“Publish or perish.” That’s the game in academia. If you want to get tenure or advance to leadership roles, you have to write a lot of articles and get them published.

But you can’t just publish anything. The journal editors and reviewers who decide what gets published have a point of view, and it’s best not to upset their point of view too much if you want them to publish your paper. That point of view is often left-wing, but the political valence matters less than straightforward conformity with the prevailing research in the field. Employ conventional methodology, write in conventional format, use conventional terminology, that sort of thing.

That means people looking to climb the ranks in academia have strong incentives to publish research that doesn’t rock the boat. The most straightforward way to do that is to publish research that largely says things that have already been said but includes some kind of unique tweak or addition.

There’s nothing wrong with that per se. The problem is that it’s very difficult to come up with something unique to publish at an academic level often enough to get tenure or a leadership role at a university.

Spending a lot of time on one idea gets you one good paper. Spending less time on several ideas gets you several less good papers. It’s no wonder that plenty of research in many fields is of dubious quality and cannot be replicated by other researchers. But “publish or perish” prizes quantity over quality.

The fastest way to produce research that doesn’t rock the boat is to plagiarize. Plagiarism, by definition, is saying something other people have already said. And the work is already done, so you can get on with other papers.

But the editors will notice, right? Maybe, but maybe not. Academia is full of people who are very good at pretending they have read all of the latest research. There are so many journals churning out so much research by so many aspiring professors who are working under “publish or perish” that it’s basically impossible to have read it all.

And many of the key papers or books that are at the center of a discipline are frequently cited and rarely read. That means you can get by just by reading what other people say about what prominent researchers or foundational thinkers have said. Since most people do that, they won’t know if you’re plagiarizing.

As is true in other professions, academia is less about what you know than about whom you know. Spending time cultivating relationships with the right people helps to avoid accusations of wrongdoing and puts you front of mind for promotion opportunities.

That implies that incentives for plagiarism are stronger, and barriers against it are weaker, for more ambitious people. If you care less about being high-status, you’ll feel less pressure to publish and be less worried about the career effects of going too slow on an idea. That means you’re more likely to take your time, properly citing sources and being as original as possible.

Most people have a moral objection to plagiarism, and that means they won’t do it. But in an environment where plagiarism is sometimes the path of least resistance, and it’s unlikely to be noticed, that moral objection can wear down over time.

All of which is to say, if you think you can get away with it, plagiarism can pay. If your job is to churn out research that basically nobody will read closely, and quantity matters more than quality, why not copy a little?

Harvard president Claudine Gay’s plagiarism has been publicly readable for years, and nobody noticed until now. She was getting away with it just fine, until she was in the unusual situation of testifying before Congress about whether calling for genocide was against her university’s code of conduct. Most people will never be in that situation.

Gay is not the only person who was getting away with it. Plenty of other researchers have, at some point in their numerous publications, copied or failed to properly cite someone else’s work. They had lots of incentives to do so at the time. They might not even remember doing it if confronted now.

It’s all a product of “publish or perish” combined with the proliferation of academic disciplines and hyper-specific research areas that have little to no effect on the real world. If the research doesn’t matter anyway, it doesn’t make much difference whether it’s plagiarized. And if everybody’s doing it, you can’t fire Gay for it without firing lots of other people, too.