My Word!

Plagiarism and College Culture

Susan D. Blum

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780801457166
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

"Classroom Cheats Turn to Computers." "Student Essays on Internet Offer Challenge to Teachers." "Faking the Grade." Headlines such as these have been blaring the alarming news of an epidemic of plagiarism and cheating in American colleges: more than 75 percent of students admit to having cheated; 68 percent admit to cutting and pasting material from the Internet without citation. Professors are reminded almost daily that many of today's college students operate under an entirely new set of assumptions about originality and ethics. Practices that even a decade ago would have been regarded almost universally as academically dishonest are now commonplace.

Is this development an indication of dramatic shifts in education and the larger culture? In a book that dismisses hand-wringing in favor of a rich account of how students actually think and act, Susan D. Blum discovers two cultures that exist, often uneasily, side by side in the classroom. Relying extensively on interviews conducted by students with students, My Word! presents the voices of today's young adults as they muse about their daily activities, their challenges, and the meanings of their college lives. Outcomes-based secondary education, the steeply rising cost of college tuition, and an economic climate in which higher education is valued for its effect on future earnings above all else.

These factors each have a role to play in explaining why students might pursue good grades by any means necessary. These incentives have arisen in the same era as easily accessible ways to cheat electronically and with almost intolerable pressures that result in many students being diagnosed as clinically depressed during their transition from childhood to adulthood. However, Blum suggests, the real problem of academic dishonesty arises primarily from a lack of communication between two distinct cultures within the university setting. On one hand, professors and administrators regard plagiarism as a serious academic crime, an ethical transgression, even a sin against an ethos of individualism and originality. Students, on the other hand, revel in sharing, in multiplicity, in accomplishment at any cost.

Although this book is unlikely to reassure readers who hope that increasing rates of plagiarism can be reversed with strongly worded warnings on the first day of class, My Word! opens a dialogue between professors and their students that may lead to true mutual comprehension and serve as the basis for an alignment between student practices and their professors' expectations.

1

A Question of Judgment

Plagiarism Is Not One Thing, Once and for All

When I worked at a newspaper, we were routinely dispatched to “match” a story from the Times: to do a new version of someone else’s idea. But had we “matched” any of the Times’ words—even the most banal of phrases—it could have been a firing offense. The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce the originality on the level of the sentence. . . .

The final dishonesty of the plagiarism fundamentalists is to encourage us to pretend that . . . chains of influence and evolution do not exist, and that a writer’s words have a virgin birth and an eternal life.

—MALCOLM GLADWELL, “Something Borrowed”

WANT to hear a funny story? I heard it thirdhand. It could be an urban legend, but whether true or not it still shows us how we think about it.

A teaching assistant encountered an instance of plagiarism in her class. She returned all the papers and said to the students: “Someone has committed plagiarism. If you confess, I will work with you to teach you how to improve and won’t file charges.” Nearly all the students in the class, maybe seventeen out of twenty, confessed to varying types of plagiarism.1

What do students understand when they hear the term “plagiarism”? Is it the same thing that is understood by faculty? By writers in general? How firm are the standards? What is the relationship between plagiarism and cheating? Is plagiarism bad? What should we do about it? It will take most of this book to answer these questions. This chapter addresses them by showing how wobbly are the guidelines for citation, the remedy to the threat of plagiarism, and the penalties for plagiarism. It demonstrates that plagiarism is not one thing, once and for all, but that there is profound disagreement about what it is and how it should be regarded.

What Is Plagiarism?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, plagiarism means (1) “the action or practice of plagiarizing; the wrongful appropriation or purloining, and publication as one’s own, of the ideas, or the expression of the ideas (literary, artistic, musical, mechanical, etc.) of another” or (2) “a purloined idea, design, passage, or work.” The OED traces the first appearance of the word in English to 1621, when Bishop R. Montague wrote, “Were you afraid to bee challenged for plagiarisme?” The term has Latin roots (plagiarius meaning “plunderer,” from plagium, “hunting net,” from plaga, “net”); according to Webster’s, the English word was originally “plagiary.”

Even within the dictionary definition—wrongfully using another’s words or ideas and publishing them as one’s own—plagiarism includes several not necessarily related actions. One definition suggests a moral, ethical, or technical violation. The other (“purloined”) points, essentially, to a crime. But dictionary definitions can take us only so far. Words are used in a variety of ways; natural language as used in society is always fuzzy. The first point to make, then, in understanding plagiarism is that it involves a range of behavior. How “bad” each instance is depends on what kind of plagiarism we are talking about.

The term at its core means to copy someone else’s work; even paraphrasing without attribution counts as plagiarism. Although the meaning sounds clear, however, it is murky in reality. Furthermore, different constituencies have different meanings for and histories with plagiarism. We might helpfully regard it as a triple entity, a triangle. At one point of the triangle, plagiarism is a kind of cheating involving written works. At the cheating corner, a student knowingly, willfully, unambiguously engages in forbidden behavior such as buying a term paper, an act that enters the realm of conscious criminality, or fraud. (Presumably the seller agrees to the exchange, so there is no theft involved.) It is an academic crime: academic credit is received without the work being done (see chapter 4).

At a second, inadvertent corner, plagiarism results from a failure to master conventions. Proper citation practices are difficult skills to acquire; they can be learned only through slow, careful teaching. Students regularly make mistakes about how to cite without any intention of breaking rules, let alone laws.

At the third corner are professionals who steal another writer’s work without permission and for their own benefit. At this professional corner, copyright infringement and other matters of law come into play.

But even beyond the threefold nature of plagiarism, in many cases the guidelines are unclear. Although writers are told to be guided by the short and sweet rule “Cite your sources,” this rule can be—and is—followed only in some contexts.

The Wobbliness of Guidelines

I came across the following two sentences one day on a single page of the New York Times:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least among humans, that a giant tortoise in the possession of the last sperm of his species must be in want of a wife.2

Conquistadors from Spain came, they saw and they were astonished.3

Both sentences allude to well-known lines from well-known literary sources—a practice often considered “homage.” The first is a variant of the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice (“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”). The second refers to the words uttered by Julius Caesar, veni, vidi, vici, “I came, I saw, I conquered,” frequently quoted with the third verb varied for effect. Allusions need not be cited, especially allusions to well-known works. These are a nod to members of the club who recognize them. (It is a matter of judgment to determine how well known a source is.) But journalists in general do not provide publication information for material they cite; it is verified behind the scenes by fact checkers. Sources are simply not credited.

Most people encounter journalistic writing far more commonly than they do scholarly writing. I noticed the lack of citation only because I was engrossed in writing this book. To find the kind of documentation in which sources are clearly cited, we have to look to academic writing. Here is a good example of proper citation from a scholarly journal, one writer quoting another academic writer:

Ortner encourages researchers to explore all the intricacies of a subculture as a means to avoid romanticized conceptions: “It is the absence of analysis of these forms of internal conflict in many resistance studies that gives them an air of romanticism, of which they are often accused” (1996: 285). We acknowledge that multiple subcultures likely exist within the SSC [Students Serving Christ] subculture, but we focus on what we perceive to be its dominant and shared understandings.4

This is a typical scholarly use of quotation—not elegant or playful, as in the New York Times, but functional. Here the authors acknowledge a potential criticism of their work, from a position similar to that expressed by Sherry Ortner, though she did not specifically address their writing. Ortner is well known, so having her words stand for a prevailing scholarly position is effective.

A different usage arises when concepts are borrowed from an authority; that person’s work—at least a representative one—is also cited:

The metaphor of script has been used in the social and cognitive sciences for the last thirty years to explain the interplay between cultural models and social action (D’Andrade 1995). In this context, concepts with a similar meaning have been borrowed from other fields, mainly those of literature and drama, such as frame, scene, scenario, script, schema, and folk model.5

Proper academic citation provides a way for authors to trace their influences, to situate themselves intellectually, to prove that they have done their background theoretical reading, to demonstrate engagement in an ongoing community of inquiry, and to provide sources for readers who want to consult earlier thinkers or data (see chapter 2). In the social sciences and humanities this is what we wish our students to learn how to do. But even this model is not so simple, even for academics. Standard practices vary considerably.

To determine how much of a consensus exists about what constitutes plagiarism, Kell Julliard conducted a study among professors of medicine, medical students, English professors, and journal editors.6 Respondents were presented with an original passage, two rewordings with verbatim quotations, and one rewording that was slightly paraphrased. Participants were asked which were acceptable and which constituted plagiarism. Most medical school faculty—who themselves publish articles—saw all as acceptable, in contrast to the other three groups. Julliard’s study reveals that a different standard exists for quotation and paraphrase in medical journals than in other academic fields.7 But it is not just medical journals that differ from all other areas.

Other studies have similarly revealed a range of practices, from very strict—in which even tiny amounts of verbatim quoting are considered plagiarism—to fairly lax acceptance of uncredited verbatim quotation.8 Writers in different disciplines expect and accept varying amounts of quotation and citation, with some embracing it and others shunning it. Furthermore, professionals and academics disagree with editors, those ultimate arbiters of correct practice. (Instability of judgment, as you will see in chapter 2, stems from the historical development of the notion of literary property and authorship but also from the very nature of language.) So if even professors lack a shared clear-cut judgment about what constitutes plagiarism, it should not be difficult to see why students have even less certainty. As I will show later, even the most subtle legal thinkers, in developing the concepts of copyright and intellectual property, struggled with the same fuzzy issues.

I think we do an injustice to students by overlooking the genuinely contentious nature of citation. By pretending that the standards are firm and fixed—despite students’ experience of often getting very different instructions from different professors, sometimes within the same department—we reject an educational opportunity and force students to conclude, on their own, that the rules don’t make any sense. That makes it easier for them to disregard them entirely.

Plagiarism outside the Walls of Academe

Mention plagiarism, and certain writers’ names are bound to come up. The public appears fascinated by plagiarism, a sin for which only some of the prominent are likely to be singled out and even fewer punished. Let’s recall a few of the most notorious cases.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian (Harvard Ph.D. in government), former frequent commentator on PBS, was accused in 2002 of plagiarizing large amounts—passages on ninety-one pages—of material from Lynne McTaggart, an expert on Kathleen Kennedy, for her book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.9 Goodwin admitted that she had been sloppy in identifying her sources, settled with McTaggart for an unrevealed amount of money, acknowledged having failed to credit other authors as well, promised to withdraw all copies of the book, and published a corrected version of it. People argued about whether Goodwin’s plagiarism was “intentional” or “inadvertent.” Some critics lambasted her for failing to live up to the standards set even for undergraduates at Harvard (where she served on the board of overseers), who could be punished for lifting a single phrase without attribution. In her defense, a list of noteworthy public intellectuals commended Goodwin’s generally exc...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• 1 A Question of Judgment
• 2 Intertextuality, Authorship, and Plagiarism
• 3 Observing the Performance Self
• 4 Growing Up in the College Bubble
• 5 No Magic Bullet
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments