Justice delayed is justice denied for early career plagiarism victims

The purpose of universities is to cultivate young minds, foster groundbreaking research and address the knowledge needs of society. A central part of that mission is to mentor the next generation of scholars.

Fortunately, many senior academics are generous in the giving of time, effort and suggestions to their juniors. This is as it should be. By contrast, the plagiarism of the work of a student or mentee is a betrayal of their trust and a denigration of the tutor’s role. Yet even universities themselves do not appear to be as concerned about it as they should be.

A case in point is that of Magdalen Connolly. She was a graduate student, then a Leverhulme early career fellow in the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. She subsequently held a Humboldt Fellowship at LMU Munich, which ended a few months ago. She had all the ingredients for a successful long-term academic career. Now, she has exited academia and has health problems caused by stress. What happened?

Connolly had some novel ideas on a Judaeo-Arabic text. They were appropriated by one of her PhD advisers. In 2020, Connolly submitted a formal complaint to Cambridge, hoping that the matter might be dealt with quickly and a mutually acceptable outcome be obtained.

Instead, it was the start of a lengthy four-year battle during which Connolly had to dedicate a lot of her time to ensuring the matter was dealt with fairly. The university set up a first investigation that lacked the necessary expertise to settle the matter. A second investigation eventually came to a conclusion a few months ago. It confirmed the truth of what Connolly had maintained all along: her adviser had appropriated her ideas without acknowledging her origination of them.

Meanwhile, Connolly sued the university under age discrimination and whistle-blowing legislation. She argued that the university did not take her complaint seriously because she was a junior academic. She also claimed that disclosure of her supervisor’s behaviour was in the public interest to prevent further theft of ideas from other students.

Last week, Connolly lost on both counts.

Cambridge‘s defence was that it did not discriminate against the complainant because it treats everyone this way. And it argued that her actions weren’t whistle-blowing because they were motivated mainly by self-interest.

But although its argument prevailed, the propriety of its behaviour remains questionable. Many large organisations have a tendency to prioritise legal risk over their ethical responsibilities to their employees. It might not be illegal, but is it really acceptable to subject someone to a four-year investigation for what was a legitimate complaint about the misuse of their work?

PhD students and early career researchers are very vulnerable and they are in a hurry, often being on short, fixed-term contracts. Universities should not subject them to an extended investigation – which in Connolly’s case was longer than her three-year fellowship contract with the university.

To fight her case, Connolly had to redirect time and energy away from her scholarship. This had a big impact on her ability to produce new work and on her health, as she set out in her witness statement to the employment tribunal. When she applied for new positions, she found it difficult. She was even told that some professors would not be willing to write her a reference and she was no longer invited to speak at Cambridge events related to her field.

Campus Spotlight: Understanding and protecting academic integrity

There are other recent examples of Cambridge students whose work was plagiarised. William O’Reilly, associate professor in modern history at Cambridge, included large portions of two essays by one of his undergraduate students in an article published in the Journal of Austrian-American History in 2018. When the student discovered this in 2021, he contacted the university, which launched an investigation.

Two years later, however, a tribunal at Cambridge decided this the plagiarism was not deliberate but, rather, the “product of negligent acts”. The journal retracted the article anyway, and the student was reported as saying he was “baffled” at the conclusion. He was not the only one.

Plagiarism by supervisors is by no means a problem specific to Cambridge, of course – or to the humanities. Indeed, students and early career researchers in science and medicine can be even more vulnerable. In some fields, collaborations of tens or hundreds of researchers can be assembled, dependent on a single principal investigator (PI). In these teams, the “superstar” PI flourishes and individual team members compete for projects. The contribution and role of early career researchers can easily become obscured. Their research ideas may even become subsumed by the PI in grant applications.

At the extreme, an abusive PI can routinely overstate his or her own achievements, while belittling those of younger subordinates and dependants. Many young scientists simply stay quiet and hope to move on to more secure positions. Perhaps this is the wisest policy, if not the most public-spirited.

As Connolly observed to me, “Even those who do win the battle, and force the university to admit that they were plagiarised, will lose years (and often their career) to the fight.” Justice delayed is justice denied. Surely no academic institution ought to be content with such a dismal state of affairs.

Wyn Evans is professor of astrophysics at the University of Cambridge. He is a founding member of the 21 Group, which provides advice and support for those experiencing bullying in UK academia