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April 20, 2005
Blurred lines
While people at North Texas State and Syracuse are getting worked up over Howard Johnson's appropriation of other institutions' academic plans, administrators on WPA-L are sharing five-year plans. Susanmarie Harrington has done some interesting (but not yet published) work on text sharing and ghostwriting amongst teachers and administrators. Blurry as the lines are between imitation and plagiarism for student and professional writers, it's even worse for administrators, because the textual practices in that group are so different. I don't know whether Howard did a bad thing or not, but I do know that if he did, it's only a degree different from the practices that are commonplace and ethical amongst people in his line of work. When teachers share assignments, it's pretty silly to cite the source. The same is true of a great many administrative documents; they circulate and morph, unattributed.
Posted by senioritis at April 20, 2005 07:06 AM