and good news is that avoiding plagiarism is not a tricky thing to handle. You can do it quite easily if you follow some expert advice or techniques. Why […] … learn more→

John Hughes’s novel The Dogs has been withdrawn from the longlist for the Miles Franklin Prize after an investigation by The Guardian identified numerous instances of plagiarism. Hughes’s lifting of passages from other books has sparked furious debate and literary detective work – mostly on Twitter – prompting questions about the nature of influences, literary pastiche and […] … learn more→

In January, Austrian minister Christine Aschbacher became the latest in a long line of politicians in central and eastern Europe to be accused of plagiarising their academic theses – but one of the few to resign over it. She gave up her cabinet post for labour, family and youth in the wake of allegations that […] … learn more→

In March 2019, the world of journalism was shaken by a case of plagiarism  : the former editor-in-chief of the New York Times was accused of having used passages from existing sources for her book  Merchants of Truth . A year later, it was the turn of the French academic world to be shaken by a scandal: faced with proven evidence of […] … learn more→

“Plagiarism” is the name of the collective neurosis of academic life – and it’s only getting worse. Academics worry endlessly about both being plagiarised and being accused of plagiarism. The concern has even extended to self-plagiarism, which in a saner world would be regarded as an ordinary exercise of the author’s copyright. Moreover, the neurosis […] … learn more→

Educational software – whether it’s a teaching aid or a program designed to help teachers with administration – is big business. The recent multi-billion dollar acquisition of Turnitin, a program that is used around the world to flag possible evidence of plagiarism, is further proof of this. But does this application mean that universities are actually dealing with […] … learn more→

When the Roman poet, Juvenal, wrote the line “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (Who will guard the guards?), it really meant, “Who will ensure that those who guard us do not overreach their authority?” But there is another sense of the question: Who will protect those who are meant to protect us? At higher education institutions […] … learn more→

“Antonio Vivaldi did not write 600 concerti, but the same concerto 600 times.” This witticism, which has been ascribed – possibly apocryphally – to the 20th-century Italian composer Luigi Dallapicolla, could also be applied, with a few factual tweaks, to Vivaldi’s contemporary, Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach not only reused his own material through the process […] … learn more→

If Donald and Melania Trump were students in one of my writing classes at Columbia University, they’d be facing charges of violating academic integrity. More specifically, they’d both be accused of—and no doubt found responsible for—plagiarism. (Donald would also be brought up for fabrication and impersonation.) As a result, they’d receive Fs in my class […] … learn more→