In a recent essay here I happened to mention the “out-of-control plagiarism problem” among undergraduates. Every time I write something about American education, I get a flurry of e-mails and letters. It’s clear that The Pennsylvania Review has a lot of academic readers.
The bulk of these communications requested more details about this issue, and possible ways to address it. There’s no way to suggest a solution to a problem that is now so inveterate and widespread that tackling it would be like tackling the National Debt. All I can do here is delineate a basic understanding of why the problem has grown to be so acute—and more importantly, why it is in large measure the fault of those self-righteous faculty who squawk most loudly against it.
Plagiarism is just another symptom of human weakness; almost all of us will cut corners somehow if we have to, and especially if the cutting doesn’t necessarily involve something that we are passionate about. If I paint my own house I’ll probably do an excellent and careful job, since it’s my house and I am committed to having the best for myself and my family. But if I’m a housepainter and do paint jobs every day, I’ll very likely cut a few corners here and there. Even if I’m scrupulously honest, I’ll probably slack off a bit on occasion because, well… it’s not my house.
One has to understand the plagiarism problem this way. A great many professors are passionate about scholarship—it’s their life, their identity, and their raison d’etre. Their self images are bound up with the years of research that they have put into their advanced degrees. And if this is the way you are, plagiarism is the worst of all sins from your viewpoint. It goes contrary to everything you have devoted your life to honoring via mental labor in the library and the archives.
What professors don’t realize (or rather, what they deliberately close their eyes to) is that students are, for the most part, not like this at all. Students are in college because their parents and guidance counselors have insisted that they go there, or because all of their friends are there, or because it’s a necessary stepping-stone to someplace else (law school, medical school, the entry-level positions in business, etc.) Yes, yes, I know… some students are genuinely there to learn. But for the vast majority of undergraduates, college is just another hoop to jump through before they gain entrance into the adult world.
For this reason, most students don’t see the value of scholarship, and therefore they have no particular moral qualms about buying a paper to get through a course. Why not? It’s just another expense, like the tuition, the dorm fees, and the textbooks. Of course, in a real sense such students are cheating themselves out of a once-in-a-lifetime learning experience and voyage of discovery into the riches of the written word—but if you’re only in college to play football, date the girls, or to get a meal ticket, why the hell not?
What I find pathetic is the childish reaction of most professors to this situation. Most of them are brainless liberals who would argue vehemently about the need to make higher education “open to all” and “easily accessible” and “available to everyone in our society.” Well, that’s exactly what happened. We did just that. And as a result we have thousands of students in college who haven’t the slightest intellectual reason for being there, any more than they had when they were in high school. Naturally, they want to get through as painlessly as possible. And then our idiot professors go into a shit-fit when these students buy term papers on the internet. What the bloody hell did they expect?
So rather than addressing the root problem of universal access to higher education, and whether that idea should be scrapped or amended or even discussed, the stupid professors devote their energies to computer programs like turnitin.com or other even more elaborate schemes for catching some unsuspecting undergraduate who’s borrowed a paragraph or a sentence from someplace. Aha! GOTCHA! Now you’ll go before the Dean for “academic misconduct” or “intellectual dishonesty” or whatever pompous phrase they now give to writing prose that looks familiar to an electronic scanner. The whole thing is contemptible and ludicrous.
It’s contemptible because the professors who are making all this commotion about plagiarism are really just acting out their own fears and emotional commitments and personal preferences, and taking out their self-absorption as “scholars” on helpless teenagers who honestly don’t understand what all the fuss is about. And it’s ludicrous because, in the world of the internet and instant transmission of both text and knowledge, no one on this planet is going to be able to stop the flow of material. Are the schmucks at turnitin.com going to keep on revising and fine-tuning their program for the next century, until they have every written word in human history digitally recorded?
Moreover, what about the new thing: personally paying someone to write your paper for you? If you’ve got the cash, there are plenty of out-of-work graduate students or English majors who’ll compose a paper to your professor’s specifications. Completely original, and completely undetectable. I knew one undergraduate at Hunter College who supported himself and his wife in senior year by writing made-to-order papers for all of his friends and acquaintances. He had a good prose style (I trained him myself in advanced composition), and that made all the difference.
When I brought this up once at a faculty meeting, one ditz-brained professor said “Well, you can interview each of your students about his or her paper, asking questions about it line by line and thereby finding out whether it was actually written by the student.”
To which I replied: “When you triple my salary, I’ll do that. Until then, I’ll just assume it’s been composed by the student.” The cluelessness of some faculty members is simply phenomenal.
If you have a command of English prose, you can crank out reams and reams of it at will. Why don’t students have that skill anymore? Simple—no one in the lower schools is bothering to teach it to them. So they show up in college completely unprepared for doing the written assignments. And what do the idiot professors do? They insanely and stubbornly insist on pointless trivialities like “footnote form” and “bibliographic references” and “thesis sentences” and all sorts of useless things that are appropriate only for graduate school. I have been in faculty meetings where—I kid you not—there are passionate arguments about how to make sure that our undergraduates know the proper MLA style for citations. Who says that academics don’t live in a dream world?
The place where faculty hysteria over plagiarism is the most intense is—predictably—the community colleges. These schools and the defensive teachers who work in them are profoundly insecure as to their status in academia as a whole. So quite naturally the specter of plagiarism haunts them, as if it were some unwanted éminence grise that threatened to subvert their shaky reputation. The community colleges are where you get the anxious discussions of “the plagiarism problem,” the monitory memos from the dean, the angry little departmental meetings of outraged faculty, and the mandatory use of turnitin.com. Omigod, we’ve got plagiarism! Our students aren’t behaving the way serious students should! We’ll have to DO SOMETHING! It’s no accident that the community colleges are also where there is the greatest level of frenzy over proper bibliographic format, academic garb for graduation, and who gets to sit where in the Faculty Commons.
Of course, sometimes the strictures against plagiarism are suspended for political reasons. Boston University has never taken steps to revoke the fraudulently obtained doctorate of Martin Luther King, despite the fact that a team of researchers working with the Martin Luther King Papers Project has shown that a substantial portion of the man’s 1955 dissertation was plagiarized (and rather ineptly at that) from published texts by Walter M. Horton and Jack S. Boozer. But King is a sacrosanct figure, and no one dares suggest that his work be checked out by turnitin.com.
No—the victims of the anti-plagiarism campaign are almost exclusively powerless undergraduates. These are the easy targets that arrogant faculty go after. One has to recognize in this campaign more than a disinterested loyalty to the canons of pure scholarship. There’s also an element of moralizing nastiness, a gleeful desire on the part of frustrated and dissatisfied academics to make someone else’s life miserable, particularly if the victim is young and carefree enough to not be concerned with the scholarly regimen of research. In such cases my sympathies lie with the student rather than with his accuser.
I knew one late woman in the Classics Department of Brooklyn College who epitomized this attitude. The typical left-liberal feminist, she was all accusatory anger and chip-on-the-shoulder entitlement. Arrogant, intrusive, argumentative, and opinionated, she demanded that the world be run her way or not at all. She would dismiss her class if they weren’t asking what she considered worthwhile questions, or if they hadn’t completed the assigned readings. She made students rewrite papers three or four times. She gave out D grades like candy on Halloween. Her exams were nightmares of pointless complexity. Students would sign up in her section only as a last resort, or under compulsion. Her class would therefore usually have about twelve registrants, while the rest of us in the department had over fifty on our rosters. She actually prided herself on this, claiming that she ran “a serious class.” The truth was that she was a silly, self-important martinet whom the students loathed, and she probably turned more young people off from an appreciation of the Classics than a century of birch rods in an English public school. She also religiously attended every departmental meeting to speak at length, which is in itself a telltale sign of fanaticism.
Naturally she had a bug up her ass about plagiarism, and regularly brought charges of academic misconduct against students for the slightest infraction in this regard. A few sane persons in the department tried to explain to her that the Core I course she was teaching was a curricular requirement for non-majors, and therefore a certain latitude and leeway had to guide one’s judgment when handling a class of that sort. “These aren’t Latin and Greek majors,” we’d argue. “You can’t run the course as if it were a graduate seminar.”
She wouldn’t hear of it. She’d clench her teeth and say “No! Students who plagiarize must suffer the consequences!” She died suddenly of a busted gut, probably from all of that hoarded bile.
I’ll end by revealing my personal stopgap prophylaxis for student plagiarism. When teaching undergraduates, I only give assignments so minutely and specifically directed that plagiarism is impractical. I also insist that not a single quotation, note, or bibliographical reference of any sort be included in any paper submitted to me, on pain of failure. This usually does the trick. The student realizes that it’s a lot easier just to follow my directions and write the paper than trying to piece it together from outside sources.
Have I been fooled on occasion by a crafty student? I have no doubt of it. But I’m sure as hell not going to lose any sleep over the contingency.
