DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: “Unintential Plagiarist” Princeton Historian Kevin Kruse: ” I think the reason AI propagandists are so flustered by the fact that no real writer wants to use their idiotic tools is that they themselves don’t enjoy writing.”

As Phillip Magness asked at Reason in June 2022: Is Twitter-Famous Princeton Historian Kevin Kruse a Plagiarist?

His 2000 thesis on civil-rights-era Atlanta lifts passages from other people’s work.

Known for posting Twitter threads that call out both real and imagined errors of accuracy in conservative commentaries about America’s past, Kruse earned the moniker of “History’s Attack Dog” from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Kruse parlayed his half-million Twitter followers into a recurring opinion column on American political history at MSNBC, and he will soon be taking his Twitter threads to print in a co-edited book, which purports to catalog “distortions of the past promoted in the conservative media.”

But a discovery from Kruse’s past may now put Princeton’s Twitter warrior under a microscope of his own, raising the question of whether he holds himself to the same standards that he imposes on his internet adversaries. A key passage from Kruse’s doctoral dissertation on the history of race relations in Atlanta displays uncanny similarities to a 1996 book on the same subject by Ronald H. Bayor, a now-retired historian from Georgia Tech.

A few months later, “Princeton [dismissed] Kevin Kruse plagiarism allegations as ‘careless cutting and pasting.’”

Scraping data and repurposing it — it’s not just for LLMs anymore!