One of the biggest higher ed stories out there right now is the Jason Arday plagiarism case. The New York Times has run two articles on it in the last two days, the Guardian is running with it, the Times of London is pushing it, and then there’s Tech Times, Times Higher Education, The Telegraph and the BBC. From a more ideologically astringent angle, there’s Bari Weiss’s ever-impartial Free Press, some sermonizing at The Wall Street Journal, and some tooth-gnashing at Daily Caller. Obviously, you can count on the white nationalists to have weighed in. This is their chance to shine.

I don’t own a TV, so I don’t know what CNN, Fox, or MSNBC are saying, but the story is all over social media, and has made it to the tabloids on both sides of the Atlantic–The New York Post, The Sun, etc. Here’s the Wikipedia entry on the case, in case you want to keep score. I guess we can infer that the Arday story is, like so many stories of its type, a story of general interest for a general audience. Aren’t all academic plagiarism stories the stuff of mass media consumption? Doesn’t everyone put high stakes on the fortunes of the latest scholarship in the humanities and social sciences?

Before you answer that, ask yourself what you remember of the famous Martin Stone plagiarism case back in 2010. Remember how it splashed its way through the mass media and flowed like a mighty stream of truth through social media? No, you don’t, because that never happened.

Here’s a description of Stone’s plagiarism from Wikipedia (links and footnotes removed; go to the original for those):

In 2010, first reports of plagiarism were made public by several scholars. Among them, Ilkka Kantola, a Member of Parliament in Finland, said that Stone had copied extensively from Kantola’s 1994 book Probability and Moral Uncertainty in Late Medieval and Early Modern Times: “tens of pages were identical or nearly identical, although my name was not mentioned at all”, Kantola said in a 2010 interview. The investigators Dougherty, Harsting, and Friedman have documented 40 instances of plagiarism in an academic journal.

In January 2010, the Commission on Scientific Integrity at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven sent notifications to editors who had published Stone’s works, stating that “the conduct of Martin Stone is highly questionable in terms of scientific integrity” and that the university “formally retracts its affiliation” with the publications by Stone which appeared when he was a professor there.

Despite the discovery of plagiarism and the retraction of many of these works, a 2023 study found that they continued to be cited by other philosophers.

In other words, Stone’s plagiarism, which went undetected for years, was much more extensive than anything imputed to Arday, has now conclusively been proven to be plagiarism, created some significant disruption in scholarly life, and continues to do scholarly damage right up to the present. The person who did the lion’s share of the work in detecting Stone’s plagiarism and bringing it to light was Professor Michael Dougherty, a specialist in medieval philosophy at Ohio Dominican University. I’m sure you’ve heard of him, and of the renown and treasure he’s won for the work he did in cracking the case.

Reached for comment for this post, Professor Dougherty declined comment on the Arday case, but mentioned that he and his colleague Dr Pemille Harsting have “renewed a request to have one more article from the Martin Stone case retracted after an initial difficulty,” something they wrote about three years ago at Daily Nous. “It’s All Too Hard to Get Plagiarizing Philosophy Publications Retracted,” says one Daily Nous headline. “Philosopher Revealed as Serial Plagiarist,” says another. It almost sounds like the plagiarism problem in academia didn’t begin with Jason Arday. And won’t end with him. It also almost sounds as though the Martin Stone case hasn’t quite ended yet, sixteen years after the initial disclosure of his malfeasance.

I only happen to be familiar with the Martin Stone case because I am (or I guess, was) related to it by marriage: I happened at the time to be married to Carrie-Ann Biondi, then a professor of philosophy at Marymount Manhattan College in New York, and co-editor of one of the volumes to which Stone had contributed a substantial (and substantially plagiarized) article. On learning of the plagiarism–largely through Michael Dougherty’s work–Carrie-Ann (along with senior editor Fred D Miller Jr and general editor Enrico Pattaro) were forced to write an editorial statement acknowledging Stone’s plagiarism, and promising to retract his work. The original volume then had to be withdrawn, and a new article commissioned and edited. The volume ultimately had to be re-issued at considerable expense to the publisher, Springer, and I’m assuming, to consumers. I watched from the sidelines as Carrie-Ann dutifully trudged her way through all that work–glad not to have to do any of it myself. I still am. 

I forgot to mention that Arday is black, and Stone is white. So one of these cases offers us Jerry Springer-level lessons about the perils of diversity, standpoint epistemology, wokeness, affirmative action, and race. The other is just some random peccadillo by an obscure white guy, lost to all but the most devoted archaeologists of knowledge.

Remember how upset people got with the slogan “Black Lives Matter”? All lives matter, dammit. All. I find it interesting how little upset these same people are at the widespread fixation on a single case of black plagiarism. Doesn’t All Plagiarism Matter? All?

Let’s face it. It doesn’t. Black plagiarism is what matters. Not white. Not all.