Ian Ayres - Controversy

Controversy

Reading Ayres' 2007 book Super Crunchers, David Leonhardt of the New York Times "came across two sentences about a doctor in Atlanta that were nearly identical to two sentences I wrote in this newspaper last year." From another author in Fast Company Ayres "reproduces the exact words, without quotation marks." Leonhardt was particularly disturbed that "many readers will surely assume that Ayres witnessed some events" that he did not. The Yale Daily News found nine passages, some more than a couple paragraphs long, where Ayres used the exact words of other authors without quotation marks. In reference to Ayres' case and another one at Southern Illinois University, Inside Higher Ed said "Both men simply stuck passages from other writers into their text when it suited them, and gave either minimal or no attribution. In some of the passages in question, neither used quotation marks, even when they quoted at length, verbatim."

After some controversy over three weeks, Ayres did say "...I should have used quotation marks to set it apart from my text. I apologize for these errors...." He and his publisher promised to correct future printings. Critics were not satisfied with his explanation that he had simply made a mistake. Inside Higher Ed noted that the same behavior by students is "severely sanctioned." Professors at other universities were quite critical of Ayres' explanation and pointed out that the method used by the Yale Daily News to discover plagiarized passages was unlikely to catch them all.