Some say the technology has the potential to unearth academic misconduct that previously might have gone unnoticed. Others warn it could unfairly upend careers, taking a lack of quotation marks as an attempt to steal ideas.
The discussion has heated up in the days since Harvard University President Claudine Gay resigned Jan. 2 amid accusations of plagiarism — claims advanced by conservative activists and other powerful foes. William Ackman, a hedge fund billionaire and Harvard donor who had advocated for Gay's ouster, later learned his wife, a former MIT professor, was herself accused of lifting passages. He's vowing to launch an AI-assisted plagiarism review of MIT's faculty, staff, president and its board — something he suggested might expand to other prominent institutions.
The back-and-forth poses unsettling questions for faculty, administrators and students as spring semester starts on campuses, including those in Western Pennsylvania. Some worry anyone with a grudge and software could end multiple careers as rapidly as AI can scan and compare vast writing samples.
"It's complicated," said Chris Bonneau, a University of Pittsburgh political science professor. "I do worry that anyone can say anything now without any kind of due process or context, and once things get in the public domain there tends to be a feeding frenzy.
"One of the most troubling things is that universities have policies in place to investigate research misconduct. ... It will distract universities that are investigating real misconduct."
"Sadly there are members of the academy who falsify the data and behave unethically," said Bonneau, past president of Pitt's University Senate. "These are the people we want to be investigating, not someone who missed a quotation mark."
CONCERNS ABOUT AI AND ITS FAIRNESS
Michael Berube, an author and professor of literature at Penn State University, called plagiarism detection software a new curveball.
"Once we open that part of the hood of the car, I have no idea how many people will be found to have unintentionally cited or paraphrased or whatever, things that might trip a wire. It's totally unpredictable."
Berube says the latest round of culture wars is "part of the radicalization of the GOP." He worries there are no guardrails to protect academia. "But I do think academia is not blameless here. There is a degree of insularity, tone deafness that makes us soft targets."
The right has long chafed at higher education's liberal bent but seems emboldened by recent events. On Dec. 5, leaders of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania appeared before a U.S. House committee and could not say definitively whether calls for genocide of Jews violated campus conduct codes. The presidents of Penn and Harvard have since resigned, and MIT's president is under fire.
U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y, whose withering interrogation of those leaders went viral, made it clear that the resignations are just the beginning.
"A reckoning is coming to higher education," Stefanik said on "X," the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
The right has stepped up attacks on what it sees as classroom indoctrination, an obsession with diversity, equity and inclusion programs and hostility toward conservative campus voices.
Gay initially survived fallout from the House hearing, which focused on response to campus turmoil over the Israel-Hamas war. But she lost footing with one of the university's governing bodies, the Harvard Corporation, as accusations of plagiarism continued to arrive.
Gay had just finished her first six months as Harvard's first Black president. Some of her defenders said the plagiarism accusations were politically motivated.
Gay herself put it this way in a New York Times op ed piece, days after her resignation.
"This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society," she wrote. "Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda."
Republicans pushed back.
"Plagiarism is actually bad. It's not a 'conservative weapon'," J.D. Vance, a Republican senator from Ohio, wrote on X.
'THE POWER OF AI'
After Business Insider published two accounts this month involving plagiarism accusations against Neri Oxman, Ackman's wife, the CEO of Pershing Capital Management likened it to retribution and seemed intent on delivering a punishing response. He had more campuses in mind than just MIT.
"No body of written work in academia can survive the power of AI searching for missing quotation marks, failures to paraphrase appropriately, and/or the failure to properly credit the work," he posted to X.
He said many in and outside academia support his efforts to address problems in higher education but noted that many think it will take decades to bring about necessary change.
"The good news, however, is that with AI, getting rid of tenured faculty is no longer as much of a challenge because it is much easier to fire faculty who have problems with their academic record," he wrote. "It is a near certainty that authors will miss some quotation marks and fail to properly cite or provide attribution for another author on at least a modest percentage of the pages of their papers."
Berube bemoaned the "billionairization" of higher education, where powerful rich donors can make waves or withhold donations if they don't like a leader's stance on a particular issue. With their enormous endowments, Harvard and other elite institutions have the resources to withstand those attacks, but less wealthy institutions may be more dependent on donor support.
"Politically, tuition can't be raised any further, and scholarships have to be provided to students who need them. I think you will see some places sustaining some real damage below the Ivy League, even Ivy League-adjacent."
Concerns that this software isn't always reliable already have become an issue for students on campus as professors use AI to look for evidence of students using ChatGPT to cheat. The problem is the software sometimes flags students who didn't cheat, causing them anxiety and stress, according to Tim Gorichanaz, assistant teaching professor of information science at Drexel University.
"The perceived infallibility of such tools may mean innocent students are left unable to defend themselves," he wrote in a paper titled "Accused: How students respond to allegations of using ChatGPT on assessments."
Bonneau said he has run plagiarism software on undergraduates and "often it is something innocuous like forgetting a quotation mark. But not always."
The New York Times described several accusations against Gay, including one involving a Pitt professor.
Gay's 1993 paper, "Between Black and White," in places contained language only slightly different from a 1992 paper, "Black Political Protest in São Paulo, 1888-1988" written by George Reid Andrews, a history professor at Pitt, and published in the Journal of Latin American Studies.
For instance, Andrews wrote that "the 'rhetoric and aspirations' of a younger generation of Afro-Brazilians with 'one or more years of university study' seemed removed from those of poor slum dwellers," according to the Times.
Gay "uses the phrase 'aspirations and rhetoric, reversing the order of those words, and refers to one or more years of 'university education' rather than 'university study,'" The Times said.
She did not credit Andrews for the words but suggested another of his works to readers.
The Harvard Crimson highlighted other similarities as part of the student newspaper's coverage of the controversy.
Contacted by TribLive, Andrews said he stands by a statement he made to the New York Post in October, saying Gay's use of his words in his opinion does not rise to plagiarism. He said it is fairly common in academic writing.
Beyond that, "I have no comment either on the plagiarism allegations or on Claudine Gay's resignation," he said.
Bill Schackner is a TribLive reporter covering higher education. Raised in New England, he joined the Trib in 2022 after 29 years at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where he was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team. Previously, he has written for newspapers in Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. He can be reached at bschackner@triblive.com.
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