Columbia University President Targeted with Plagiarism Allegations

Over the past week, Columbia University, along with a slew of other college campuses, has been in the news due to protests supporting Palestinians in Gaza.

As those protests continued, along with the controversy of those protests and how both police and universities responded to them, another headline got some attention: Allegations of plagiarism by Columbia University’s president, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik.

The allegations come from a Yale professor, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, who alleges that Shafik omitted a co-author from a final printing of a 1994 paper that she published in Oxford Economic Papers.

But, while it’s easy to say that this is similar to other plagiarism allegations against college administrators, and some reports have, this case is actually very different from those and deals both with different allegations and different issues.

However, perhaps the biggest difference is that there’s no clear proof of wrongdoing (at least not yet). While I agree that the situation is unusual, it’s not proof of plagiarism by itself.

Understanding the Case

The allegations involve two separate publications of the same research. The first took place in 1992 when Shafik published a working paper entitled Economic Growth and Environmental Quality – Time-Series and Cross-Country Evidence in a publication operated by the World Bank.

With that publication, Sushenjit Bandyopadhyay was listed as a co-author.

The paper was rewritten and then republished in 1994. That publication was in Oxford Economic Papers and featured Shafik as the sole author. Bandyopadhyay was listed in the special thanks section of the paper.

According to Mobarak, this was inappropriate and an attempt to deny credit to Bandyopadhyay. He argues that if Bandyopadhyay did enough work to be an author in the first paper, he should have been included in the second publication. The situation is made more complicated by the fact that Shafik was Bandyopadhyay’s supervisor at the time the research was performed.

However, the case is significantly more nuanced than that. While this is certainly an unusual situation, there’s no real proof of wrongdoing from what we know right now.

A Question of Why

One thing to understand is that a working paper is essentially a draft publication. It’s akin to prepublication prints on sites like arXiv, where one is sharing their work and their findings, but before a draft has been finalized and put through peer review.

So, the similarities between the two works are expected. If we treat the working paper as a rough draft, it’s easy to see why the research and verbiage have so many similarities.

The only question of validity is this: Why was the co-author dropped?

According to Mobarak, the only reason is that Shafik wanted to take credit for herself. However, that is far from a foregone conclusion.

While it is somewhat unusual for a co-author to be dropped like this, there are reasons that it could have happened. First, the inclusion might not have been appropriate the first time, meaning the removal actually addressed rather than created an authorship issue.

Second, the rewriting and additional work on the paper in the two years between publications may have removed or limited Bandyopadhyay’s contributions to the paper. An authorship credit was no longer appropriate.

Finally, it’s possible that Bandyopadhyay requested his name be removed. Perhaps he had a disagreement with the final draft or some other issue.

However, that last one seems unlikely, given what little Bandyopadhyay has said.

The New York Post reached out to him, and he declined to comment. However, Mobarak said he spoke with Bandyopadhyay. According to him, Bandyopadhyay did feel he should have been listed as an author but also didn’t say anything “negative” about Shafik.

In short, we don’t know why the change was made. However, given the evidence, I think it was unlikely a deliberate and malicious attempt to deny Bandyopadhyay credit.

Something Other Than Malice

While there are definitely many things that this could be, it seems unlikely that this was a deliberate attempt to deny Bandyopadhyay credit. There are several reasons for that.

First, Shafik was already the primary author of the paper. There’s simply not much that she gains by becoming the sole author. Collaboration is expected and encouraged in research. Keeping Bandyopadhyay on as a co-author doesn’t really harm her standing in any way.

We see this regularly in research. Most issues of authorship integrity don’t involve removing names that contributed but rather involve adding names that didn’t. Adding other authors doesn’t really dilute the contributions of others, but it can give fake authors an ill-gotten boost.

Second, Shafik didn’t completely remove Bandyopadhyay. He was given a “special thanks” in the paper. While that doesn’t carry nearly the weight of co-authorship, it does give some credit and likely ensures that Bandyopadhyay was aware of the publication.

If one were trying to pull a fast one, omitting the co-author completely would make more sense.

Finally, the final paper was published in Oxford Economic Papers. It’s a well-respected journal. Assuming that the working paper publication was disclosed, which it should have been, the journal was almost certainly made aware of the reasons for the change in authorship. It’s unlikely that it would have published the paper without a valid reason.

So, while it is theoretically possible that Shafik removed her co-author from the final paper, failed to disclose the working paper publication, and did so with the intent of robbing Bandyopadhyay of credit, it doesn’t seem likely. Other reasons simply sound more plausible at this time.

Bottom Line

It’s easy to compare this case to the ones made against other university presidents and administrators. However, this one is different in just about every way. The allegations are from a different source, they deal with different issues and the evidence of wrongdoing is, at this moment, very weak.

Yes, what Mobarak accuses Shafik of doing is at least theoretically possible. But at this time the evidence doesn’t support that and there are still innocent explanations as to what happened.

Shafik, for her part, has not responded to the allegations. However, given events going on at her school and elsewhere, that is hardly a surprise.

It is premature to accuse Shafik of plagiarism or authorship integrity violations without knowing why Bandyopadhyay was dropped as a coauthor. While it is unusual, it’s not, by itself, an indication of plagiarism or other wrongdoing.

This is a classic case of seeing somthing unusual and jumping to the most egregious conclusion. It is technically possible, but we have to eliminate some more mundane explanations first.