Guest Column by Michael R.
[Introduction: This comment by Michael R, in response to the Jason Arday post, “On The Left’s Horrifying Lack Of Integrity In The Wake of The Arday Scandal: I’m Sorry I Was So Right, And How I Wish I Were Wrong. Now What?” is sufficiently extensive and covers such an umortant ethics issue that I deem it worthy of a Guest Column. He begins by referencing the “Everybody Does It” attempted exoneration of the late Cambridge fraudster Facebook post that was favored on the platform by my old friend, a history professor who should know better but who is apparently completely woke-blinded…]
To your long-time Georgetown history professor, you can reply that all he has done is demonstrate why the left has lost all credibility. He thinks he is showing how it is fine to plagiarize. All the has shown is that those institutions no longer care about academic rigor and have no credibility.
Now about the plagiarism. There are different grades of plagiarism. Let me explain why the current round of plagiarism is so devastatingly bad.
When I was in grad school, many of us were asked to carefully check the introduction chapters of foreign students’ dissertations. Because of the difficulty of writing in a foreign language and the differing intellectual property standards in different cultures, there was a lot of plagiarism and the advisors were very careful to detect it and get it corrected before the defense. This is a mockup of a typical Asian student’s introduction.
“Poorly worded original sentence. Sentence directly copied from source 1. Two sentences directly copied from source 2. Poorly worded original sentence tying the thoughts together.Four sentences from source 3. One sentence from source 1. One sentence from source 4. A poorly worded original sentence tying them together. Rinse and repeat.”
You can see what is going on. They lack the English language skills to really blend the thoughts from the different sources together, so they just copy whole sentences (occasionally paragraphs) from many sources and tie them together with some original sentences. This is plagiarism, but this is pretty easy to fix. They are writing a typical intro, they just aren’t doing the paraphrasing and integration of the ideas needed. We would work with the students to get this fixed so that there weren’t any problems. There are probably a lot of programs that didn’t do this, resulting in a massive amount of plagiarism. I am fairly sure this is pretty common in dissertations, especially the Introduction chapters (which are typically reviews of the literature and not original research).
Ethics Alarms 
I haven’t been in an engineering class in over 20 years, but I do try to keep my knowledge up to date by reading recently-published technical books in my field, and I’ve found that many of them ARE hard to read. They’re written in something like English, but by an author who clearly is not using their native language, and no one has edited the text for English grammar. So, it’s not just the fault of the students; a generation of 3rd-world would-be academics are pushing out books than aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. Electronic publishing (that is, distribution in electronic format) has compromised the page-composition that tied texn and figures together, and I’m sure that LLM AIs will be further polluting the knowledge pool.
If corrections are not made, in the age of advanced or even sentient AI, will this matter?
It will matter to humans in the forms of personal achievement, honor and virtue, but what are the practical implications for us all?
Are our potentially perpetual dark ages actually going to be earmarked by humans acceptance of being second on the intellectual food chain in favor of feeling better about what and who we’ve promoted as their competence is essentially irrelevant to our continuing as a species?