Plagiarism On Campus, Part 1, or: In Defense of Students

Property thief

Recently, there have been several good articles in The New York Times about plagiarism and education, specifically as it pertains to college students.

The general gist of the articles goes something like this:  Students today have grown up in an internet-induced world of blurred intellectual property rights.  It's so easy to cut and paste someone else's words into their own documents that they do it all the time and, consequently, have a growing sense that there is nothing wrong with it.  As a result, professors are policing more than educating and students are being trained to stitch together the ideas of others instead of vocalizing their own.  In failing to synthesize their own argument, students are not really becoming educated. 

Plus, they are stealing the work of others.

"Found art" in Amelie

I've been thinking about these articles a lot because I'm gearing up (read: procrastinating) to write my syllabus for the fall semester. 

Last year, I experienced all of the frustration expressed by educators in the NYTimes articles.  I moaned about the collapse of education and I was struck dumb by my students' seeming inability to understand why cutting and pasting is cheating and why Wikipedia is not a valid source for a college paper.

This year, as I read the articles, I am struck by another thought:  Maybe it's the educators who are missing the point here, and not the students.

Some people call this "sharing."

In this article, published yesterday, Trip Gabriel says, "Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image."

I agree, but I think it is a mistake to dismiss this change as negative and immediately move on to thinking of ways to fight it or educate students away from it.

Gabriel's words bring to mind the Barbara Kingsolver book Pigs In Heaven.  One of the main themes of that book is that America's individualism--in which the work of the individual is done for the individual with the expectation of individual gain--is just that:  American.  A cultural construct, not a global reality.

This is not the only way
of doing things...

In some cultures, the value of the group is greater than the sum of its parts.  Kingsolver focuses on Native American culture, where stories and art are the intellectual property of the entire group.  Individual storytellers may put their own spin on them and may earn a reputation as a talented teller of tales, but the stories themselves have no author--or, to put it another way, the community shares authorship.

In the arts, this trend of community property has been gaining ground for years and hasn't necessarily relied on the internet.  "Found art" is a concept whose popularity is older than the internet, and adults have been complaining about music sampling since I was a kid--before the internet made music sharing a copyright issue.

Grown-ups grumbled that musicians aren't really musicians if they aren't writing their own music and that artists aren't really artists if they aren't creating their own art.  Maybe it's because I was a teenager when I first heard these complaints that I always bristled at them.

I will grant you that creation is important.  When it comes to writing, it is essential that students learn to first understand their own point of view and then express it--themselves, in their own words.  And I am certainly not suggesting that students be encouraged or allowed to simply take the words of others and present them as their own. 

A finished paper should include the words of others--properly cited--and also the words of the student author--thoughtfully expressed.

However, I think it is a mistake to dismiss this generational trend as an unfortunate side-effect of the internet and react to it with nothing more sophisticated than increased policing.

Instead, we need to work with it.  We need to understand what is good about the relaxation of intellectual proprietorship--the increase of community knowledge.  We need to understand where our students are coming from and start there. 

Because if all we do is tell them they can't copy and paste, then all they will learn is how to be sneakier when they cheat.  But if we meet them where they are, accept that there is valuable skill in culling the internet and successfully sifting through the junk for the valuable nuggets of information, we can help them hone the skills they bring to the table rather than dismissing those skills as "cheating."

Club DJ:
Creator, plagiarizer, or something in between?

This gives us a jumping off point, a common ground for then discussing sophisticated topics such as, for instance, intellectual property.  Then we can make some headway when we explain why Wikipedia isn't a legitimate source and how and why we have to cite the sources we do use.

We can't fool these kids into thinking that there is anything they can say that hasn't been said before, and we're wasting our time if we try.  So we need to focus our attention on helping them find the person who already said it best, teach them to read that person's words carefully, and then how to enter into that conversation as a peer.


And then, of course, how to give that person the credit they are due.

It's a subtle distinction, but an important one:  Don't fight the trends of a generation.  Work with them, understand them, and let go of a sense of moral or generational superiority. 

Should Marcel Duchamp credited the designer
of this urinal before he "signed" it and called it his own?

In my next post, I will discuss the specifics of my plan on how to do this.  In the meantime, I'd love to hear your opinion.  Am I crazy for embracing this generation of students?  Am I nuts to suggest that good can come from this relaxation of intellectual property rights?

Don't be afraid to disagree with me-- I really want to know what you think!

Disclaimer: All of the images in this post have been stolen. I can't credit the creators of the images because I stole them from people who had stolen them from someone else.