As a new professor, I’m not sure what’s worse — plagiarism or the new wave of pseudo-intellectual argument justifying plagiarism, as explored in this NYT piece:
“This generation has always existed in a world where media and intellectual property don’t have the same gravity,” said Ms. Brookover, who at 31 is older than most undergraduates. “When you’re sitting at your computer, it’s the same machine you’ve downloaded music with, possibly illegally, the same machine you streamed videos for free that showed on HBO last night.”
In fairness, Ms. Brookover is not defending plagiarism, but rather explaining the mindset that allows it to flourish. I get it.
The difference is this. Streaming HBO video for free is not akin to plagiarism. The parallel would be if I posted the same HBO video to my blog and claimed that I produced and directed it myself.
The issue here, then, is not copyright and intellectual property, as author and plagiarism apologist Susan D. Blum would have it. And it’s certainly not “intertextuality” or any other fashionable new-media concept. Students who hide behind the rallying cry that “ownership of ideas is meaningless,” as one commenter put it, are the very same people who pretend to own other people’s ideas in order to gain benefits they did not earn. This is the height of cynicism and arrogance.
Another commenter said it well:
There are several comments that confuse and conflate copyright violations and plagiarism. The two simply have no connection. Plagiarism is an [sic] scholarly/academic violation that not [sic] depend on the source. Copyright is an issue of intellectual property.
An author who has assigned away a copyright could in theory be in violation of that copyright by reusing their own words, but it would not be plagiarism. Similarly a student who presents an uncopyrighted work as their own violates the plagiarism rule but not copyright.
Correct. If you head to Kinkos to photocopy my book and then sell copies on the street, you’ve violated my copyright. If you replace my name on the cover with your own, you’ve committed an entirely different offense. If you turn around and argue that “information belongs to the people, man,” you are truly an asshole.
This is not about a new postmodern culture of pastiche and “trying on many different personas,” much less challenging Enlightenment ideas about authorship and individualism. What a con. It’s about discipline and intellectual honesty, issues of integrity that cannot be allowed simply to vanish in the digital winds.
I’d finish by saying there’s a case to made that “intertextuality” and the free flow of information is already accounted for in the established mode of scholarly citation and attribution. It’s long been understood that we don’t produce knowledge in a vacuum, but rather in a community. Plagiarism is not the communal ethos taken to the extreme, it’s the opposite. It’s supreme selfishness.
6 Comments
Couldn’t have said it better myself …
… so I’ll just copy and paste this text and publish it at my blog without citing you as the original author. Is that OK?
Your question presumes that I’m the author of the post. Maybe I copied it from somewhere else… one never knows, do one?
As long as you’re not throwing out the baby with the bathwater, I agree. But “challenging Enlightenment ideas about authorship and individualism” is a legitimate pursuit when not being used to justify intellectual sloth.
It makes no sense to compare scholarly citation, etc. with intertextuality used in a creative context.
Absolutely, Chris – my point was not that all postmodern theorizing is bad, but that it is open to abuse, and this is clearly a case of abuse.
My favorite line from Mr. Gabriel’s piece:
“Professors who have studied plagiarism do not try to excuse it — many are champions of academic honesty on their campuses — but rather try to understand why it is so widespread.”
Um…
Virtually everyone in my college writing classes plagiarized, and none of them justified it with lofty intellectual arguments about “a world where media and intellectual property don’t have the same gravity” – except, perhaps, after a few bong rips. They simply hated writing, having never been taught how or why to do it well, and surmised (correctly, I think) that many of the writing teachers who lectured them about plagiarism were feigning their concern. Most of my classmates applied themselves more fully to the composition of text messages than they ever did to writing of essays and research papers.
Great piece, Dave.
One aspect of this is that students at the middle and high school level spend very little time writing papers in which they have to use multiple sources, synthesize that information into an original thesis, then express it in their own words. The English curriculum, at least in many city schools has way too much of “compare this to your life experience” or “how does this make you feel?” and Social Studies is a joke in the years before high school.
On a lighter note, we just bought my brother-in-law, who will be starting his first college year this September a t-shirt that says “Plagiarism: Getting in trouble for something you didn’t do.”