YOUR THOUGHTS EXACTLY
CREDIT WHERE NO CREDIT IS DUE.
By Bill Kirtz
Steal from one person and it's plagiarism. Steal
from several and it's research."
We appropriate ideas and phrases all the time-consciously
and unconsciously, for allusion and effect. But if we deliberately present
others' words or thoughts as our own, it's plagiarism.
Clear? Not really. Not when Northeastern officials
find students confused about what constitutes idea poaching. When the Evil
House of Cheat and Other People's Words tempt Internet scanners. When professional
writers blame their filching on psychological disorders or wayward computers.
The border between scholarship and larceny, between
research and word lifting, is hotly disputed. Facts and commonly accepted
knowledge are certainly there for everyone's taking. As English department
chairman Stuart Peterfreund observes, we appropriately appropriate many
things without acknowledgment. "We live in a culture of things that
have already been said, and they're all right to use because they're in
our word horde," he says. [Direct quotes like this require attribution,
as do paraphrases.] Puns, literary allusions, and the like add spice, not
stolen goods, to our prose.
If we disguise these as our own thoughts, though,
if we use others' phrases to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise
bald and unconvincing narrative [this line from W. S. Gilbert's The Mikado
is unique enough to require citation], it's theft.
Some professional pilfering draws only a cynical
shrug. A Sunday New York Times article describes onetime Clinton confidant
Webster Hubbell as a character out of a Theodore Dreiser novel. The next
day, NBC Today cohost Katie Couric uses the Dreiser line, without credit,
to introduce Hubbell. Television rips off print all the time. No big deal.
At times, however, quarrels about past research
can spin consumers' heads and excite copyright lawyers. In a celebrated
current case, the woman suing Amistad filmmaker Steven Spielberg for plagiarism
admits she used several unattributed passages from an earlier book in her
novel about the 1839 slave mutiny. [You needn't cite specific sources if
you put facts into your own words.]
Northeastern's Student Code of Conduct states
that any attempt to present another's work as one's own is a "serious
violation" with a minimum sanction of probation. But most professors
try to make the punishment fit the crime [this Mikado quote has passed
into common usage] in their own fashion, and don't report violations to
the University Court or Office of Judicial Affairs.
The provost's legal adviser, Halee Burg, has a
problem with this. Although she says faculty members making individual
judgments about cheating penalties have good intentions, referring all
such matters to a central tribunal will guarantee that the same offense
gets the same punishment throughout the university. Burg and Annmarie Allen,
assistant director of the Judicial Affairs office, also note that ad hoc
treatment of academic dishonesty makes it impossible to detect a repeat
offender.
In practice, professors impose dramatically different
penalties for the same offense. Some teachers let an admitted word thief
off with an F for the paper; others automatically flunk even the most repentant
sinner; a few refer every case to Judicial Affairs, where the minimum sanction
is suspension.
Why the variations? Pharmacy professor Ralph Loring,
who has written a ten-variation scenario to alert students to plagiarism
issues, finds some colleagues reluctant to "air our dirty laundry"
in front of a university tribunal. Another professor takes remorse into
consideration. He'll tell a miscreant, "I don't think this is your
work." If the student admits it, the matter ends there with an F for
the course. If he or she denies it, the prof will refer the matter to Student
Court.
Anyone who's ever perused a term paper notes one
irony of campus plagiarism: it's usually practiced by weaker students who
simply couldn't have penned the chiseled, impeccably detailed prose they
proffer. Peterfreund notes two common traits in these larcenists: "a
high insensitivity to the nuances of language and no sensitivity to language
as art." Loring finds that "people take quotes and stick them
in, and the style change is so glaring that it's laughable." So you
don't have to be Lieutenant Columbo to raise an eyebrow or two when a grammatically
challenged sophomore suddenly presents a smoothly written, professionally
researched profile.
Loring and other N.U. profs dispute the popular
notion that classroom cheaters tend to be nonmajors, indifferent to a required
course. "You see it at all levels, in all different kinds of classes,"
he says. "People are human, pressured, give in to the easy way out."
Stephen Nathanson, philosophy professor and director
of the Center for Effective University Teaching, agrees. Calling many plagiarists
"panicked," he thinks we should make sure we give those undergrads
enough guidance about required papers "so they don't freak out at
the end" and present someone else's work as their own. Allen, along
with many N.U. professors, finds students often ignorant about how to research
and properly credit others' work. She says her Judicial Affairs office
will include more details about academic honesty in its orientation sessions
for students and parents.
Still, Nathanson isn't soft on scholarly poachers.
He calls dishonesty "the worst classroom sin." Some mercy for
the contrite? "That's the trap," he replies. "My policy
is that a student will as a minimal punishment fail the course, with no
makeup. The faculty needs to give good signals, to make clear that it's
a serious offense and deserves strong punishment. [Even] a genuine 'I didn't
understand' isn't good enough."
Nathanson and Peterfreund both think that assignments
requiring outlines and drafts are effective teaching devices and safeguards
against word and idea lifting. Nathanson assigns highly specific formats.
In his introductory philosophy course, instead of requiring a generic paper
on the existence of God, he may make students defend and critique arguments
for God's existence, which forces them to research, or at least to rephrase
others' work. Stressing the need for students to be active learners, Peterfreund
says the English department tries to "meet the plagiarism problem
head-on with writing workshops [and] process learning" so instructors
can observe the growth of a paper and proper incorporation of secondary
materials.
Classroom integrity is more than an academic affectation.
Loring notes that "the whole process of science is built on the idea
of getting credit. If people start to plagiarize, the whole system breaks
down." Nathanson adds, "In the real world, if you're caught cheating,
your career can be destroyed, and if you're not caught, you can cause all
kinds of damage."
Of course, in today's excuse-prone society, there's
a glib alibi for every intellectual theft. Romance novelist Janet Dailey
has said that "psychological disorder I never even suspected I had"
made her lift passages from three of a rival's books. [If you don't want
to cite a source formally, using "has" shows it's not your quote.]
No one, however, has matched New Republic writer Ruth Shalit's nifty rationale
for admitted plagiarism. She told the American Journalism Review [credit
where credit is due] her fault was simply "downloading Nexis searches
as text files and then putting them onto my screen and later conflating
them with my own notes."
Peterfreund points out that such cut-and-paste
defenses are as valid as a murderer's whine that "the gun had a trigger."
It's mechanically easier but no more morally justifiable to lift from cyberspace
than from a dusty textbook. And historian Barbara Tuchman's foolproof inoculation
against The-Mouse-Made-Me-Do-It disease predated computers: make your research
your own by paraphrasing, not copying, it into your notes. [I heard her
talk; no more specific attribution needed.]
Nevertheless, Internet purveyors of stolen words
have never been so brazen. Type "the Evil House of Cheat" into
your Yahoo search box and you get an advertisement for a "Mekka [sic]
of over [sic] 8,000 essays in 40 catagories [sic]." ["Sic"
is an academic sharpshooting device to highlight errors in cited material.]
Here, for a price, you can put your name on a study of juvenile delinquency,
abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.
On the Other People's Papers Web site, you can take a free grab at a Canadian
student's thoughtful, if unsourced, defense of the death penalty.
Irate over the ease with which Web users can adopt
such material, Boston University is suing eight on-line term paper companies
for wire fraud, mail fraud, and racketeering. While this federal suit is
the first in the country to challenge term paper sales on the Internet,
Massachusetts already bans the sale of term papers.
Nobody, though, believes that laws will halt essay
lifting. As the cheat goes on, the least we academics can do is to try
to keep our own scholarly skirts clean. That opening quote, for instance.
I always thought humorist Tom Lehrer said it, but Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
credits it to scenarist Wilson Mizner.
Whatever. As James McNeill Whistler replied when
Oscar Wilde gushed, "I wish I'd said that," at the painter's
bon mot, "You will, Oscar. You will!"
Bill Kirtz is an associate professor in the
School of Journalism. His opinions appear regularly in "Talk of the
Gown."
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