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January 22, 2005
When the plagiarists punish the plagiarists
It will be interesting to see whether the Chronicle's 17 December 2004 exposé of professorial plagiarism will actually spur institutions to cure their own hypocrisy about textual standards. At my institution, there's a committee at work on issues of academic integrity, but its purview is limited to the work of students. At the University of Alabama, the student newspaper is raising the issue of the double standard.
Universities pursue the issue of plagiarism for the alleged purpose of protecting academic integrity. That argument falls apart when one considers how few professors are sanctioned, much less expelled, for plagiarizing--and even for appropriating their own students' work. So one must ask what cultural work these student honor codes and plagiarism policies are actually performing.
One would hope that student newspapers' pushing the issue would have some effect; but Jesse Rosenfeld's successful McGill University battle against the imposition of Turnitin has not, to my knowledge, resulted in universities' stampede away from the plagiarism-detecting software. As in all other forms of social activism, reformation of universities' (mis)use of academic integrity codes will require concerted, organized action. And that would, in turn, require that a whole lot of people view this as a serious social issue.
Posted by senioritis at January 22, 2005 07:33 AM