StepAside

Far more people tell me that they've been stolen from than that they've stolen. I'm a person with both experiences; in high school I patchwrote in a chemistry term paper, and in my early years in the professoriate, a reviewer of an article that wasn't accepted then used some of my stuff for an article that she subsequently published. Yuck.

I don't have any stunning insight into the "filthy-bastards-stole-my-stuff" phenomenon. Certainly it's well demonstrated in the comments on Henry Brighouse's post on Crooked Timber (to which Collin kindly alerted me):

“…and the worst plagiarism is not copying off some web-site but stealing other scholars’ ideas and/or empirical material before they publish it…”

My husband and I have both had very unpleasant experiences with this, and there is little recourse, least of all “truthful malicious gossip”. In the sciences, where many ideas are patentable, there is a great incentive to “scoop”. The person with the greates interest in a malicious gossip retribution may be the only person doing so. We found it very useful to sign and notarize our ideas as soon as they were hatched.

And you can see it in the Chronicle colloquy on plagiarizing professors (about whom I was growling recently), in which "An anononymous professor, large public research university," begins, "I was recently the victim of plagiarism by another professor in the U.S." (And of course the moderator, ever alert for material for his next story, injects, "Dear Anonymous Professor at a Large Research University: The Chronicle would love to hear about your experience. You can e-mail me at thomas.bartlett@chronicle.com.")

There's actually a long trail, pre-blogosphere, of victims' complaints; c.f. Neal Bowers, Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiarist. New York: Norton, 1997.

So here's my question/speculation: in a culture that's obsessed with plagiarism and in which any discussion of non-student plagiarism seems to evoke impassioned victims' testimony, why are so few institutional structures aimed at sanctioning non-students who plagiarize? In asking this question, I have to point out that I'm not talking about copyright, which is different from plagiarism:

In separating form from content or expression from ideas, copyright law differs from our common conception of literary borrowing or stealing, in which the unacknowledged appropriation of either ideas or words is deemed unacceptable. Plagiarism can and often does occur when the literary item is not copyrighted, and, in fact, the citation procedures that ensure academic honesty tend to be more rigid than those that apply to copyright legislation. In copyright, words alone are protected from appropriation without acknowledgment, but to avoid plagiarism both an author's "ideas" and his or her "wording" must be credited. . . . . (247)
Spigelman, Candace. "Habits of Mind: Historical Configurations of Textual Ownership in Peer Writing Groups." College Composition and Communication 49.2 (May 1998): 234-255.

And I'm not talking about the various mechanisms (for an early example of the lists of possibilities, scroll down to "Web Sites" on the Ehrlich page) that are available for catching plagiarists. I'm talking only about punishments—sanctions. If we're going to go so far as to throw students out of college for plagiarism but retain plagiarizing professors (including professors who plagiarize from their students, what does that suggest about the true motivations for institutions' energetic pursuit of student plagiarists?

In 1982, Neil Hertz suggested that teachers pursue student plagiarists in order to assuage their anxieties about their own unacknowledged textual appropriations when they give lectures. For my own part, I cannot help but regard the uproar over student plagiarism and the low grumbling about professorial plagiarism as one demonstration of what I have long asserted: that plagiarism as a cultural construct serves to preserve an educational status quo very much akin to the mechanisms described in Bourdieu's State Nobility. In fact, a Foucauldian interpretation of plagiarism policies as a means of surveillance over the Other—the dirty student bodies—still seems very much on the mark.

Prewriting for an essay. Feedback deeply appreciated.