Earlier this year, Princeton professor and serial tweeter Kevin Kruse was accused of plagiarism by historian and author Phillip Magness. For Reason, Magness laid out a compelling case against Kruse. Kruse’s perpetually twitchy fingers fell limp.
That is, until last Friday, when Kruse triumphantly posted a letter from the dean of Cornell’s graduate school, where Kruse earned — or didn’t, depending on your evaluation of the charges against him — his Ph.D., announcing that after an investigation, the university would “take no further action in this matter,” because it had concluded that Kruse’s “errors were made without intent to plagiarize.”
The Graduate School at Cornell held an inquiry back in August, which addressed the allegations about some lines in the preface to my dissertation and concluded there was no ill intent on my part there.
They issued me this letter which I’m allowed to share: pic.twitter.com/ai8hyrhfAw
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) October 7, 2022
Dean Kathryn Boer did not expand upon how the determination of intent was made, and Magness has responded to the decision with indignation.
Since Kevin Kruse is apparently claiming exoneration for clear and unambiguous acts of plagiarism in his doctoral dissertation & other works, here are 4 straight pages where he clearly cribbed both language and content from Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland.” pic.twitter.com/oGzDBoRSSw
— Phil Magness (@PhilWMagness) October 7, 2022
But regardless of whether Kruse intended to plagiarize a number of different authors in a number of different instances, Princeton student and former National Review intern Abigail Anthony has noted that there is a discrepancy between Boer’s explanation for the university’s inaction (“this element of ‘intent’ is a key criterion for evaluating plagiarism under Cornell University’s Code of Academic Integrity”) and other parts of Cornell’s plagiarism policy.
Cornell Dean’s comment and Cornell’s official policies. pic.twitter.com/QQJKkyoCZI
— Abigail Anthony (@abigailandwords) October 14, 2022
While the Code lists “knowingly representing the work of others as one’s own,” as an example of an academic integrity violation, it does not identify “intent” as a “key criterion” for determining whether a student has plagiarized. To the contrary, it simply states that “representing another’s work as one’s own is plagiarism and a violation of this Code. If materials are taken from published sources the student must clearly and completely cite the source of such materials.”
Moreover, as Anthony pointed out, Cornell’s School of Arts and Sciences defines plagiarism as “misrepresenting somebody else’s intellectual work – ideas, information, writing, thinking – as your own. In other words, it is a misuse of source material. Whether intentional or unintentional, plagiarism is a serious violation of Cornell’s Code of Academic Integrity.”
The school’s announcement is one of affirmative inaction for a rich, powerful Ivy League professor, all because he spends a healthy — and unhealthy — amount of time lambasting the right people on Twitter.