Will Princeton Investigate a Progressive Professor for Plagiarism?

Y ou may know Princeton University history professor Kevin Kruse from social media, where he shares insightful comments, such as “Is there a contest to see who can be the stupidest member of Congress?” Such posts accumulate thousands of likes from his half-million followers. His Twitter is so far left that it makes Vox look conservative. You might also recognize Kruse from his guest appearances on MSNBC or his contributions to the New York Times 1619 Project. Now, he faces numerous allegations of plagiarism, a charge detailed by Phil Magness in Reason. Kruse’s doctoral dissertation and books include passages (even verbatim clauses) that are strikingly similar to previously published works, without appropriate quotation marks, proper citations, or footnotes. Surely, if the plagiarism allegations lacked any credibility, Kruse would want to immediately inform his many followers, but he hasn’t done so.

Plagiarism is a big deal for an academic. So is tenure, and Princeton recently fired a prominent tenured professor, not for plagiarism but, it has been suggested, on a pretext — the administration didn’t like his speech. While Princeton University purports to have a robust commitment to free speech, this commitment does not protect plagiarism. In 1893, undergraduate students formally established the honor system, which requires that students “must not violate the code, and as a community, they are responsible to see that suspected violations are reported.” Students must write, “I pledge my honor that I have not violated the Honor Code during this examination” on all in-class written examinations, tests, and quizzes. On all written submissions, students must affirm that “this paper represents my own work in accordance with University regulations.”

Princeton stresses the importance of academic honesty. During freshman orientation, all the new students are required to attend an information session about the honor code. Later, all juniors are required to pass the Academic Integrity Course in preparation for their independent work. In 2021, Dean of the College Jill Dolan emailed all juniors, reminding them that “our academic community at Princeton and around the world relies fundamentally on the integrity of its members, of the research practices they follow, and of the finished work they produce.”

Princeton’s Rights, Rules, and Responsibilities sections 2.4.6 and 2.4.7 outline the expectations for acknowledging sources in academic work. Quotations — even mere phrases — must be clearly distinguished by quotes or indentations, and accompanied by “identifying the author, title, place and date of publication (where relevant), and page numbers.” Merely including a source in the bibliography is insufficient to constitute a “proper acknowledgment.”

Paraphrasing also requires attribution to the source. Princeton maintains that “a thorough rewording or rearrangement of an author’s text does not relieve one of this responsibility.” The university provides examples, explaining that “inserting even short phrases from the source into a new sentence still requires placing quotations around the borrowed words and citing the author”; failure to do so is plagiarism. When the original language is absent but “the key idea, the choice and order of the examples, and even the basic structure of the original sentences” are retained, a citation is necessary to indicate that “the content is not original.”

Students who violate the honor code are subject to disciplinary action, including probation, suspension for one or more years, and expulsion. Princeton warns students: “If you have any questions about when and how to cite your sources, ask the course instructor.” Perhaps there should be an asterisk. A student in Kruse’s courses may wish to consult a different professor.

Princeton affirms that it is “committed to high scholarly standards in the substance of research and to high ethical standards in the conduct of research.” Research misconduct includes “fabrication or falsification of data, plagiarism, interference with the integrity of the work of others, or misappropriation of ideas of others.” The dean of the faculty is responsible for forming a committee to review allegations of research misconduct, which has 90 days to decide whether a formal investigation is warranted.

Princeton University claims to value academic integrity, but the standards are clearly slipping. The freshman-orientation website in fall 2021 doctored a quote by Joshua Katz. He had written, “The Black Justice League, which was active on campus from 2014 until 2016, was a small local terrorist organization that made life miserable for the many (including the many black students) who did not agree with its members’ demands.” However, the university’s website omitted the phrase “including the many black students” without indicating that Katz’s language had been altered. Deleting that clause made it easier to paint Katz as racist, and it obscured the Black Justice League’s notorious methods for targeting students — specifically the black students who dissented. If a student submits an essay with a quote that omits substance deemed inconvenient for the argument and fails to include an ellipsis or indication that the content was deliberately deleted, surely it would result in disciplinary action. Yet the same conduct was allowed by the university and apparently deemed an appropriate welcome to incoming students.

Universities enthusiastically pursue lengthy investigations when it serves the agenda of bureaucrats in the diversity-equity-inclusion propaganda organs. Georgetown investigated Ilya Shapiro for four months over a tweet; Joshua Katz endured a year and a half in Princeton’s academic purgatory before the final judgment deemed him too impure to be associated with the institution. In Katz’s case, the investigation ostensibly concerned a consensual relationship with a student over a decade ago, though his allies argued that his criticism of social-justice activism played a role.

But what happens when an anti-racist ally is exposed for alleged academic dishonesty? I await Princeton’s thorough probing into Kruse’s academic history.

Will Professor Kruse face Katz’s fate — stripped of tenure and fired? Perhaps Kruse’s focus on white flight renders him a sufficiently progressive, anti-racist scholar. After all, Princeton’s history department published a “Statement on Systemic Racism” in 2020, affirming that it “joins in [the university’s] efforts to redress marginalization and inequality” and therefore established a “Working Group on Racism and Structural Inequality.” Maybe Princeton will reference Kruse’s stellar course reviews as justification for keeping his faculty position — although such reviews did not help Katz, who accumulated more teaching awards than Kruse, including the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. The university could rule on a technicality, as was the case for Shapiro at Georgetown, and cite the fact that Kruse’s dissertation was authored at another institution, Cornell, and therefore was not subject to Princeton’s academic standards. Still, Kruse’s dissertation was undoubtedly an essential part of his initial hiring, and his books were published — including the text apparently copied from others — after he joined Princeton’s faculty in 2000.

Maybe Princeton will enforce the punishment that Kruse himself prescribed for plagiarism: “We’d expel a student who pulled this” and revoke his or her degree. If so, Princeton students will learn a lesson in whom not to copy from. If not, they will learn instead that the rules don’t apply to the people with power and the “correct” opinions.