On the Unforgivable Crime of Plagiarism
A Provocative PrefaceBack in August, an Economist article took aim at America's sex offender laws, arguing that many statutes reflexively require astounding punishments for a wide range of prosecutable practices, only a few of which are the nightmare scenarios that keep parents up at night. Deftly avoiding any defense of sex offenders per se, the article makes a political point that seems crucial to me: no politician ever lost support for proposing a new or harsher sex law, and few politicians would dare speak out against such proposed legislation; after all, if a politician were to resist these sex laws, as another article in the issue puts it, "the attack ads practically write themselves." As a result, it just might be that some of our nation's statutes have lost touch with the balance--between intervention/punishment and opportunities for change, say--that we might hope would underlie our laws.
There's a lot more to be said before one does justice to this topic, but I raise it here only to highlight and (maybe) exaggerate the point I want to make about plagiarism.
A Clarification
For those who don't follow it, plagiarism it is a perennial source of scandal involving famous writers and politicians, and it has motivated an increasing number of zero-tolerance policies and high-profile expulsions at colleges. More than a few high schools and high school teachers adopt similar zero-tolerance policies as well.
For the moment, I want to ignore examples of students copying entire works (e.g., buying essays), a form of plagiarism I've seen only a few times. The below concerns the (very common) kinds of plagiarism in which student work includes some combination of source material and the writer's "own words," but which constitutes plagiarism because the writer failed to cite some sources or reproduced exact wording without quotation. Now then...
The Point
With American sex statutes in mind, I wonder if a parallel political problem exists today in higher education regarding plagiarism: No academic administrator ever lost points for stiffening penalties for, or formalizing proceedings against, plagiarists. Certainly for institutions charged with the production of knowledge (and subsidized on that basis), instances of academic fraud leaves a lot of egg on a log of faces. And yes, technological changes have made the offense less difficult and more tempting to perpetrate. All of that merits some kind of response from teachers and administrators. But institutional responses seem to too often position students as lone gunmen committing academic treason within institutions that have no interest serving such criminals. Not plagiarizing, then, is a tacit admissions requirement for undergraduates. The act is criminal, and those who do have no standing with the assignment/course/academic community.
But what I have seen when uncovering plagiarism in the writing of my students/tutees--from middle school to the graduate level--is not a lazy and dishonest effort at avoiding thought, but a learning and survival process that is, in its broadest form, common to everyone I've ever seen or known. Surely we all parrot the language of those we admire as we develop our ability to recombine language bits into utterances that sound unique. Surely our ability to do things ourselves is the result of a long learning process, not its defining feature. And the worst problem with criminalizing plagiarism is that it confuses students into thinking that plagiarism is something that only criminals do. The resulting thought process--I'm not a criminal, therefore I don't plagiarize--stops many students from more faithfully identifying what it is that's expected of them when they're tempted to use the authoritative language of others to help advance an argument. Meanwhile, when they're not caught and prosecuted for doing it, students often get their most positive feedback for borrowed language and their harshest critique when they can't/don't plagiarize...why struggle with your own language when you've got someone else's that seems to be so perfect the way that it is?
It seems unlikely that many people are going to look at sex offenders anytime soon and ask, "What does it mean about me and my culture that these people exist?" but I'd like to think it more likely that educators could use the prevalence of plagiarism to talk about how people really learn, how individual courses do (or don't) foster the confidence it takes for academic apprentices to make "original" arguments, whether it makes sense to treat plagiarism as the same offense early and late in a student's learning trajectory, and how struggling students should be treated by institutions of learning.
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1 Comments:
In my own experience as a college professor assigning research papers in both Anthropology and Art History, I have found that most plagiarism problems come from students who don't fully understand the citation process. I have taken to writing extensive instructions on my syllabi and even in one instance, had to insert an entire class on proper citation when almost all of the Anthropology papers turned in failed to cite sources properly, if at all. In the last instance, though I failed all of the papers the first time, I allowed them to be revised and turned in to for a replacement grade. I do believe that plagiarism is serious but I agree that we need to continually take the opportunity to re-educate and offer a chance for redemption.