The world is blessed and cursed by nuance. Most issues are complicated, and truly understanding them requires expertise, depth of insight, familiarity, and an appreciation for how nuances impact the issue and its context. Except for plagiarism. Conversations about plagiarism treat it like a matter of strict liability. If you do the offense, you’re guilty no matter what, and the context only determines how severe the punishment will be.

As a person whose work largely inhabits the space of meaningful nuances, strict liability has always struck me as a blunt instrument, and it’s why most crimes and offenses require a showing of intent of some kind. I sort of get the inherent harm argument undergirding strict liability crimes, but even the most egregious offenses recognize exceptions that discussions of plagiarism seem to lack.

I think it’s time for a public conversation about nuancing how we describe, define, and punish acts of plagiarism. Plagiarism isn’t inherently harmful, though some forms of plagiarism could be. Plagiarism doesn’t require intent, but perhaps that is a key to nuancing the conversation. Maybe we would be better served by following the lead of some institutions that recognize gradations of conduct within academic integrity infractions, and by having a deeper common understanding of which actions are severe and which actions are de minimis.

Now, no matter how mild or inadvertent the plagiarism, you can lose the presidency of Harvard for it. Perhaps that approach is not serving our society well? Are you unable to run Harvard because you copied someone else’s words a bunch of times 20 years ago in research papers that are unrelated to college governance? Is there a better way to ensure the punishment fits the “crime”?

I think this conversation is more pressing than ever, given not just how many high-profile cases there are related to plagiarism by senior college officials, but how much the Internet and now AI (artificial intelligence) facilitate ease of copying and generation of content. I hope we can all agree that copying five words in a paper is materially distinguishable from submitting an entire paper written by ChatGPT as if it were your own writing, or that a failure to cite a source is materially less problematic than paraphrasing an entire thesis.

When I talk to many faculty members about the idea of intent in plagiarism, they get the concept, but often reject it as useful to the definition, though they may be willing to consider it in mitigation of sanctions that may be applied. Mainly, they just don’t have the bandwidth to explore a student’s intent with every act of unattributed copying. But, I think that leads to a key point, which is that critiquing plagiarism rules as blunt tools should raise the question of whether the same policies should apply to students as to faculty as to administrators, and whether work used for academic credit should be subject to the same rules as academic-adjacent work, such as a commencement speech.

I hope that what we might provoke with a renewed conversation on this topic is a more widely accepted or applied rubric that allows us to identify gradations of plagiarism based on severity, harm, context, and intent. While I could make the argument that some de minimis acts should not even be considered plagiarism, I’m going to put that fight aside because I think it could distract from the simpler idea of gradations of plagiarism that are subject to differing levels of censure based on the act. In that way, we’re not obligating faculty and administrators to dedicate enormous amounts of time to determining intent. Already, some faculty members are abandoning or eschewing plagiarism engines because they create more work than solutions, tend to create distracting false flags, and are variable in their assessments. Put Claudine Gay’s writings into one verification service and you may get very different output than if you ran her papers through a different service. Each engine is only as good as the data feeding into it and the search algorithms used to identify matches.

There are many ways to rubric this, and a number of institutions have done so – typically with a basic three- or four-level approach. However, I offer the following rubric as a conversation starter for how institutions might more appropriately nuance the conversation around plagiarism and its impacts. Hopefully, this also leads to a larger conversation about how and why a provost or president might be held to different standards than a faculty member or a student, depending on context.

This rubric identifies ten degrees of plagiarism, from most severe to least. All are violations, but consequences should be geared to the severity of the offense from worst to least.

Within any degree, there are exacerbating factors and mitigating factors that should influence the consequences imposed. Defiance might warrant a different response than contrition. Covering up misconduct could exacerbate a sanction. And, with respect to plagiarism by senior administrators, context should be considered with respect to their current role, how their misconduct impacts that role, whether the conduct occurred in their current role or a previous faculty role, whether the conduct impacts academic credit, and on their ability to perform their current duties.

Without a doubt, there are arguments to be made that the weighting of degrees above is flawed or subjective and that switching some of the degrees may make more sense. I offer this as a jumping-off point for conversation rather than as a definitive, academically empirical framework.