Claudine Gay’s recent spectacular flameout has sparked a smoldering brushfire over academic plagiarism.

Suddenly, we are seeing plagiarism everywhere. Shortly after the exposure of Gay’s sins, Neri Oxman, who is a Harvard professor herself, and the wife of Bill Ackman—the hedge fund manager that led a donor’s backlash against Harvard’s tolerance of anti-Semitism—was accused of it. The fact that Oxman is white has not deterred accusations that uncovering plagiarism is the right’s new weapon to purge black women from academia. In an ironic twist, Francesca Gino, a Harvard “honesty researcher,” stands accused of plagiarism herself. Naturally, all this is part of the right’s racist attack on science, intellectuals, and academics led by the bête noir Chris Rufo, who is being accused of leading a white supremacist “scalping” party against professors he doesn’t like. No worries, this professor provides a helpful guide to thwart the stupid right-wing demons.

In summary, it’s your classic cluster-you-know-what.

Such things usually end when everybody walks away from the debris, shrugs their shoulders, and waits for the next one. But there is some edification lurking in this one because plagiarism, not to be excused in any way, is actually a symptom of a deeper problem. The plagiarism problem will only be solved when that deeper problem is addressed.

C. Northcote Parkinson (1909-1993) is best known for Parkinson’s Law—”work expands to fill the time available for its completion.”[1] Parkinson’s legacy extends far beyond his eponymous law, however: he was a witty and wide-ranging critic of the administrative and corporate state.[2] One “law,” which Parkinson never named but which I will call Parkinson’s Corollary of the Perfect Corporation, is at the heart of the academy’s present malaise.

According to Parkinson, organizations follow a predictable arc, each stage set by its predecessor. Initially, the organization is driven by creative vitality, which plays out in a milieu of “chaotic squalor.” Transitory workspaces pop up in unusual places—under stairwells, in shabby buildings—and disappear as new needs arise. People come and go on missions that, to the outside observer, look to be inscrutable but are crystal clear to the people involved.

Out of that can come success and, often, wealth. This sets the organization’s next stage: the need to manage it. People with organizational talent are brought in, organization charts are drafted, mission statements are set down, and ancillary personnel are brought in to handle the inevitable drudge work of accounting, hiring, firing, and many other onerous functions. After a time, new administrative quarters are built, often with glittering accoutrements. The creatives depart or are superannuated to be replaced by others more suitable to the growing managerial regime. This stage, Parkinson notes, marks an organization that is “on the point of collapse.” To quote Parkinson:

During a period of exciting discovery or progress, there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters. The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done. Perfection, we know, is finality; and finality is death. [emphasis added]

This pretty much describes the state of the modern academy. Out of exciting beginnings, the administrative university Benjamin Ginsberg warned us about more than a decade ago has now matured—if I may use that word—into Parkinsonian perfection: a glittering, perfectly organized, hollow, and brain-dead shell. [3]

Looked at this way, it should not surprise anyone that plagiarism should be rampant in our modern universities. As the administrative university has grown, so too have demands for accountability and for evidence of sound management. This is quite natural: people footing the bill—increasingly federal funding of research and education, and therefore taxpayers—have every right to know how their money is being spent.

The administrative university’s response has been to establish and count metrics of academic productivity, an oxymoron if ever there was one. Number of publications per year is one easy metric, and there are a lot of these to count. More than five million academic articles were published worldwide in 2022, building on a five-year growth rate of about 23 percent. Outlets to accommodate this flood of knowledge are equally prolific: there are nearly 47,000 academic journals presently in print, and their numbers have grown by roughly 90 percent since 2000.

These are impressive numbers for administrations to tout. “See? Look at all the new knowledge your money is paying for! Where else will you see 5-year growths of 23 percent?” Like everything else about the administrative university, the numbers are as hollow as the administrations that deploy them. To be sure, intellectual breakthroughs do happen, but at a rate that seems unrelated to the amount of money spent.[4] The overall effect is a proliferation of weeds in the academic publishing ecosystem, overwhelmingly populated by publications that are never read, never advance the frontiers of knowledge, and are marked by a disturbingly high incidence of incompetence and downright fraud.

This is not to say that academic publications do not have value. On the contrary, they are very valuable: their value is just not what publications are supposed to be, that is, media of communication between scholars. In the new academic ecosystem, their value lies in being tokens for promotion, prestige, and tenure. It does not matter what the publications say. As such, they are susceptible to the many abuses of academic publishing we see today: misrepresentation, fraud, the proliferation of “predatory journals,” the “retraction epidemic,” and, yes, plagiarism. With the advent of online tools for sniffing out plagiarism, we are likely to be seeing a lot more come to light. But nobody will care because nobody reads academic publications anymore. What matters is the count, not the content.

How to respond to this?

We could descend into a plagiarism witch hunt, but we already have lots of experience with that, and it has had no good effect. Nor has the outcome of plagiarism witch hunts ever been uplifting. The problem has not yielded to better management and oversight, either: Robert K Merton raised concerns over this five decades ago.[5] There have been several attempts over the years to police academic misconduct, including plagiarism. The federal Office of Research Integrity was established in 1985, with the NSF and NIH following suit. Forty years on, the problem is still with us, a clear mark of custodial failure. The uncomfortable fact is this: where a rewards system exists, and there are benefits to be gleaned, “gaming” the rewards system inevitably follows.[6] As one safeguard is erected, new ingenious workarounds will be devised to keep the grift going.

What, then, to do?

No one should be surprised that academic publishing is rife with plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty. Nor should anyone be surprised that the scientific literature is rampant with mediocrity, as exemplified in Claudine Gay’s tedious curriculum vitae. How could such a person be elevated to a high academic office, many have asked? Here is the uncomfortable truth: the modern academic ecosystem is structured to incentivize and reward plagiarism and mediocrity.[7]

We have been brought to this point by the inexorable logic of Parkinson’s Corollary of the Perfect Corporation. Building the Perfect Corporation is an expensive undertaking. In the modern university, this has been made evident by the extraordinary bloat of administrators that has occurred over the past few decades. This is not some force of nature: it is being paid for by the exponential growth of revenue streams—mostly federal monies—flowing into the academies. The solution should be obvious: cut off the oxygen and remove the government funding that is fueling the cultural rot. Only in this way will the network of perverse incentives that have driven the modern academy to Parkinson’s “point of collapse” be disentangled.

Pulling our universities back from the brink of collapse will mean restoring the “chaotic squalor” Parkinson identified as the mark of a vital and creative enterprise. As obvious as the solution might be, implementing it will be painful and nigh impossible because a great deal of money and power depends upon keeping the hollow and brain-dead academy shuffling forward in its zombie walk. And nobody voluntarily gives up money and power. It has to be taken from them.

[1] Parkinson, C. N. (1955). Parkinson’s Law. The Economist. London, The Economist Group. November 19th, 1955: 9pp.

[2] Parkinson, C. N. (1957). Parkinson’s Law, and Other Studies in Administration. New York, Houghton Mifflin.

[3] Ginsberg, B. (2011). The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, Oxford University Press, USA.

[4] Park, M., E. Leahey and R. J. Funk (2023). Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time. Nature 613(7942): 138-144.

[5] Merton, R. K. (1973). The sociology of science: Theoretical and empirical investigations, University of Chicago Press.

[6] Biagioli, M., M. Kenney, et al. (2019). Academic misconduct, misrepresentation and gaming: A reassessment. Research Policy 48(2): 401-413.
Oravec, J. A. (2019). The “Dark Side” of academics? Emerging issues in the gaming and manipulation of metrics in higher education. The Review of Higher Education 42(3): 859-877.
Strielkowski, W. and O. Chigisheva (2018). Research functionality and academic publishing: gaming with altmetrics in the digital age. Economics & Sociology 11(4): 306.

[7] Turner, S. P. and D. E. Chubin (2020). The Changing Temptations of Science. Issues in Science and Technology 36(3): 40-46.

Photo by SJ Travel Footage — Adobe Stock — Asset ID#: 24187273