00:00:44.080Today is a story of which I'm still not entirely sure it's a story in the sense that we're tracking a particular phenomenon with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
00:00:52.720It's about a couple of things I've noticed.
00:00:56.380And I think I can put them in a kind of narrative causal nexus.
00:01:00.780But there are places where I would love for someone to openly say, yes, I got inspired by or I am distinguishing myself from these other things.
00:01:12.540You mean they're ripping off the ideas of others and not giving them credit?
00:01:17.460I've plagiarized my plagiarism allegation.
00:01:19.760But yeah, that's actually a good way of putting this, which is weird because one of the people we're going to be talking about is known for explaining the manipulation he's going to engage in before he engages in it, namely Chris Ruffo, someone who does not exactly hold back with like, yep, I'm fomenting a moral panic.
00:01:37.020So today we are talking about the politics of plagiarism allegations, who gets accused of plagiarism for what, why, under what circumstances, what kind of backgrounds or conditions make those allegations stick, what kind of conditions allow people to get away with it.
00:01:56.980Adrian every now and then will like text me that he's got to be in his bonnet and I'll be like, what are you talking about?
00:02:02.300And then suddenly there's like a 5,000 word Google Doc of like research.
00:02:07.620And often it's like, listen, trust me, this all comes from Germany.
00:02:12.240What we actually get to do is like take the plagiarism cycle that has been deployed with some cynicism and some success against the likes of Claudine Gay, for instance, the former president of Harvard University,
00:02:28.360and dissect where that comes from, tell an alternate story about its origins, make some
00:02:34.320comparative case studies. And it's really interesting to me that we're doing this now
00:02:38.360because I think we think of plagiarism allegations as something that happens against
00:02:43.060individuals. But the idea of what plagiarism is, is now really much more contested and almost seems
00:02:51.140a little moot or quaint because of the rise of AI, right, which is a massive industry now that's
00:02:57.180something like 75 percent of the GDP. Don't quote me on that. I'm making that up. I'm pulling that
00:03:01.460figure out of my ass. You got it from Claude. It is a shocking proportion of our economy is going to1.00
00:03:08.900bullshit. Yeah. This technology that relies upon plagiarism as a condition, like a structural0.99
00:03:15.100condition of its possibility. Right. So like plagiarism is now industrial policy in this
00:03:20.840interesting way. And so that is a new feature of the politics of like originality and credit
00:03:29.320and citation that is, I think, going to change all of these conversations or at least expose
00:03:35.840their hypocrisy. So, Adrian, tell me what made you want to do this episode now?
00:03:42.720Well, it was exactly this. It's the fact that one of the features of 2026 is that we have these
00:03:47.300plagiarism scandals that involve AI use, right? There was a horror novel a couple of months ago
00:03:52.520that got pulled because it had clearly been written using extensive AI. There have been
00:03:58.000pieces pulled from various publications for AI use. And earlier this week on May 19th,
00:04:05.100there was a piece in the New York Times about a book called The Future of Truth, which in the
00:04:11.860kind of thing you can't make up contained more than the FDA approved quantity of quotes that
00:04:18.060no one ever said. Oh, my God. This guy used AI to write his book about the epistemic crisis
00:04:24.200instigated by AI. Yeah, it's pretty good. That's spot on. That's beautiful. That's some heavy
00:04:31.740handed writing from God, you know. So this is a book by a guy named Steven Rosenbaum. And I don't
00:04:38.860want to rag on him or I don't want to single him out. I thought that it was really interesting to
00:04:44.520kind of think about, we by now have a script of how these things are reported and how people
00:04:48.820respond to them. And I think that's kind of interesting because a lot of the same people
00:04:53.940who today are like, well, who knows? Like, you know, we all use AI. We're extreme originality
00:05:00.900mongers and guardians of actually typing when it came to someone like Claudine Gay less than two
00:05:08.060years ago. God, it feels like 100,000 years ago. I'm just going to give you three quotes from this
00:05:14.420New York Times story about this book about the politics of truth. On Monday night, Mr. Rosenbaum
00:05:20.180acknowledged in a statement that the book had, quote, a handful of improperly attributed or
00:05:24.380synthetic quotes and said that he had started his own investigation. So I really like. Is he going
00:05:30.940to use Claude to ask if Claude plagiarized his book or bullshit his book? Yeah. I have no idea0.91
00:08:22.620that function by very different logics.
00:08:24.160And one of them we were used to, one of them is very new.
00:08:26.320But let's say that someone finds a quote, likes it, puts it into Google, and finds something else that's been spat out by AI.
00:08:37.480That person didn't use AI, but they probably got misled into misquoting this person, which is what happened here, into using it by AI, even though they themselves didn't use it.
00:08:47.860So there are things to investigate here.
00:08:49.440And the third thing, of course, is something like, it's not just that the quote's made up, it's that the entire text containing the quotes is from Chachi PT or from Claude or whatever.
00:09:00.000And that, of course, is a very different beast, because in that moment, that does, to me, suggest, well, that's plagiarism, right?
00:09:07.340Like, the reason the quote sucks, the reason the quote isn't correct, is because the stuff around it isn't yours, right?
00:09:14.740It's your book and my book and everyone's book ripped off just collectively.
00:09:18.520And I should say that like the thing that with these synthetic or improperly attributed quotes seems to be kind of the third case I was outlining because Stephen Rosenbaum goes on, as I disclosed in the book's acknowledgments, I used AI tools, Chad, GBT, and Claude during the research, writing, and editing process.
00:09:38.300And you're like, okay, so it's not stealing if you put it in the acknowledgements?
00:09:44.220I mean, like, I guess there are precedents for that, among them academics.
00:09:49.900There are very famous, especially European academics,
00:09:53.800where you have to look into the acknowledgements to find out who actually wrote the book,
00:10:03.680This was a joke that Michael Hobbes made on If Books Could Kill.
00:10:06.980He's like the 19th century version of Chad GPT or the 20th century version of Chad GPT was the wife who actually did all the writing.
00:10:14.360Yeah, so there's real precedent for this.0.91
00:10:16.400But at the same time, it's kind of wild that in an age where allegedly we're really caring about academic integrity or about research integrity, you can just put like, well, a lot of this shit's not mine into your acknowledgments.
00:10:30.360I mean, you can do it, but the fact that he's like, well, I thought that was that.0.83
00:10:36.300It's part of this, like, weirder moral logic where people think that copping to or acknowledging a sin is equal or, like, absolves them from having committed it, right?
00:10:45.860It's like, well, no, even in that, like, Catholic mode of confession, you have to do more than just say that you did it, right?0.99
00:10:51.560Like, what it actually seems is like, well, I'm self-aware about being an asshole.0.99
00:10:55.800It's like, well, no, that kind of makes it worse.0.88
00:10:57.200In his statement, Steve Rosenbaum basically said that the episode, quote, serves as a warning about the risks of AI-assisted research and verification.
00:12:03.360So, you had already alluded to this, but my suspicion is that our story here starts in the German-speaking world, which, as you also indicated, is a little bit of one of my obsessions.
00:12:13.900Well, it's your background and your expertise, so it makes sense to me.
00:12:18.960So, let me lay out the story and tell me whether you think this holds water or not.0.99
00:12:24.200I'm going to start with a guy who you've almost certainly never heard of, but German listeners will be like, oh, that fucking guy.0.99
00:12:45.880Does he have a cravat or a ruffled collar?
00:12:48.520Let me send you a picture of him just so we can be as superficial as humanly possible.
00:12:54.320We have long since broken the taboo against making fun of people's appearances on this show.
00:13:01.000Oh, God. Yeah. No, he looks like. I'm sorry. This guy looks like the husband with a mysterious dark past in like a psychological thriller, you know. Yes. The husband with whom not all is well. He's like handsome in a kind of like Ken doll standard way. He's got a big old chin and he is indeed wearing a European style scarf under one of those god awful two tone oxford shirts and like a blazer.
00:13:31.000and glasses. And I'm guessing you're going to tell me, Adrian, that he's on the right somehow.
00:13:37.020Yes. I had never put that together that he looks like in a Lifetime movie,
00:13:40.900the man who has a dark secret. He did turn out to have a dark secret.
00:13:44.380Does he have a dark secret? Oh my God.
00:20:55.320But he was very, very vocal in his protestations that he was innocent, that he had not plagiarized, and then seemed kind of surprised every time another passage was found.
00:21:06.780Because we should be clear, the number of passages that were found that were plagiarized were enormous.
00:21:25.320But he just seemed genuinely shocked by the plagiarism that was in his dissertation, while it became clear that the plagiarism was massive.
00:21:35.220And the only way this goes together, if that was not you at the keyboard, but I don't know.
00:21:40.340People are saying, questions have been asked.
00:21:43.360Yeah, but in any case, he gives up his doctorate about, I think, a week or two after this comes out.
00:21:51.100And by, I think, March 1st, this first breaks in February 16th, I think, 2011, by March 1st, he's out.
00:21:59.100He's just, like, lost his job because of a dissertation.
00:22:12.240Did you notice how Neil Gorsuch did not only not resign, but is currently seated on the Supreme Court of the United States?
00:22:18.360I've definitely noticed that he's on the Supreme Court.
00:22:20.380Yeah, yeah. Hard to miss. Hard to miss. Yeah. But in Germany, really, this was a swift thing. I once talked to another politician who sort of was in the Bundestag at the same time as zu Gutenberg. And he pointed out that like, probably for his colleagues, the big break came when it was revealed that he had clearly plagiarized the parliamentary research service, like the parliamentarians have a research service that they can sort of draw on.
00:23:19.680The reason why this story matters, I've always been fascinated by this guy and his fall.
00:23:24.740I would bet that he shills for AI now.
00:23:26.620I don't know what he's doing right now.
00:23:27.760But the most important consequence of this affair to Gutenberg is the way, you know, you notice that there's an extremely swift turnaround as far as political scandals go, right?
00:23:39.440Like, you know, if people had accused him of sexual harassment, right, this would have taken, if it had happened at all, probably months and months.
00:23:46.740But, like, we're really going from basically, like, 10 days before he's out.
00:23:54.820The other part, though, is that the allegations came out so quickly because they were not necessarily reported in traditional media anymore, not only.
00:24:03.780Because what happened was that on the 16th, someone was like, well, there's something weird going on here.
00:24:09.020on february 17th 2011 someone starts a wiki and uploads this guy's dissertation to that wiki
00:24:18.420the gutenplag wiki so this is basically a bunch of everyday gumshoes kind of combing through this
00:24:27.740text bit by bit by bit and just marking everything that they can find by february 21st they had
00:24:36.040already found like dozens of these things and like released a first statement being like there's a
00:24:40.840lot here you guys the things that this one professor drew attention to aren't even getting
00:24:45.720close to scratching the surface here oh wow and so it's both a very traditional scandal in the
00:24:51.080sense that someone falls over their own hubris their own lies it's concerned with academic
00:24:56.840conventions and habits that are centuries old but it's done through new media right it's done
00:25:05.540through the internet. The internet portion of this is not accidental. This guy wouldn't have
00:25:09.660fallen as quickly if it weren't for the fact that people could get together and like make a day of
00:25:15.680it and be like, I'll enter this paragraph into Google and see what pops up, right? Yeah. Once
00:25:19.780this wiki is set up, it becomes extremely iterable. And the same people sort of start
00:25:24.560doing this with other dissertations. Like, well, we have a good system here. Let's look at some
00:25:29.500others. And Gutenplag almost immediately after zu Gutenberg resigns becomes Vroniplag, named
00:25:37.100after Veronika Sass, who is the daughter of the then Bavarian governor.
00:25:42.040Okay. So somebody who doesn't have a ton of power in her own right, but is a woman. Yeah.1.00
00:25:47.600This is what we in the business call foreshadowing. Yes. Yeah.
00:25:52.200So basically, we get into this situation where they're clearly doing it partly to fuck with0.98
00:27:48.880And with Vroni Plagg, the claim was like, well, she may not be that important, but why are people handing out like doctors as party favors to like politicians' daughters?
00:27:58.580It's interesting because I think there's already kind of an anti-university element to it.
00:28:04.200But there's also a kind of sense that some people are getting away with something.
00:28:07.800And that's a particular kind of person who's getting away with getting to carry these titles without actually having worked for them, right?
00:30:22.900He looks like he is in a tax bracket where, like, most of the people around him have known that they can't actually be frank with him for, like, the past 20 years.
00:30:37.040It's more distributed than you'd think, but some of that has to do with the fact that, like, some parties sort of draw more from sort of academic milieus.
00:30:44.780I couldn't find earlier numbers, but the following numbers from 2019, I think, kind of reflect things nicely.
00:30:49.640The party with the most PhDs in parliament were the Greens, actually, with 21 percent, but then followed by the FDP, so the sort of right-wing liberals, so like the business party, the AFD, and the CDU, 1918 and 18 percent, respectively.
00:31:07.040Right. The AFD, I thought, actually had the most PhDs in the party.
00:31:11.580The accredited Nazi. Many such cases.0.98
00:31:14.640Yeah, exactly. Right. The AFD was founded by professors and it has had a very robust bulk of PhDs in it from the beginning.
00:31:22.300There are far fewer among the Social Democrats, where there was it was 14 percent in the left party.
00:31:27.200And the second dissertation, so Habilitation, Venia Legendi, is far rarer.
00:31:31.480Five percent of the AFD have that and three percent of the FTP.
00:31:34.560And everyone else is like one dude or one lady.
00:31:37.040So for a long time, it was sort of part of a mature kind of conservatism.
00:31:41.260It was a nice signal for that, right, if you had a doctor in front of you.
00:31:44.960And then the Internet came along and made that system a bit shaky.
00:31:47.600There were tons of scandals about politicians who carried a doctorate from essentially degree mills, either in Eastern Europe or in Switzerland.
00:31:56.540And there were tons of scandals about plagiarism.
00:31:58.940But because the PhD was a very different totem on the center right or right than it was on the left, most of the catch of these wikis, of the Vroniplag wiki, was center right or right.
00:32:14.520They include an FDP politician who got some kind of degree from Oxford and then said, oh, my citational practice is actually accepted in England.
00:32:23.680Yeah, sure. It's just a cultural difference.
00:32:26.020So someone had to fly out to Oxford and they're like, what the fuck are you talking about?0.76
00:32:29.920We don't plagiarize just as a matter of course.0.88
00:32:32.480But I could see this becoming an issue with left-wing valence, right?
00:32:37.160If it's a source of right-wing hypocrisy that could undermine their own claims to authority,
00:32:42.060I could see this becoming something where people on the left are like,1.00
00:32:44.460look at these fucking idiots who are trying to be snobs1.00
00:32:48.760and they're claiming authority that they don't even have.1.00
00:32:51.440They stole their work just like they're stealing money from your pocket, etc.
00:33:16.640She has served as the president of the European Commission since 2019.
00:33:20.360So she's essentially, you know, like very high up in the EU, sort of the highest office in the EU, in fact, and got caught up in these questions of authorship and authenticity of her work and also a CDU politician.
00:33:33.720So this really was a kind of, as you say, a kind of populist insurgence against these people who were some sort of elite, right?
00:33:41.520But from the beginning, there were some problems with this that sort of, as we say, foreshadow what's going to happen later on.
00:33:48.540And one thing is the kind of question of how these cases are selected, right?
00:33:55.100These people just kind of move on almost happenstantially to people that they find interesting
00:33:59.920or people where there have been rumblings or people where there's been interest.
00:34:04.880And one of the people that emerges from this feeding frenzy is a guy,
00:34:09.520I'm going to talk about in a little bit more detail later,
00:34:11.820who sort of brands himself as like the German-speaking world's number one plagiarism hunter.
00:34:48.580Part of the animus generated by these phony dissertations is about the fact that because so many people get them in Germany, there are a lot of unemployed PhDs in Germany and a lot of people who feel they didn't get their due.
00:35:00.380Or it's not that they feel they didn't get their due.
00:35:02.320They know they didn't get their due, right?
00:35:03.920There are a lot of stalled out careers in German academia.
00:35:07.000German academia can be really rapacious in the way it treats its young.
00:35:10.860There's a lot of disappointed PhDs out there.
00:36:05.960That's one sort of problem that quickly emerges.
00:36:07.940The other is how easy it is to kick off a feeding frenzy like this, right?
00:36:11.360The wikis appear to be some pretty interesting kind of space, but kind of like social media around the time, right, 2011, 2012, they start showing kind of the dark side of social media as well, which is that it's the same way that we've all replied to a tweet and then later being like, oh, fuck, I was totally part of a pylon.
00:36:42.640And so there is a kind of self-reinforcing logic, and it can be kind of a logic that ends up being uncharitable to a fault.
00:36:51.060And there are some bizarre examples of where these feeding frenzies kind of go awry.
00:36:56.680One that I find interesting is this guy, Matthias Grav, I think is how it's pronounced.
00:37:01.600One of the plagiarism hunters, one of the big plagiarism hunters, comes forward and says, like, this guy, I think it's his dissertation or a book.
00:37:09.060This guy plagiarized very seriously, especially from this edited volume that came out right before his book came out.
00:37:18.900And then eventually people realize that someone had created this fake edited volume in order for it to create identifiable borrowings.
00:37:30.720right the borrowing went the other way oh whoa isn't that crazy framed yes i mean like in the
00:37:37.980most maniacal way possible i will write a fake book in order to like ensnare this guy i mean
00:37:45.940something i always want to say is like every now and then you come across an argument of somebody
00:37:49.940being like okay don't be paranoid about your political enemies like nobody's really going
00:37:54.740that far out of their way to hurt, you know, a leftist thinker or, you know, a woman who accused
00:38:01.880somebody of sexual assault or, you know, their ex or whatever it is. And I'm always like, I don't
00:38:07.280know, people go really far out of their way to hurt people they don't like. Like the inventiveness,
00:38:14.000the effortfulness is actually kind of shocking. Yeah. And I mean, I guess in this case, it's
00:38:19.800probably not even political. It's that people lost out jobs and like, you know, or felt that
00:38:24.420they maybe deservedly that they were mistreated dude some of the people i hated in grad school
00:38:29.800i'd probably do something like insane and convoluted and evil but that's grad school yeah
00:38:36.140everyone i went to grad school with as i'm laying the last brick they're like look inside your heart
00:38:41.840i'm like i can't this is a grad school thing you're like just enjoy the cask of uh amontiato
00:38:47.020yeah that's a citation not plagiarism just before someone comes after us but the other thing that
00:38:54.060happens in this debate is that context sort of very quickly goes missing in a way that should
00:39:01.620ring familiar to listeners, even not in Germany, but in the United States, which is to say that
00:39:07.060they all sort of treat plagiarism as a known and identifiable quantity and not as a practice,
00:39:14.020right? Yeah. What I mean by that is it matters where the plagiarism occurs, right? Is this
00:39:20.440a load-bearing part of your argument or not?
00:39:56.420Right. I mean, I've only ever written like two page documents on typewriters, but like plagiarism is easy in the Internet age.
00:40:04.160Like in some way, it's actually more work than if she had just formulated it herself.
00:40:07.640So almost certainly it feels like, like, I don't want to excuse what she did, but I do want to say like it just does make a real difference.
00:40:14.460And anyone who's written for a living knows that.
00:40:16.880But this kind of stuff, this kind of lived knowledge, this kind of lived expertise tended to get bracketed for like, oh, it's a 10-word overlap.
00:40:39.520In a way, that just doesn't seem to be true.
00:40:41.720And so if people lived through the Claudine Gay story, you may remember something similar and you may understand why I'm telling this long German preamble. I'm hoping you're picking up on the way these pathologies in this discourse, which I should emphasize, I think people should find out whether people plagiarize their dissertations. I don't think that's a bad thing.
00:41:02.200But there are these pathologies that sort of sneak in, and the way it can be weaponized in very interesting ways, and the way it can be deployed to kind of suggest to an audience an expertise it doesn't actually have, that became weaponized twice over in the United States when this kind of vogue arrived here.
00:41:22.880The other thing that I kind of want to point to is
00:41:24.780zu gutenberg had written nothing other than his dissertation.
00:41:27.740That's what his doctorate is based on.
00:41:29.780With that guy, Grav, there's already this very strange thing
00:41:32.980where it's like, well, this man wrote a ton of stuff.
00:41:38.480If a person bangs away at a typewriter enough,
00:41:42.000they're probably going to accidentally reproduce someone's verbiage at some point.
00:41:51.160I mean, like, I think there is an element of, like, once you have enough to go on, like, a large enough source space, you're almost always going to be able to find something where it really matters then.
00:42:02.560Like, what might be the origin of this borrowing?
00:42:15.360It does feel very borrowed, but it's this thing where you're like, that's where you kind of reach for phrases that have kind of stayed with you.
00:42:57.780So I think this is a good example of where context drops out and where the pragmatics of how academic work is produced kind of get deliberately sidelined in a way that lends itself to bad faith manipulation.
00:43:11.120It doesn't have to always be bad faith manipulation, but it lends itself to it.
00:43:15.740And I should say that I've written, I don't even know how many books.
00:43:19.180I've written something like eight books.
00:43:57.640Didn't have to change that later, right?
00:43:59.220The other thing that happens is that the kind of populist energy this releases very quickly sort of fuses actually with far-right populism,
00:44:07.340even though it, as you said, like mostly finds its targets on the center right or even on the far right.
00:44:14.520And this is where we have to get to this guy, Stefan Weber.
00:44:16.880He's Austrian. He's about 10 years older than me.
00:44:19.400He got a doctorate in communication and a second dissertation of Habilisation of Venia Legendi in 2005 at the University of Vienna.
00:44:27.180And then his academic career sort of stalled out.
00:44:30.080And to hear him tell the story, in 2005, another academic contacted Weber to confess to him that he had plagiarized extensively, really extensively, from his 1996 dissertation.
00:46:23.840I mean, not only, but like the idea is that there are people out there getting PhDs who shouldn't because they're not working, quote unquote, scientifically or German is a little weird in this way.
00:46:34.600What he means is scholarly. They're not working in a scholarly manner.
00:46:37.100Right. Like the concept of fraudulence comes to expand from this like very specific accusation of like, you know, appropriated material into this bigger accusation that's like really more of a social prominence.
00:46:52.140It's like it is illegitimate and somehow fraudulent for you to be claiming that we should take this line of inquiry seriously into something like gender studies.
00:47:01.820Or like it's fraudulent for a person like this to claim the kind of like dignity and authority that the PhD confers.
00:47:10.800Yeah, or it's illegitimate to argue in this way or to read texts in this way, right?
00:48:24.060But it didn't come about in any forthright way.
00:48:26.900It's dishonest in how it was put together, right?
00:48:30.100But these two things get very quickly conflated.
00:48:32.400The idea that, like, certain fields, certain forms of inquiry cannot but be fraudulent, right?
00:48:38.100And that's something you know all too well from conservative attacks on black studies,
00:48:42.680African-American studies in the United States, on ethnic studies in California, on, right, on gender studies now all across the Western world, right?
00:48:52.420And we should say that of the famous cases that either this Vroni Plague or this guy Stefan Weber has sort of publicly outed as being plagiarized,
00:49:02.880the humanities and social sciences, I think, are kind of in the minority.
00:49:06.920I don't have a, I couldn't find a complete accounting, but it does seem to be, right,
00:49:11.600If you're a politician and you're writing a phony dissertation, you're going to do it in, like, economics or, like, law, right?
00:49:18.140Like, and that is indeed where he finds a lot of this stuff, right?
00:49:20.900Again, I mentioned that in some fields in Germany, you have to have a PhD in order to be able to practice in medicine.0.98
00:49:30.060Well, I don't want to cast dispersions, but I would imagine that the impetus for fraud is stronger if you, in order to do this job that has nothing to do with writing, you have to write this fucking thing.0.94
00:49:41.060which, having done it, is not easy to do,0.97
00:49:43.520I would imagine that that would be a place
00:49:45.660where people might be incentivized to cut corners.
00:49:48.080So Gutenberg was, I believe, it was in law.
00:49:50.320In other cases, it's in politics, right?
00:49:52.420Like, politicians tend to go into those fields, right?
00:49:55.940Likewise, people who are at the top of various corporations
00:50:00.120tend to do theirs in macroeconomics or whatever.
00:50:03.780But very quickly, it sort of gets melded with this discourse
00:50:06.740about, like, oh, the crazy humanities, oh, the crazy, you know,
00:50:10.560Like, I don't know if he ever did one on gender studies, partly because, like, they already regard our dissertations as illegitimate.0.95
00:50:18.080They don't need anyone to put that on a fucking wiki.0.96
00:50:21.200And I should also note that the vast majority of those publicly implicated in these plagiarism cases are not academics, right?
00:50:28.020But they're politicians or people in media and the corporate world.
00:50:31.320But it becomes, for him, a way to attack the university.
00:50:35.580Now, as I indicated, he's not totally wrong on this, of course.
00:50:40.560The demand for PhDs from these various grandees must have led to some advisors taking advisees that they must have known couldn't really do the work just because they were busy, like, being photographed next to a tank.
00:50:54.800It's like, it's a full-time job to write a PhD.
00:50:57.300And if, like, that guy also has a full-time job that you can see every day on television, you're like, when is Karl Theodor finding the time to do this, you know?
00:51:07.060So he's right to think that there is an element here of like, well, I want a very prominent PhD advisee, and I'm not going to look too carefully into how he pulled this off, right?
00:51:22.360At the same time, Weber links the stalling out of his own career explicitly to the fact that the wrong people got promoted over him within academia.
00:51:45.640And so in a 2023 interview with Die Presse in Vienna, he says,
00:51:50.340quote, it is simply a fact that there are always networks at universities
00:51:54.160that sweep plagiarism cases under the rug.
00:51:56.760So we're starting to get into this kind of populist conspiracizing here.
00:52:01.100I have to say that academics, in my experience, sweep lots of stuff under the rug.
00:52:09.020You know, I will not say that we are blameless in this.
00:52:12.860I would say that plagiarism is one of the few exceptions.
00:52:15.520I wish that we treated, you know, our sex pest colleagues the way we treat plagiarists.
00:52:20.860But I think he's just wrong there, which might be because he's not been inside an academic department for a long, long time.
00:52:26.640There is this thing within the German-speaking world, which is true, that people really, like, force their underlings to write books for them.
00:52:35.260I find that a bizarre thing and offensive and, frankly, is a practice that needs to stop.
00:52:40.560At the same time, when I have spoken, as I often have, with other German colleagues about this, they also identify this as really unethical and really bad and say, like, you shouldn't read that book.
00:52:52.100So, I'm not sure about the sweeping under the rug, but this idea that academia is sort of busy with this kind of organized corruption and sweeping it all under the rug, and, you know, you need whistleblowers, etc., etc., I hope you're sort of hearing the kind of what Eric Fassin calls the state-sponsored anti-intellectualism sort of coming in here.
00:53:11.660Like, this is about the idea, someone has to really put some pressure on these universities in order to fix their mess, to clean up their mess.
00:53:18.080the second thing is that this kind of conversation about plagiarism really quickly becomes about
00:53:25.160right-wing hierarchies about who deserves what as you were saying you you immediately clocked
00:53:30.160that the first victim of this wiki process was a male politician and the second was a woman who
00:53:38.060happened to stand close to a politician that people didn't like right and this is not an accident like
00:53:43.600there is here a real sense that like a fake and phony elite has established itself at universities
00:53:50.440and it's preventing the real elite the true natural elite from breaking through and getting
00:53:56.780their just desserts right and this is where i'm wondering like i i will spoil this right now and
00:54:02.720say i did not find a place where chris rufo says i was inspired by that but i'm hoping you're
00:54:08.200hearing the resonances of the dei panic here yeah which is exactly about this about the idea
00:54:13.180The problem with the university is that the wrong people are in charge, that the biologically wrong elite has risen to the top, and we must get them out and restore the hierarchy as it ought to be, which is a white dude in charge of Harvard.
00:54:27.960Yeah, I mean, this was what really struck me with the Claudine Gay, quote unquote, plagiarism scandal. It was not just that the actual accusations were so flimsy, but that the actual accusation seemed like a stand in for this other grievance, which is, you know, the sense of what she really stole was not somebody else's words or somebody else's work, but she stole her position of authority and dignity and power from the white man who was supposed to actually have it.
00:54:55.600And by extension from, like, all white men everywhere, right?
00:54:59.040From the same 2023 interview with Weber, I'm going to do one more quote.0.89
00:55:03.500However, I question why gender studies and feminism have been granted a place at the university that has effectively become dogma.
00:55:09.880And I have personally experienced that one is no longer permitted to question this.
00:55:13.580I've also frequently observed that gender studies and feminism operate within universities in much the same way that patriarchalism once did.
00:55:20.540There is no longer a fraternization, but rather a sororization.0.99
00:56:23.180Maybe this is the wrong state of affairs.1.00
00:56:25.380Maybe this is unnatural for women to be at the top.
00:56:28.620But I do think it's really, really important here that this idea of inverted hierarchies, that plagiarism is a problem not because it takes what someone else's and passes it off as your own, not because it demeans the incredible work that people put into this kind of academic endeavor, but rather because it distorts natural hierarchies.
00:56:49.720And my guess is that it was the anti-gender turn and this implicit recourse to the correct or natural hierarchies that Wokeness had supposedly subverted that first put the work of people like Weber on the radar of U.S. right-wingers, right?
00:57:07.200Now, the big change as this sort of jumps over to the United States is the Ph.D., as we say, is not particularly widespread among media, political or corporate elites here.
00:57:18.360And there's really no tradition of deriving legitimacy from the Ph.D. in those spaces.
00:57:24.840Like even if someone has it, people tend to disavow it.
00:57:27.520There's a couple of members of the Senate who are Republicans, but also doctors.
00:57:31.920And when you see them, when there's a Senate hearing, they'll ask questions to which they would normally know the answer.
00:57:37.520And you're like, you went to medical school, you know this.
00:57:39.820But they try to ape a kind of like ignorance that they think people want to hear from them, right?
00:57:44.400Well, they'll use their PhD as a credential when they're doing something like an anti-abortion.
00:57:49.220Like, I am a doctor. I know that life begins a concept. No, no, no.
00:57:52.880But then they'll also be like, do vaccines really work? Who can say?
00:57:56.320We need to let parents decide from themselves, right?
00:58:25.180Because, fellas, every field discriminates against you, so you better leave all the high-paying, high-status ones to the women and the gays.1.00
00:58:32.820Is it gay to finish a dissertation?1.00
00:58:38.200I mean, I think something similar is true in American media and in American business as well.
00:58:43.880I couldn't find reliable numbers here, but all the numbers I did see suggest that the proportion of Fortune 500 CEOs with PhDs is in the low single digits, right?
00:59:21.840And people keep like trying to make an issue of that and being like, like every couple of years, someone writes an article being like, Alex, Carp's dissertation is dog shit, y'all. And it just kind of, it's like a lead balloon. It's like fetch. He can't make it happen. And people still are like, oh, he's such a smart guy. It's like, well, I have 136 pages minus footnotes that would convince you otherwise, but okay.0.99
00:59:42.880But so that, I think, has a really important consequence for when this kind of plagiarism hunting as a kind of right-wing populist trope gets to the United States, which is it doesn't get trained on politics.
00:59:59.120It gets trained on the universities themselves.
01:00:01.500It becomes a story entirely about university corruption, right?
01:00:05.720And it's telling, right? Like, if you wanted to do a really one-to-one kind of transfer, Rufo would have gone after someone who had, like, some progressive foundation and had a PhD or whatever, right? But he doesn't. He goes after the president of Harvard University.
01:00:18.900And I think it sort of starts fusing with what Fassin calls state anti-intellectualism.
01:00:24.260It's used to basically beat down and bring under control institutions of higher learning that conservatives and, you know, especially conservative governments have had some trouble gaining traction over previously.
01:05:51.140Exactly. And so on January 2nd, 2024, Gay did step down from the presidency and pointed out that one of the reasons she was stepping down was that it wasn't just an attack on her political stances, right, which she, I think, would probably be the first to admit, if people don't like that, then that's okay.
01:06:13.260But the academic rigor became kind of entwined with it in a way that, you know, I think any Black academic can sort of immediately clock as like being not about having read the work very carefully, but about their standards, their way to say the N-word in academies, yeah.
01:06:29.500Yeah, why are you in a prestigious place? You don't belong here, according to this other metric that I hold very closely but will not avow, yeah.0.96
01:06:36.400Exactly. And so from there, so this is January 2nd, 2024, we fast forward to 2026. And I would just invite in closing to have all our listeners reflect on how all the nuance, all the questions of pragmatics, all the, well, we can't possibly know, and who can possibly say that wasn't permitted when Claudine Gay had to step down, is suddenly back in fashion.
01:07:03.500Yeah. I mean, Bill Ackman, of course, discovered his taste for nuance much sooner than the rest of the AI booster crowd, which was precisely when his wife, Mary Oxman, was found to plagiarize large parts of her dissertation extensively from Wikipedia, among other things. But we're all Bill Ackman now, right? We're all in the position now where we are like, well, you know, this gentleman is doing a self-analysis to find out what went wrong here. It's like, I don't know.
01:07:56.400We know the situations that give rise to this.
01:07:59.200We know what academic fraud looks like. It is a problem and is a thing that we have to confront. But at the same time, we also know that it comes in an unbelievable number of shadings.
01:08:10.260And there was a moment when it was easy to weaponize a kind of black and white picture of what academic fraud was, what it looked like and who committed it and what it said about the university.0.99
01:08:20.640And then the moment you could attack the university much more easily by just being like, oh, who the fuck cares?0.96
01:08:49.640Yeah, but I mean, like, the interesting thing about Claudine Gay, of course, is that, I mean, Rufo, to his credit, was like, I'm going to take her down, and then proceeded to do it.
01:08:58.580The New York Times is the one who really brought her down, right, by being like, oh, we're going to send, like, 15 correspondents to Harvard University, interview everyone, and, like, keep getting things leaked to us by the Harvard Corporation in order to, like, make this woman resign.
01:09:13.460knowing full well, having read the tweet where Rufo is like,
01:09:17.360yeah, by the way, this is in bad faith.
01:09:18.780And they're like, well, it may be in bad faith,
01:10:22.460Well, I mean, it's because the old plagiarism that was supposed to show how corrupt and degraded the institutions had become was conveniently, like, disproportionately the purview of women in this imagination, right?0.84
01:11:17.940I hope that people have found something of interest in this.
01:11:20.860It's a funny story because, as I hope people can tell,
01:11:24.060there are some causal links here that I don't entirely know and understand.
01:11:27.700I think at some point I would love to see some of those Claudine Gay, you know, anti-fans, these sort of people obsessed with taking her down, when they started softening their position towards AI use or how they nuanced that or whether they always dual track this.
01:11:44.160I don't know. But I do think it's a very interesting comparable for how the standards of academia can sort of be used against it, can be used in its delegitimation and in putting really the central government, putting, you know, national politics in charge of it.
01:12:01.960Thank you for taking me on this journey, Adrian.
01:12:03.940Thank you for coming on with me, Maura, and I'm sorry, this was a weird one.