On plagiarism
No, not really about whether Claudine Gay "really" plagiarized or whether she should be booted from this/that/the other, but my experience w/ plagiarism over the years, as someone who has been plagiarized from and as a teacher.
Let's get the teacher bit sorted with first - I taught a writing class at UConn, to actuarial science majors. It was supposedly a technical writing class, but I turned it into something different: a business writing class. Frankly, in business writing, originality & uniqueness are not valued. That's why the corporate folks love ChatGPT. That anodyne shit is beloved in compliance departments.
However, if you taught a writing course, you were given access to plagiarism detection software, and all the students had to submit their work through the system. I told them I understood how the system worked, but that I was going to be reading their papers, and that they would be submitting drafts repeatedly, and of course I was expecting repeats, yadda yadda. Also, I kept copies of everything.
I only had trouble with one student who was a non-native speaker of English, and who took my class twice... and didn't understand the purpose of the final project. I don't think he understood what I was saying, and never asked for help. My dude, you actually have to communicate to people, if you're going to work with people in the U.S.
But the software lit up all the time with everybody's paper. My dear bullshit software, there are only so many ways one can write about risk. I am not looking for unique insights here. Just something usable. I want all sources properly cited, the argument logically structured, etc. I would object to someone lifting a Wikipedia article wholesale, but I knew how to give assignments properly. I wouldn't even care if students used ChatGPT now - the point is to provide proper communication. I would grade more harshly if they couldn't get it right, what with all the assistance ChatGPT could provide.
Plagiarizing from meep: would not recommend
This is the funny one, though.
The latest plagiarism brou-ha-ha detail is funny because... who would plagiarize their acknowledgments?! COME ON, MAN.
But in general, the Claudine Gay plagiarism stuff is a bunch of blah-blah prose that nobody much cares about, in terms of the actual content. It really is boring stuff, not anything anybody would want to read.
Whereas the stuff people have plagiarized from me was really ill-advised because the stuff I put online for free has a VERY STRONG authorial voice.
If I'm writing to please myself (or to see what I can get away with), yeah, I let it rip. It tends to read the way I talk, and I am very distinctive. If you're paying me a nice salary to write, and that stuff gets put behind an expensive paywall, of course, I'll tone down the meepisms.
So the thing I've found most often plagiarized is my Dante essay, which is a really weird thing to copy.
Yes, I've got footnotes, I got a very good grade on that paper, and I even got that paper put up on one of the author's websites. But it's really about Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle's science fiction version of Dante's Inferno, which isn't a very well-known work. Both Niven & Pournelle have much better-known books.
The paper has been sitting on my website for decades, with my name on it, and the website also contains loads of examples of my own writing. It's obvious that all of it is me. There's no way you can pass off this paper or any subset of it as by anybody else. Maybe you can pass it through the guts of ChatGPT now to obscure the origins, but seriously, don't do it.
I don't google for it that often, but I've had people email me in the past about it when somebody else plagiarized me. Again, it doesn't come up too often because there is the software, and I assume most of the time the instructor just handles it without telling me.
But seriously, don't do this - it's easy to detect.
I just wonder about people sometimes.