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  • "My Word!": Rethinking the Roots of Plagiarism

    By Joshua Kim February 9, 2011 9:30 pm EST

    Our next book club selection for our Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL) is My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture, by Susan Debra Blum.

    Do you do academic book clubbing on your campus?

    I love these discussions. Our last book club was on The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, by Louis Menand.

    As an incentive participate, we buy the book for anyone at our institution who signs up - and the book club is open to everyone in our community.

    Any suggestions for our next book?

    I'd certainly suggest that you read My Word, either individually or as a group.

    Blum is an anthropologist at Notre Dame, and the book is written for an academic rather than a popular audience. This approach has its pluses and minuses, as the book adheres to academic norms of providing long quotes (almost transcripts) from informants, undergrads at Notre Dame - which Blum calls "Saint U" in order to make her conclusions more generalizable.

    Blum sets out to discover, utilizing her anthropological toolkit, why plagiarism seems to have moved from deviant to normative behavior amongst college students. Her concern is not with outright cheating, or the wholesale purchasing of term papers, but rather the seeming inability of students to properly cite sources and give attribution for other peoples ideas and sentences. She seeks not to judge, but to understand, preferring to think about the failure to attribute as a teachable moment. Blum's main conclusions in My Word (and I hesitate to so simplify her complex and nuanced arguments and observations) are:

    • Students are mostly confused about attribution and citation, as the rules seem (to them) to be inconsistent, capricious, and illogical.
    • The dominant culture that students operate in is a "remix culture", one in which cultural capital is developed and displayed by one's ability to reference and quote from popular culture when interacting with peers. Lines from "The Simpsons" (or perhaps "Jersey Shore", "The Daily Show", or "Glee") contribute to the vernacular of the college sophomore. Footnoting one's cultural references would be beyond uncool. This remix culture does not extend to books or magazines or newspapers.
    • Academic norms of attribution are particularly alien to undergraduates. Learning to operate in the professorial culture of citation requires learning a new language, one at odds with the prevailing mode of communication and therefore difficult to master.
    • Class work (studying, going to class, writing papers etc.) competes with an endless list of social, paid work, entertainment, and volunteer opportunities and obligations that make up the life of a college student. Campuses are "total institutions", where students find the demands on their time to be both enticing and endless. The ethos of "work hard / party hard" best captures student life, a result Blum thinks of a performance culture that has pushed kids to be active achievers since pre-school. The result is that students spend less time on class work than professors would expect and want. Papers are written with an eye towards maximum efficiency, which when combined with Google and competing deadlines, often results in un-sourced and un-attributed quotes and ideas finding there way into final drafts.
    • The medium of the long-from (10 to 20 page paper) feels foreign and disconnected to the present and future work demands for almost all students. Comparable, perhaps, to speaking and reading in Latin. The disconnect between students fluency in absorbing, interacting with and creating rich media - and professors comfort with the long-form writing, is growing with each new class. Does Quentin Tarantino footnote his movies? Do the kids on Glee stop to give credit to the original artist for the songs they sing?

    The solution, for Blum, is to take the time to engage issues around plagiarism and citation directly with our students. It may be necessary to craft different types of assignments, such as media mashups, ones that speak more directly to the cultural (and future employment skill concerns) of students. We should face the problem head on, and involve our students in coming up with a solution. The practice of hauling students into judicial proceedings for non-attribution is too close to the RIAA's strategy of suing individual college students, both unfair and ineffective in stemming the tide.

    After reading My Word, it will be difficult to think of plagiarism through our traditional professorial lens.

    What are you reading?

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Comments on "My Word!": Rethinking the Roots of Plagiarism

  • Plagiarism
  • Posted by Chauncey M. DePree, Jr., DBA , Professor at University of Southern Mississippi on February 10, 2011 at 3:15pm EST
  • Plagiarism includes faculty and accreditors like the AACSB (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business). If faculty and accreditors choose to exempt themselves from standards of plagiarism, don't expect students not to plagiarize. See, "University and AACSB Diversity," published in the proceedings of the American Accounting Association Annual 2010 Meeting (http://commons.aaahq.org/post/3d4bfd4201), for a discussion of how the University of Southern Mississippi punished a professor who brought to the attention of USM faculty and administrators, and then to the AACSB, faculty plagiarism. Also see www.usmnews.net for documentation that supports the failed procedures used by President Martha Saunders and Interim Dean Alvin Williams to punish the professor for asking questions about USM's plagiarism. The College of Business at USM still reports the copied Academic Integrity Policy on its website that it took from Syracuse University "without proper citation"--a term used by USM faculty plagiarizers. Note that Syracuse provided extensive citations for the sources of ideas and words of its Academic Integrity Policy but when USM's College of Business copied Syracuse's Academic Integrity policy, its faculty and administrators did not copy Syracuse's citation list nor give credit to Syracuse. Since USM's Academic Integrity Policy was prepared for the reaccreditation process, the AACSB was among those who received the plagiarized Policy. The AACSB was advised of the plagiarism but it decided that the plagiarized Academic Integrity Policy did not violate AACSB standards.

 These secret decisions were learned only through Mississippi Open Records requests. Chauncey M. DePree, Jr., DBA
Professor
School of Accountancy
College of Business
University of Southern Mississippi
m.depree@usm.edu
  • What would be the author's point?
  • Posted by Harry Coverston , Instructor/Philosophy Department at University of Central Florida on February 11, 2011 at 4:30am EST
  • So students are too busy partying and working to take the time to learn to cite sources and then to use that knowledge when required to do so. That’s hardly news to anyone who has ever been a student in the past 50 years or who has ever taught them. What seems to be new is the idea that somehow this avoidance of the hard work of becoming a genuinely educated human being is somehow a generational issue. Why would that be so?

    I was particularly taken by this statement: “Learning to operate in the professorial culture of citation requires learning a new language, one at odds with the prevailing mode of communication and therefore difficult to master.” OK. So it’s difficult. What would be the author’s point? Most things worth knowing are difficult to learn. Students have complained about learning languages since they became part of the curriculum of higher education. That doesn’t mean that those skills are not necessary for educated human beings nor does it mean that the fact such learning is difficult somehow excuses those who would become educated today. Indeed, in a global culture, fluency in as many languages as possible is an asset, not a punishment.

    Moreover, the notion that a 10 to 20 page paper “feels foreign and disconnected to the present and future work demands for almost all students” is really a lame excuse for not doing the hard work of learning and using proper citation form. Upon what basis can a current college student make an informed decision about the work demands of the present, much less the future? Consistent hard work may indeed feel foreign and disconnected from the experience of many students today. But why would such feelings be particularly important to consider in the construction of a higher education curriculum? These are students, not consumers.

    One last thought. The reference to the “remix culture” in which a simple rehashing of previous ideas has become the norm ought to be a warning to those of us who seek to prepare the inheritors of our culture. Where is the creativity? Where is the original thought? Do we presume this generation of students has nothing new to say worth hearing? Surely those of us entrusted with their education must have a little higher expectations of our students than mere acquiescence to a culture which concerns itself primarily with the ability to memorize and regurgitate other people’s quips from popular culture, where footnoting is “uncool” and where books and magazines are ignored entirely.

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