Last week, in the wake of General Conference, there was a mini-scandal: it appears that in Elder Bednar’s talk “Put on Thy Strength, O Zion,” he borrowed his interpretation of a parable from a 2016 article, sometimes even using that author’s precise words. He didn’t flag his intellectual debt in the oral version of his talk, though, and the original published version also failed to use quotation marks or footnotes for many of the ideas.
Now, I realize I’m idiosyncratic, but the first person who comes to mind when I hear about a plagiarism scandal is my friend and colleague Brian Frye, Dogecoin Professor of Law & Grifting Spears-Gilbert Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky Rosenberg College of Law.
Professor Frye is the preeminent plagiarism apologist in the legal academy. And his apologia pro plagiarism forces us to confront the question, why is plagiarism wrong? While the answer seems self-evident, he makes it clear that the question of the wrong of plagiarism is a lot murkier and harder to pin down.
Brian argues that, in academia at least, the norm of attribution is purely compensatory: we produce knowledge and share that knowledge broadly, without explicit compensation for our production. Except that we are compensated:
Of course, academics aren’t really altruists. We just expect compensation in a non-monetary form. We demand attribution, the coin of the scholarly realm. We fill our purse with citations, and dole them out liberally, in the hope they are fruitful and multiply, and return tenfold. Every cite is sacred, every cite is great, and if a cite is wasted, we get quite irate. We encourage copying, so long as we get credit, but if someone copies without giving credit, we consider that person a thief. Or rather, we call that person a “plagiarist,” a “kidnapper” of ideas.
Note that here I didn’t plagiarize Brian; I attributed his words to him. And he’s not against attribution (though he doesn’t demand it). Rather, he believes that attribution should be in the service of helping readers, not paying rents to landlords. After all, plagiarism doesn’t violate the law. There’s no criminal or civil cause of action. Rather, it allows academics (and presumably others) to claim property rights in ideas that we can’t claim legal property rights in.
In fact, there are areas in which we explicitly want plagiarism. The legal profession is a big one. In transactional law, when we form a new entity or draft a new partnership agreement or write a new disclosure document, we generally don’t start from scratch. Rather, we look on the network and try to find a similar document someone at the firm has used before. We take that document and make necessary changes (small and large) to fit the current transaction. And that’s what clients want! It would be insanely expensive to produce a new partnership agreement from scratch every time they wanted to form a new partnership. It would risk introducing mistakes into the document. It would be inefficient.
Do attorneys make attribution in those documents to the attorneys who came before? No. Why would they?
Norms against plagiarism, then, are situation-dependent. And it’s worth noting that, Brian’s scholarly pursuits notwithstanding, legal academia is citation-heavy. Law review articles have footnotes, if not for literally every sentence, for nearly every sentence. Other academic disciplines act similarly, albeit (in most disciplines I’ve read) with significantly fewer footnotes than I use.
But have you read a work of popular history lately? Most don’t have footnotes or endnotes; some include sources for each chapter at the end of the book. Poetry? No citations (except in critical editions written after the poet is important enough to become part of The Canon).
Jazz? None. (Seriously. One of the fun things about solos in jazz is that the soloist will often quote other melodies and songs in the course of their improvised solo. But it’s on the audience to catch the quotation and understand where it comes from.)
Now, I’m not making any judgment about whether Elder Bednar’s talk should have been better-footnoted. Honestly, I’m not sufficiently familiar with the published sermon genre to have a strong opinion. The fact that LDS General Conference talks tend to include footnotes suggests a norm toward citation, at least in the context, but even if there is such a norm, what’s the norm in service of?
If I go with Brian’s analysis—and I think he’s relatively convincing—then we want to encourage citations where those citations will help the reader’s understanding/further research/etc. But we should probably be indifferent where it’s merely the product of intellectual landlordism.
(I will note that I do think there are compelling reasons to discourage students from plagiarizing; students are developing their writing and reasoning skills, and being able to separate their ideas from others’ ideas, credit others’ ideas, and build on them is a legitimate pedagogical goal.)
At the very least, there’s value in trying to articulate why a thing that we believe is wrong is, in fact, wrong. And there’s a ton of value in being forced to confront our assumptions and realize that those things we think are self-evident are, in fact, not objective Truth but, instead, cultural norms.
And there’s definitely value in reading Professor Frye’s provocative art/scholarship.
(If you’re interested in his quick take on this mini-scandal, it’s worth noting that he was scandalized … that the plagiarism was at best half-hearted.
