When a Harvard scholar was recently accused of lifting several paragraphs of his new book from another author, he resorted to a now-familiar defense: it was his “research assistants” who had been sloppy and allowed the unattributed quotations. But that type of buck-passing infuriates some scholars, who are loudly questioning whether works written with the aid of multiple student researchers actually qualify as scholarship at all. “We’re not talking about razor blades or soap. We’re talking about creative endeavors. A book that bears a name is widely presumed to be written by that author.”