What is Plagiarism?

William Shakespeare was famously accused of “plagiarism” by his arch rival, university graduate and playwright, Robert Greene who, on his deathbed in 1592, wrote a very popular and scathing pamphlet in which he accused Shakespeare - a non-university-educated actor - of stealing lines and plots from established university-educated playwrights such as Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd.  

Fast forward to over four centuries later, Professor Jason Arday - a scholar of Ghanaian heritage - the youngest ever Black academic to be named a Professor at Cambridge University, is also accused of plagiarism, which led to his untimely death on August 14, 2026 at just 41.

I am, of course, not comparing Shakespeare and Professor Arday - God forbid! I am only using the similar accusations against them to explore the whole notion of plagiarism. So, what is this “disease” or intellectual “crime” that has persisted across ages and cultures, tainting the legacies of some of the most brilliant minds the world has ever known?

Plagiarism is conventionally defined in modern academic and legal contexts as the practice of taking someone else’s work, ideas, prose, or intellectual property and passing them off as one's own without appropriate attribution or acknowledgement.

The word itself derives from the Latin plagiarius, meaning "kidnapper" or "plunderer"—a term famously adapted by the Roman poet Martial to describe those who stole his verses.

At its core, plagiarism is understood in modern Western institutions as an act of intellectual dishonesty, theft, and institutional fraud. It is governed by rigorous citation standards, intellectual property laws, and institutional codes of conduct. However, defining plagiarism as an absolute, universally fixed moral boundary obscures a complex reality: the concepts of original authorship, ownership of ideas, and textual borrowing are deeply tied to specific historical periods and cultural frameworks.

The Demise of Prof. Jason Arday and the Weapons-Grade Standard of Plagiarism

The definition and enforcement of plagiarism carry real-world consequences, as illustrated by the case of Professor Jason Arday. In August 2026, Prof. Jason Arday—who in 2023 had been appointed as the youngest Black professor in the history of the University of Cambridge—was found dead at his home in London, shortly after resigning under intense public and institutional pressure following accusations of academic misconduct and plagiarism. The accusations were first voiced in mid-2026 by Nathan Cofnas, a white US researcher and former Cambridge philosophy affiliate.

The tragic circumstances surrounding Prof. Arday's resignation and death highlight a central dynamic in contemporary academic politics: the deployment of plagiarism allegations not merely as objective standards of academic integrity, but as selective instruments of institutional power and racialized scrutiny.

Critics, commentators, and fellow academics pointed out that the public pillorying and media campaign against Professor Arday went far beyond standard academic peer review or internal administrative resolution, functioning as a weaponized assault against a high-profile Black scholar. In fact, it was, plain and simple, an intellectual lynching of Professor Arday.

His case demonstrates how the definition of plagiarism can be applied asymmetrically. While technical standards of citation are presented as objective, universal rules, their enforcement often reflects surrounding social hierarchies and power dynamics. When standards of attribution are treated as rigid metrics detached from pedagogical context or systemic inequities, allegations of plagiarism can serve as a mechanism to delegitimize non-traditional or marginalized scholars.

Historical Perspective:

To understand whether plagiarism is an inherent moral breach or a culturally constructed norm, we must examine how the transmission of knowledge has functioned historically across different civilizations and artistic movements.

Ancient Egypt and the Greek Scholars

The standard Western narrative of intellectual history often attributes the foundations of philosophy, geometry, and science to classical Greece. However, historical evidence demonstrates that prominent ancient Greek thinkers—such as Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, and Herodotus—traveled to and received extensive training in ancient Egypt (Kemet).

In ancient Egypt, knowledge was viewed as a sacred, collective continuum rather than individual private property. Scholars, priests, and scribes built upon existing texts, cosmological models, and mathematical formulae without asserting personal, exclusive ownership over the ideas.

When Greek philosophers studied in Egyptian temples, they absorbed, translated, and synthesized these traditions into their own works.

Under modern definitions of copyright and academic attribution, the uncredited adaptation of Egyptian mathematical principles or philosophical concepts by classical Greek writers could be categorized as plagiarism.

Yet in the ancient Mediterranean context, this cross-cultural absorption was considered standard scholarly synthesis and pedagogical transmission. The concept of individual copyright did not exist; ideas belonged to the shared domain of human inquiry.

Cubism and the African Vision of Art

A parallel dynamic appears in the history of modern Western art, particularly with the rise of Cubism in the early 20th century. Pioneers of Cubism, such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, radically transformed Western visual art by breaking away from traditional perspective and adopting geometric abstraction, multi-perspective flattening, and structural reductionism.

This artistic shift was directly inspired by African art, specifically traditional West and Central African masks and sculptures that Picasso observed at the Trocadéro Museum in Paris. The African vision of art prioritized conceptual representation over literal mimetic reproduction, treating the art object as a symbolic and structural entity.

While Cubism drew fundamental aesthetic principles from African traditions, European art movements absorbed these forms into individual artistic portfolios. In Western art history, this was celebrated as genius and avant-garde innovation rather than cultural plagiarism or theft. This contrast demonstrates how Western frameworks historically permitted the uncredited appropriation of collective, non-Western intellectual and artistic traditions, while strictly penalizing internal violations of individual property within their own institutions.

Is Plagiarism Culture-Specific?

The comparative history of knowledge transmission shows that plagiarism as currently defined is culture-specific and bound to particular economic and philosophical frameworks.

1. The Individualist vs. Collectivist Framework: Modern definitions of plagiarism rely on Enlightenment-era individualism and capitalist notions of intellectual property. In contrast, many Indigenous, Asian, and African intellectual traditions view knowledge as a collective resource meant to be refined, shared, and passed down through generations. In these contexts, repeating the exact words of an ancestor or master is an act of respect and fidelity, not theft.

‍

2. Textual Continuity: In classical East Asian scholarly traditions, such as Confucian education, memorization and verbatim reproduction of classic texts were viewed as the highest demonstration of erudition. Originality was expressed through subtle synthesis rather than the creation of entirely new terminology.

3. The Variable Boundary of Appropriation: Western culture itself permits extensive borrowing in specific domains—such as jazz music, hip-hop sampling, open-source software development, and folk storytelling—while strictly policing written text within academic institutions.

Reining in the Definition of Plagiarism

The tragic loss of Prof. Jason Arday highlights the urgent need to examine how academic standards are defined, applied, and enforced. When plagiarism is defined purely through technical metrics and used as a tool for public harassment or selective prosecution, it strays from its core purpose of fostering academic integrity.

Plagiarism is not an absolute, immutable law of nature; it is a culturally specific set of conventions created to govern intellectual credit within specific economic and academic structures. A nuanced understanding of plagiarism acknowledges the importance of fair attribution while recognizing that knowledge creation has always been an interconnected, global process drawing on diverse cultural traditions.

These traditions operate today in a system dominated by Western philosophy and dictums. Whereas, up till today, art is produced in Africa without individual claims of authorship (nobody claimed individual rights of ownership to the world famous Benin or Ife bronzes), based on the philosophy of Ubuntu (“I am because we are”), in the Western and capitalist world, the opposite is true: the idea or work of art essentially belongs to the individual. These divergent world views further make any sensible discussion of plagiarism rather complicated.

No matter from which perspective the issue is viewed, one thing is clear, behind the ostensible claims of plagiarism and intellectual rigor lies a festering sore of racism nurtured by the unrelenting, jaundiced belief that Blacks are incapable of any outstanding intellectual contribution to the march of civilization. That is the unfortunate reality that the case of Professor Jason Arday has tragically laid bare.

Were Shakespeare to be alive today, what would have been the impact of the accusations of Robert Greene on his professional career?

‍