Plagiary

1.  After reading Scott McLemee's article at Inside Higher Ed, I scooted off to Famous Plagiarists--and felt vaguely dissatisfied.  The vague dissatisfaction arose from the "Literature" section, which features such luminaries as S. T. Coleridge, T. S. Eliot, and William Shakespeare.  Oscar Wilde is nowhere to be seen, although the book version of The Picture of Dorian Gray includes a chapter distilled from J.-K. Huysmans' A Rebours (and, as Jerusha McCormack has pointed out more generally, "[i]t is hard to say anything original about The Picture of Dorian Gray, largely because there is so little that is original in it" [1]).  And Shakespeare's "threat level" seems a bit low, given that King Lear appears to owe rather a lot to an earlier play. 

But such quibbles aren't the source of the dissatisfaction in question.  In his "War on Plagiarism," Prof. Lesko neglects to get at the literary-historical problem: what, exactly, are we to do with a long-dead major author after we find him or her guilty on all counts? Should we respond to such authors in the same way that we respond to a novelist caught in the act now?  (Or, as Scott asks of Coleridge, "And the more you love his poetry, the harder it is to know what to think of his kleptomania. Should you be indignant? Or just perplexed?") When I teach Dorian Gray, for example, I always point out that Ch. XI is plagiarized.  Now, strictly speaking, an au courant contemporary probably would have recognized the "poisoned book" and, by extension, Ch. XI's debt to it; after all, Huysmans was a key Decadent.  Moreover, as other critics of the novel have noted, there's something oddly appropriate about the chapter's derivative nature, given how derivative Dorian is himself.  Still, we're stuck with the original question.  Should I derail the classroom discussion for a lecture on the evils of plagiarism? Issue a blanket amnesty? Toss the novel into Reading Gaol? What?

Given that literary history consists of authors reading, rewriting, alluding to, parodying, and saluting each other, it's impossible to  yank a brick out of the wall without reducing the whole edifice to a shambles.  One cannot ignore Shakespeare because he borrowed extensively from someone else's King Leir, any more than we can eject Coleridge from the Romantic canon because he had a cribbing habit to accompany his opium habit.  It's much easier to dimiss a pleasant third-rater like Rhoda Broughton, who in one novel absconds with a passage from The Mill on the Floss without so much as a "please, George."  After all, Broughton has had no real influence on subsequent novelists.  And there's the problem, isn't it? Once a work turns out to be powerful enough to generate imitation, response, parody, critique, and so forth, its own borrowings frequently become, in practice, a purely academic question.  If the writer isn't caught and halted at the time (like Brad Vice), then his or her work may either go the way of all published literature or become so culturally significant that plagiarism becomes, to all intents and purposes, irrelevant.  Once the work has successfully gone forth and multiplied after escaping into the wild, as it were, it's perhaps a little late (not to mention futile) to denounce the author at every turn;  what are we to supposed to do, dig up Coleridge's bones and burn them? (Even Norman Fruman, famed chronicler of Coleridge's plagiaristic misdeeds, enthusiastically dubs Coleridge a "great artist" [2].) Like it or not, the plagiarism issue is just not very helpful when it comes to assessing Coleridge's, Shakespeare's, or Wilde's historical significance.  It's similarly useless when talking about low-end novelists:  I can point out that both Anna Eliza Bray and Emily Sarah Holt steal from John Foxe, but once I've branded "plagiarist" on their respective foreheads, I'll still be left with the problem of what they've chosen to steal and how it affects the texts in question.  That's not Lesko's evil goblin, French poststructuralism, speaking--that's old-fashioned, standard-issue literary history and interpretation.  (The LP, after all, is neither Foucauldian nor Barthesian, let alone--despite her B.A.--Derridean.)   Lesko urges us to be "frank in our critical assessment," but this call to frankness seems to evade the historical and critical issues at issue here, not confront them. 

2.  On a slightly different note, I was discussing plagiarism with the head of our committee on academic integrity.  In our conversation, I pointed out that we often expect students to regurgitate information on exams (most frequently, in short identifications), whereas we just as often expect them to think original thoughts in their papers.  This, it seems to me, is an unspoken contradiction in our pedagogical practice: do we make it clear why we reward students who plagiarize our lectures in an exam (that is, after all, what they're doing), but punish them for doing the same thing in a term paper?  We punish several types of cheating on exams--stealing a test, copying another student's work, bringing cheat sheets--but repeating points made in lecture rarely makes it onto the radar.  (This page, for example, includes several hints on deterring students from cheating during an exam, but doesn't include "appropriating the instructor's ideas" on its list of potential sins.  After all, we often want the students to appropriate our ideas.)  I usually make a point of warning students that I know what I think, thank-you-very-much, but even so, regurgitation isn't grounds for failure.   There are ways of getting around this problem--for example, I assign a few more poems than I will actually discuss in class, precisely because I want students to approach them "unspoiled" during an exam--but it's still there, nevertheless.  Have other people discussed or dealt with this issue?  Or am I just inventing a problem? (After all, I'm an academic; we do that sort of thing.) 

[1]  Jerusha McCormack, "Wilde's Fiction(s)," The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, ed. Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 110. 
[2]  Norman Fruman, Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel (New York: George Braziller, 1971), 263.
                   
   

Comments

[Vito Prosciutto]

Most of the undergrad English classes that I had didn't have any sort of exams at all. This seems the simplest solution to the problem. Exams seeme appropriate in a class where the objective is, say problem solving (e.g., math), or if recall of specific facts is of importance, but English is really outside that bound. There is the danger of a student having all outside work done by a paid accomplice, but this could be approached by having some in-class writing assignments, perhaps an open-book addressing of some point about the reading, but an actual exam? I think that'd be a bad idea.

[StyleyGeek]

I think that you have raised some really interesting questions here. Rather than hijack your comment thread, I have written up a post about my thoughts on your point #2 over at my blog.

Feel free to come and take a look.

[Caleb]

Re: #2, I have had some students tell me that other instructors require them to footnote and cite material drawn from classroom lectures, and I've had other students do this on papers they turned into me without even asking. It always felt a bit weird to look down to the footnote and see my name cited with a class date ... But at the same time, I can appreciate the dilemma you're setting up.

[Caleb]

Oops ... I meant to say the papers they "turned in to me," not the papers they "turned into me." The latter would be the ultimate form of plagiary, eh?

[Brandon Watson]

I was a bit surprised not to see Laurence Sterne on the list, given that Sterne regularly plagiarizes in Tristram Shandy. (The most notorious case is an attack on plagiarism lifted almost entirely from someone else; oddly appropriate, since attacks on plagiarism are often cases of plagiarism to some extent.)

I think we academics tend to confuse the moral issues of plagiarism with those issues of plagiarism that are really just the way academia works. There are very few moral problems with plagiarism, except where a case counts as illegal, or where it endangers someone else's livelihood. The major problem with plagiarism in an academic setting, whether teaching or research, is that if allowed to go unchecked it brings down the whole system, which depends crucially on assigning credit where credit is due. So we tend to overlook plagiarism where it doesn't pose a real threat to this (the usual 'common knowledge' exemption, for instance). And there's no moral reason why we shouldn't -- I think you're right that the real question is whether we can do it consistently.

I've always thought that the reason we don't have a problem with students plagiarizing our lectures is that, rightly or wrongly, we tend to regard our lecture material as falling under the 'common knowledge' exemption: i.e., as something anyone who's taken the trouble to research the subject should have picked up somewhere, so it's pointless to bother about where, precisely, they picked it up. But I haven't thought about this particular question much. It could be that the real reason is that here there's no threat to the principle 'credit where credit is due' -- if a student appropriates my idea, that's not a failure to give credit to me; given that they are doing it in work for me, it's just what I would expect to happen if they found it a usable idea. I think that's why I don't like it when people cite my lectures in their papers, although I can see the point of doing it: it feels like they're trying to pass off as research ideas they are expected to have exposed themselves to as a matter of course.

[Caleb]

Brandon makes some good points about the "common knowledge" exception. I always point out, too, that we're talking about "common knowledge" within a given context. Depending on the audience I am addressing, some things might count as common knowledge that would not count as such when other audiences were involved. (I might cite some things in a general article for the American Historical Review, for instance, that I could assume the readers of a more specialized journal like Civil War History already know).

Based on that expansion of the "common knowledge" exemption, I've told my students in the past that all of us within that particular course share "in common" the knowledge discussed in lectures, so to cite that common knowledge would be redundant within the context of that course. I might say the same thing about fact and figures or a basic narrative of events drawn from the course textbook, although one would have to be careful here.

What Brandon's generally getting at is that we should try to get students thinking about what constitutes plagiarism and what constitutes the quotidian collaboration of academic life.

[Brandon]

Caleb's exactly right; I think students often come away with the notion that plagiarism is a matter of failing to follow the rules of some citation format, when really it's about making a genuine contribution to a far-reaching collaboration.

[Clanger]

Ah, the obsession with novelty in art as being inherently good. Is it any more plagiarism for Will to do a different Lear, than for whomever to remake the film of 'Alfie' (the first that springs to mind)?

Each is an artistic work in its own right. So maybe they re-imagined something, rather than imagining it. Big deal. Gain points for doing it more interestingly. Lose points if you cack up a classic.

Slapped wrists if you fib and pretend your work doesn't have a heritage. But its still your work when you've finished with it, low-end or high-end.

Because this is art.

Undergrad essays are either examples of hard work and cogent thought under the stresses of all that scarey teenage angst, or the cut'n'paste jobs of lazy wasters. Reward the former for effort, originality, and genuine ability. Fail the latter as a duty and an act of justice.

Because this is not art, it is education (and when you hit postgrad/postdoc, criticism).

Artists are permitted such leeway because they are artists-it is their job to imagine, or re-imagine, and then develop a work to conclude as their own. Critics can't get away with anything because they are (humble) critics, so if in doubt, footnote and cite, and earn extra points for so doing.

[Clanger]

A useful text to suggest for those suffering from an excessive appreciation of novelty in art:

Miola, Robert S. 'Shakespeare's Reading'. (OUP: 2000).

Anyone who believes that this is an acceptable precedent to permit cheating in essays by copying rather than thinking, is so dumb they should not be allowed on to a university campus, except as a medical specimen.

[Gdr]

The question is, why do you expect your students to produce original ideas?

In the sciences, undergraduates aren't expected to come up with original ideas, but to demonstrate that they possess knowledge and skills.

[Clanger]

No Eng. Lit. tutor would demand that their undergrads develop entirely new readings of any work (the original research, as with the sciences, comes later).

What is expected is that they did the thinking themselves. They took their own ability to analyse a text, read it critically, thought about it, worked at it, and came up with something from their own mental toil (and their study of other critical views on a text, properly cited), written clearly in a way that can convey what they think to others.

Not the results of 5 minutes spent with Google and a bit of editing.

'Original' here means they went from A to B by thinking for themselves, not copying.

[StyleyGeek]

Another thing just struck me -- given that most of what we say in undergraduate lectures is either "common knowledge" or based on the textbook/readers we are using, interspersed with only a little of our own research, why should we be expecting the students to cite us anyway? They should be citing the textbooks, readers, and/or whatever else we have based our lectures on. It's our job to make it clear to them where we are getting our information.