Representative Elise Stefanik Accused of Plagiarism
Yesterday, I published an article about the unfolding plagiarism scandal involving Harvard president Claudine Gay.
In that case, the allegations had been around for some time, with Harvard learning about them in October and, according to recent statements, they had already conducted an investigation and decided that no violation of their policies had taken place.
However, Gay found herself in the national media spotlight after she and two other university presidents testified before the House Committee on Education at a hearing addressing antisemitism at schools. The testimony she and others gave was seen as evasive, prompting calls for all three to resign.
Nowhere was that call to resign stronger than Representative Elise Stefanik, who was also on the committee and was one of the harshest questioners of Gay at the hearing. In addition to her pointed queries at the hearing, she openly called for the resignation of all three presidents, releasing a letter to that effect.
Shortly after the hearing and the national attention on Gay, two reporters shared the text comparisons that they, and others, argue prove Gay is a plagiarist. That story is still developing, with Harvard staunchly supporting Gay.
However, even as Gay is wading through the fallout of her allegations, Rep. Stefanik is facing one of her own. According to an article in Newsweek, a letter that Rep. Stefanik published calling for the resignations of the presidents, was plagiarized from fellow committee member Rep. Kathy Manning.
Rep. Manning, who is a Democrat, is the one who made the accusations. She accused Rep. Stefanik of plagiarizing a draft of a letter she and her team wrote and tried to get Rep. Stefanik to sign onto as a show of bipartisanship.
However, she says that Rep. Stefanik, instead, released her own version of the letter, complete with the first three paragraphs being copied nearly verbatim.
The situation, predictably, is more complicated than that. However, it’s an excellent case study of the point from the previous article: That political plagiarism scandals are rarely, if ever, about the plagiarism itself.
Understanding the Elise Stefanik Plagiarism Scandal
According to both sides and supported by the public record, shortly after the controversial hearing, Rep. Manning approached Rep. Stefanik on the floor of the House with the intent to draft a bipartisan letter to send to the university presidents. It was there that Rep. Manning provided her colleague with a physical copy of her draft of the letter.
The two camps began to go back and forth with the letter, with both sides making edits. However, a divide quickly emerged where Rep. Stefanik wanted to call for the resignation of the presidents but Rep. Manning wanted to focus instead on asking schools to amend policies to better protect Jewish students.
At the end of the day, Rep. Stefanik’s team said that they would be moving ahead with their first edit of the letter. The next morning, Rep. Manning’s team wrote back, saying that Rep. Stefanik could not simply take Manning’s letter but that they were still amenable to finding a compromise for a joint letter.
Nonetheless, both camps ended up sending in their versions of the letter that day, with Rep. Manning sending hers first. This resulted in both versions of the letter having nearly-identical text for the first three paragraphs, though significant deviation in the remainder of the letters.
This, in turn, prompted Rep. Manning to accuse Rep. Stefanik of plagiarism, saying that she was using her letter to “try and get her 15 minutes of fame” and encouraged readers to compare the letters for themselves.
Rep. Stefanik, for her part, called the allegations “desperate and deranged” and said that she’s only being criticized because her version of the letter had more support.
News media, once again, has picked up on the story. Though not as prominent as the Gay scandal, the story has been gaining traction, in particular among Rep. Stefanik’s ideological opponents.
But this raises several questions: Is this plagiarism? If so, how serious is it? To answer that, we have to dig deeper into the world of political plagiarism.
The Problem with Political Plagiarism
From a purely pragmatic standpoint, there’s not much of a dispute whether the copying happened. Looking at the first three paragraphs of both papers, it’s clear that they are nearly identical, and that is an amount of text that cannot be explained by coincidence or accident.
There also doesn’t appear to be much dispute that Rep. Manning’s team wrote the text in question, having presented Rep. Stefanik with the letter and the latter’s team acknowledging that they were using their edit of that letter.
However, this type of plagiarism in politics is not particularly unusual. For example, in 2019, now-President Joe Biden was accused of plagiarizing talking points for his website. Three years earlier, it was former President Donald Trump, who was then running for office, that faced allegations he plagiarized an op-ed from Ben Carson.
Politicians (and/or their teams) routinely copy the work of their colleagues, think tanks, political commentators and others without clear attribution. Some of this is expediency, but some of this is also about having a consistent message between different politicians talking on the same issues.
Though I, predictably, support citation, attribution and transparency in this messaging (and have criticized many politicians for not providing it), I also have to acknowledge that this is a common practice and one that rarely raises alarms.
But what makes Rep. Stefanik’s case different is first that the language came from a political opponent and, second, that she was specifically asked not to use it.
In that regard, the case most closely mirrors the 2016 Melania Trump plagiarism scandal, where the former first lady plagiarized a speech made in 2008 by Michelle Obama.
However, even that comparison doesn’t really tell the full story. Obama and Trump were never collaborators on the speech, and there was no element of joint intent or joint authorship. Melania Trump’s speechwriter simply took the text and repurposed it without anyone being aware until after the speech aired.
In this case, though the text in question appears to have been written by Rep. Manning’s team, it’s also understandable why Rep. Stefanik’s team felt some ownership of the letter. Even though they didn’t write the paragraphs that they copied, they did put significant work into their version of the letter.
That said, I strongly disagree with Rep. Stefanik. The allegations are not “deranged” and the concerns raised are reasonable. In an ideal world, Rep. Stefanik, after not being able to agree on a letter with Rep. Manning, should have penned her own from the ground up, focusing on the points she wanted to make.
Using so much of Rep. Manning’s language makes the letter look lazy and weakens her points. A letter that is fully her own would have not only been better ethically, but would have been much more effective at relaying why she is taking a different stance.
That, in the end, is the big problem with this story: That the similarities distract from what both politicians are trying to say with their respective letters.
Bottom Line
In the end, this isn’t a major plagiarism scandal. Realistically, it’s a minor political tiff between two Congresspeople who, despite trying to craft a bipartisan letter, failed to come to terms and sent their own versions instead.
While Rep. Stefanik’s should have crafted their own intro, it would have been better both ethically and practically, the copying itself is only unique in that it was from a political opponent who asked that their work not be used in this way.
However, where the scandal is interesting is in how it is being reported. The reporting is almost exclusively from sources that have an ideological opposition to Rep. Stefanik. In that regard, it’s similar to the Claudine Gay story, which was launched and largely sustained by her political opponents.
Comparing the two stories is nearly impossible. They involve very different allegations of plagiarism, in very different environments with equally different citation standards and norms. In the end, both are worrisome cases where the alleged plagiarist should have done better, but aren’t necessarily major scandals that routinely end careers.
But having that kind of nuanced conversation about the plagiarism is nearly impossible, simply because the goal of both stories in the news cycle isn’t to discuss plagiarism, but to attack political opponents. Plagiarism is just a weapon, and all sides have shown a willingness to wield that weapon, no matter how contradictory they are in doing so.
As someone whose focus is plagiarism and the issues that surround it, there’s a good deal of discussion to be had in both these cases. But, in the end, that’s a conversation that won’t happen, even among those who probably need to have it the most…
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