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May 03, 2005
Plagiarizing profs
The Christian Science Monitor has a worthwhile story on plagiarizing professors. The very fact that they run a story on this topic is heartening evidence of increased attention to textual transgressions as they occur throughout the culture, instead of fetishizing the transgressive student. Now, that's not news; in 1988 Thomas Mallon (Stolen Words) took delight in cataloging culture-wide transgressions.
Mallon's point was that plagiarism is bad and we have to stop it. My retort (think here of Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction: "Allow me to retort") is that we have to ask whether we are misunderstanding what we are defining as "plagiarism" and hence as "bad." I won't recount that argument here; it's taken me two books and about a dozen articles to work through it, and I'm still not done. The point I want to make here is that maybe a culture-wide recognition of the culture-wide practices that are classified as plagiarism will provide the kairos for culture-wide discussion of how we define plagiarism and why. And behold, here's the Monitor doing some of that work, noting that plagiarism is not an eternal, foundational category:
But the rules have become more rigorous in the past three decades. Standards for footnotes in research papers are tighter.
"What was considered sufficient attribution in pre-[World War II] research would almost all be considered plagiarism today," says Jon Garon, dean of the School of Law at Hamline University.
Update: BP observes that Darwin seems to be instrumental in the move toward greater attribution of sources: he provides a seemingly complete trail of bread crumbs that step by step reveals the reasons for his assertions. This became the standard for the sciences almost instantly. Contemporary academic culture has made him the standard for researchers in the social sciences as well as the sciences. As time goes on, too, the operation of the researcher's intelligence is increasingly subordinated to the authority of his/her sources.
Posted by senioritis at May 3, 2005 08:32 AM