Why You Should Care, or Project Plagiarism Matters

I keep forgetting to show my students stories of why and how academic citation matters "in the real world."

I'm going to start collecting them here, so that I have somewhere easy to point to.

I've spoken before about why I think plagiarism--or, rather, the habits of academic honesty that plagiarism violates--is a big moral deal.

It certainly is a big deal in academia, and the big deal that it is can properly be called a moral deal because the procedural standards are oriented toward properly moral goals--honesty, diligence, courtesy, etc.

Whether it is a big deal, moral or otherwise, outside the academy is worth pondering.  I don't believe that my students believe my insistence on proper attribution does them any good outside of the classroom or has any goal not restricted to the "academic" part of academic integrity.

I came across several examples this week that might be useful for Project Plagiarism Matters.  Just one will have to suffice for this post, however.

I wouldn't have noticed this one but for my colleague at Huntingdon, Dr. Jeremy Lewis, who reminded me that students are protected, as well as imperiled, by proper citation.

When College Students Plagiarize You, You Must Have Said Something Worth Saying

Yes, it's the college student who got in trouble here, but the person whom he plagiarized is a writer, who has a stake in having her work acknowledged.  She also has a stake in having her work benefit herself, rather than some privileged white dude.  ("Lord, prosper the work of our hands!")

It seems worth reminding students that they might some day write for a living--incidentally to whatever employment they find or as a substantial part of their careers.  They learn proper citation now as part of a system of proper attribution that protects writers from having their work stolen for others' benefit.

This system is especially important for those of us in the essentially charitable enterprise of education.  We accept a modest salary in exchange for bettering the lives of others by passing along ideas that we have learned from others.  There are only a few concrete ways we can augment that modest salary, and almost all of them have to do with generating ideas worth sharing and publishing them in income-producing ways.

But even for those of us outside academia, the protection of our intellectual and artistic work--enacted legally by copyright protection, but morally by accusations of plagiarism--still matters.  My students might not go on to be researchers or authors, but they might go on to be bloggers.  Many of them are already users of content-sharing social media--instagram and such.  They might go on to be technical writers of some kind.  They might be speech writers or website designers or nurse-educators or anybody else who would create something with words.

They might like to know that some fussy old fuddy-duddy of a professor like me is training those who come after them not to plagiarize them.

Sentences You Should Fear

I have become quite an expert at catching instances of academic dishonesty.

In fact, I've caught more plagiarists without the help of my school's detection program (SafeAssign, Turnitin, etc.) than with.

I say this not to brag, but to preface the following list: those sentences I'm mostly likely to say right before I catch you. I put this list in order of ascending frequency.

"Gee, that's not how the book put it." When a student, even a good student, knows more about the topic than the author he's supposed to be summarizing, analyzing, or assessing, I tend to assume that student has done a little outside "research." So I start doing a little "research" of my own.

"Gosh, this would have been a great paper for the other class this student is taking/took last semester/would have taken as a freshman." I do know what classes are being offered elsewhere in the school, you know. And sometimes, your other professors and I chat about, like, what we're teaching. Recycling paper is good and will lead to a cleaner and better future for all; recycling papers can only lead to your downfall.

"That's . . . not . . . what I assigned." Sometimes, an essay that doesn't address the assignment but is in other ways a sound effort is just a bad essay. Other times, it's a bad deal--that purchased essay didn't exactly do it's job. And the funny thing? About two sentences into our conversation about your paper (and we will have one), I can tell which of these it is.

"This is a rather astounding improvement over the last paper." This sentence almost never, in itself, provokes The Conversation. I've actually had students who work on their writing and improve it over the course of the semester. (No, really! Some people do that. Have you considered that as an alternative to . . . no? Well, it was worth a try.) But it almost always provokes a little one-on-one time with the search engine.

"Wow, this is a grammatically correct sentence." You know who you are and why this makes me start googling. This corollary to the previous (both falling under the "There's no way that student produced this paper" category heading) is distinguished primarily by the suspect sentence's isolation from its surroundings. That pearl of great price--grammar--shines all the brighter when it appears in the midst of the compost bin that is your usual writing. I always google the pearl. And I usually find that it has an original owner that is not you.

"Darn that thesaurus function on Word." This one is kind of fun, actually. When I reconstruct the sentence that would have existed before your thesaurus use rendered it nonsensical, I can figure out whether you're 1) a bad writer or 2) a bad writer and a plagiarist. If the probable ur-sentence of the tortured sentence is itself confused and mangled, that's a sure sign that it actually originated with you. (I never attempt to reconstruct the mental pattern that produced such a sentence. I prefer to live in a land of logic and reason.) If the reconstructed sentence is logical, grammatical, and germane to the essay, I go a-hunting.

And, the final and most frequent precursor to your visit with the academic dean:

"Oh, look! Wiki!" Nowadays, I read the relevant Wiki page(s) right before I start grading. It just makes the whole process faster.

Perhaps this list will make you reconsider your attempt to skirt the requirements of your course. Or perhaps it will simply make you a better plagiarizer. Either way, I will consider it a success. The former is better for your soul, which is, of course, more important than your intellect. But the latter is not lacking in a kind of scholarly merit--the skills of a successful (as opposed to lucky) plagiarist are genuinely intellectual skills that may serve you later in life.

Opinionation

Pace Stanley Fish, who is always worth reading, even when he's wrong, plagiarism is a big moral deal.

Fish offers several cogent arguments to the contrary in his recent "Opinionator" piece, "Plagiarism Is Not a Big Moral Deal," the most insightful of which is that professional standards are not the same as moral imperatives.

This resembles the principle that appears in legal theory as the difference between mala prohibita and mala in se: that is, the difference between merely procedural crimes (e.g., driving down the wrong side of the road) and crimes that are morally objectionable in themselves (e.g., murder).

In the latter case, the law recognizes acts of moral significance. In the former case, moral significance (if there is any) is the creation of the law--if there were no traffic law, there would be no moral significance in choosing which side of the road to drive down. This is part of why traffic violations that result in no harm to person or property are minimally punished. They're not a big deal. We punish them only because having a system of traffic regulation is, overall, a good thing, not because there is an eternal moral imperative to drive on the right side of the road.

Fish wants us to view plagiarism as something like a malum prohibitum: something that violates the merely procedural dictates of a self-contained community.

But my language begins to betray me already.

Fish does not use the word "community" in reference to academia--only in reference to golfers. Academia is "our house," a "guild," a "context of practice," a language game which students must learn to play.

It is no accident that Fish does not call academia a community. A community is more morally weighty than a guild or a "context of practice."

Fish's overall point, by the way, is not that plagiarism shouldn't be punished--it is that there is no philosophical warrant for valuing originality. And in this, he is correct.

But codes against plagiarism are not about protecting original work. Standards of proper citation do not exist to protect the originator of an idea. That's the difference between plagiarism codes and copyright law.

Standards of proper citation exist to cultivate habits of worthy discourse within the academic community. (And, yes, I am just silly enough to pretend that something called "the academic community" exists, or at least could.) They exist to train us to participate in the tradition of academic discussion.

Proper citation trains us in courtesy--we acknowledge our intellectual debts both for the sake of our intellectual parents and for the sake of our current conversation partners. In the former sense, our intellectual parents may have a stake in the conversation in which we are quoting them; proper citation courteously invites them into that conversation, as it were. In the latter sense, citing our sources allows our current conversation partners to understand most fully what we are saying. We do our conversation partners the courtesy of aiding their investigation into our arguments.

Proper citation trains us in truth-telling. As the previous point suggests, when we acknowledge our intellectual debts, we allow for the fullest possible understanding of our claims and arguments. This transparency may make our arguments vulnerable; perhaps the scholar whose phrasing we found so felicitous was known for eliding fact and assertion, or perhaps the "varied" studies we are marshaling to prove our points were all funded by the same super-conglomerate. Proper citation is a kind of full disclosure, the kind of openness that is necessary for excellent discourse.

Proper citation trains us in respect. Acknowledging our intellectual debts is a kind of justice--giving someone her due, as Thomas Aquinas put it (more or less, somewhere-or-other). If we have been taught, our teacher has earned something from us--not the recognition of his originality, but the recognition of his generosity in teaching us (however remote or impersonal the mode of teaching).

And proper citation trains us in diligence. Students and scholars who plagiarize are not, in general, trying to claim false credit for original thoughts--they are trying to get out of doing hard work. Charitable description, thoughtful analysis, and persuasive rhetoric are difficult practices to master; proper citation is itself, as Fish acknowledges, a kind of skill that one must master. Anti-plagiarism codes are designed to identify and, yes, even weed out those who do not care to do that work, to learn those skills.

Respect, truth-telling, courtesy, diligence--these are all morally weighty terms. If Fish is right that originality is not a terribly interesting or valuable thing, he misses that it is the least of the things proper citation is designed to cultivate.

A Good Class

My students nearly came to blows this week, arguing over the ethical implications of a serious reading of Revelation.

It doesn't get any better than that, does it?

What Mike Pressler Should Have Done

Or, Why I'm Not Rallying Around the "Innocent" Lacrosse Players

Don't get me wrong. I'm happy that three men are no longer under an undeserved indictment, that what appears to have been a cruelly false accusation has been set right, and that the legal system has proved itself able to negotiate a complex case with relative justice.

But I don't particularly care for the triumphalist tone being bandied about: "Innocent Lacrosse Players Vindicated!!" "Finally, Justice for the Dear Sweet Boys Who Never Did Anything Wrong!" "Mounting Pressure for Duke To Apologize to the Clearly Wronged Former Lacrosse Coach!"

Uh, no. Especially not to that last one.

Mike Pressler tolerated an atmosphere among his players that should never have been tolerated. This permissive attitude is what led to the night which remains an embarrassment to the University, irrespective of whether a felony was committed.

Had Pressler done, say, something like this a long, long time ago, this painful night might never occurred. And, more importantly, those boys might have had a chance to grow into real men. I fear that now, they never will.

The Next Stage

I have finished Preliminary Exams (called Comprehensive Exams at other schools) and am now officially ABD.

My advisor has already alerted me to several job listings for which I am now eligible to apply. Scary!

Incidents in the life of a grad student

I begin prelim exams today. I will defend April 17th.

I should have been blogging about all the things I've been reading to prepare for the exams. But, alas, no go.

The good news is that after exams, I'll start preparing to write my diss. That, I'll blog about. Stay tuned.