Related Articles
The conservative activist Christopher Rufo published claims on Monday that Vice President Kamala Harris had copied portions of her 2009 book “Smart on Crime,” citing five sections that he said were lifted from widely available sites including Wikipedia and news reports.
The passages called into question by Mr. Rufo on his Substack platform involve about 500 words in the approximately 65,000-word, 200-page book. Ms. Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, wrote the book with another author when she was the district attorney in San Francisco.
In a review of the book, The New York Times found that none of the passages in question took the ideas or thoughts of another writer, which is considered the most serious form of plagiarism. Instead, the sentences copy descriptions of programs or statistical information that appear elsewhere.
The five passages that Mr. Rufo cited appeared to have been taken partly from other published work without quotation marks.
Jonathan Bailey, a plagiarism consultant in New Orleans and the publisher of Plagiarism Today, said on Monday that his initial reaction to Mr. Rufo’s claims was that the errors were not serious, given the size of the document.
“This amount of plagiarism amounts to an error and not an intent to defraud,” he said, adding that Mr. Rufo had taken relatively minor citation mistakes in a large amount of text and tried to “make a big deal of it.”
The Harris campaign in a statement rejected the accusations as a right-wing attack to try to derail her growing support.
“This is a book that’s been out for 15 years, and the vice president clearly cited sources and statistics in footnotes and endnotes throughout,” said James Singer, a campaign spokesman.
Known for his work opposing diversity, equity and inclusion programs, Mr. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, published plagiarism accusations last year that helped lead to the resignation of Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay.
Mr. Rufo is part of a loose confederation of conservative writers and activists who, during the past year, have tried to expose plagiarism among academics, many of whom have been Black scholars who work in the field of diversity and inclusion.
The examination of Ms. Harris’s work indicates a shift into government and political figures. Emphasizing the breadth of his work, Mr. Rufo said in an interview that he and several other collaborators had examined the work of about 300 authors.
Among their targets was the master’s thesis of Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Ms. Harris’s running mate. Mr. Rufo said that no evidence was found of plagiarism in his thesis, which one of Mr. Rufo’s associates found in the library at Minnesota State University at Mankato.
In the interview, Mr. Rufo, who describes himself as “leading the fight against the left-wing ideological regime,” said he had not evaluated academic papers or books written by former President Donald J. Trump or his Republican running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, because they did not fit into the group’s hypothesis, which Mr. Rufo described as the theory that “left-wing racialist ideology leads to academic corruption.”
Mr. Rufo said that while he and his colleagues had examined mostly published work by white academics, plagiarism had shown up almost always among papers written by Black scholars, particularly Black women who work in diversity and inclusion.
“We can speculate as to why,” Mr. Rufo said, but he suggested that academic studies that lead to careers in diversity, equity and inclusion were not as rigorous as some others.
Some academics, however, have characterized the campaign as racist.
In his accusations about Ms. Harris’s book, Mr. Rufo cited sentences describing programs or recounting statistics about crime, or conditions that could lead to crime.
In one chapter that recounts efforts to fight crime in High Point, N.C., the book appears to have borrowed a paragraph from a news release by John Jay College of Criminal Justice about an award on High Point’s work. There are no quotations around the text, but a footnote cites the news release as a source.
The paragraph reads: “The drug market shut down immediately and permanently, with a sustained 35 percent reduction in violent crime. High Point repeated the strategy in three additional markets over the next three years. There is virtually no remaining public drug dealing in the city, and serious crime has fallen 20 percent citywide.”
The news release: “The drug market shut down immediately and permanently, with a sustained 35% reduction in violent crime. High Point repeated the strategy in three additional markets over the next three years. There is virtually no remaining public drug dealing in the city, and serious crime has fallen 20% citywide.”
In another section about the relationship between high school dropout rates and crime, Ms. Harris’s book credits a 2008 report by the Education Research Center for information on high school dropout rates. But the text describing the report is similar to a passage that appears to have originated from The Associated Press and republished by NBC News. Neither The A.P. nor NBC is credited.
In the book’s acknowledgments, Ms. Harris thanked her co-author, Joan O’C. Hamilton, writing that she was “the perfect writing partner.” Ms. Hamilton did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The Times also reviewed Ms. Harris’s 2019 memoir “The Truths We Hold,” and did not discover any instances of plagiarism.
“Smart on Crime” focused on Ms. Harris’s approach to policing and was published around the time that she entered the race for California attorney general. The book helped introduce her to national audiences.
More recently, the book has been scrutinized by reporters analyzing Ms. Harris’s positions on crime.
<
