Seeing double

April 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Several of us have been preparing and sharing ideas ahead of our faculty roundtable discussion today. For you Baruchians, it will take place Tuesday, April 12, 2:3o-4pm, in the SOC/ANT department conference room.

We will talk about sources, citations, designing plagiarism-resistant assignments, using technology in research, turnitin.com, and more.

The subject has me reflecting on a book that I read months ago but has yet to release me of its coiling grip. It seems absurd to say this, but The Culture of the Copy, by Hillel Schwartz (Zone Books, 1996), is utterly original. It’s hard to imagine a more kaleidoscopically visionary 565 pages. Maybe I exaggerate, for irony’s sake, but this is essentially a cultural history of copies, fakes, forgeries, doubles, twins, reproductions, and the like. The focus is a sidelong view of our obsession (and ambiguity) vis-a-vis originality, authenticity, singularity, and identity. Its central argument is, I think, that our human nature, the making of ourselves, has always been the making of doubles and likenesses. Schwartz is keenly interested in moments when facsimiles stand in for originals, when duplicates dupe, when samples take on their own lives. The book’s introduction (cleverly titled “Refrain”) is the story of the man known as the Real McCoy, and this biographical story itself also functions as a recapitulation of the rest of the book. It’s an entertaining read, letting the myriad curiosities and strange tales speak for themselves, and yet the back of the book contains more than 150 pages of endnotes to satisfy the scholar.

I will stop short of a book review here. There are some very provocative insights throughout, but I will stick to the several pages Schwartz discusses plagiarism, which comes on the heels of this conclusion about sampling: “Sampling is what imperialists did when they colonized ‘undeveloped’ lands, calling theft ‘development’; sampling is what ghettoized colonies do in revolt against property laws wired around them” (310).

Schwartz traces complaints of plagiarism back into antiquity, suggesting that it is not a feature solely of literate societies. There are audacious examples galore: “Samuel Taylor Coleridge rabidly charged others with theft, but his own perpetual plagiary he considered a form of spirit possession: ‘I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist. I care not whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed…” I doubt many Baruch students can claim the right to rip off with such transcendental air, perhaps underlining how plagiarism is defined morally as a debased form of copying. Appropriating in the name of poetry is not quite plagiarism?

Plenty of ironic cases in the history of plagiarism:

  • A passage on seeing double was stolen repeatedly by 18th-century scientists.
  • The first book on photography published in the US retouched an English book.
  • Victorian ministers hand copied sermons on honesty from printed books to make them look like originally penned texts.
  • The Boston Globe ran a story on a plagiarized 1991 commencement speech that was published in the New York Times.
  • Lexicographers responsible for defining plagiarism were accused of plagiarizing definitions.
  • A University of Oregon booklet plagiarized its section on plagiarism. (312-13)

Schwartz is gloomy about defending against plagiarism: “our culture of the copy tends to make plagiarism a necessity, and the more we look for replays to be superior to originals, the more we will embrace plagiarism as elemental.” (313)

The radical left has offered solutions: “the 1988 Festivals of Plagiarism in Glasgow, London, San Francisco, and Berlin exalted plagiarism as a defiance of capitalism, whose commodification of the world and of art proceeds upon the pretense of originality and the projection of uniqueness… plagiarism must be a thoughtful assault upon privilege, retaking that which should belong to everyone” (314).

After more citations of students and scholars caught plagiarizing papers and exasperatedly insisting they thought it was their own words, Schwartz concludes: “Plagiarism in our culture of the copy is sticky with feelings of originality-through-repetition, revelation-through-simulation. That plagiarism should be taken up on all sides–as a means for subverting the System and as a means for getting an edge in business, science, or politics–is proof of its centrality and the reason why plagiarism is treated so gingerly, defended so boldly, resumed so intemperately. Like forgery, plagiarism is a personal addiction… Plagiarism is, moreover, a cultural addiction, and I use that word with malice, for the ubiquity of the metaphor of addiction is itself a clue to our embrace of the rhetoric of replay despite a professional anxiety about disorders of repetition” (315).

Do you think plagiarism is not an epidemic but endemic not only to the academic world but also scientific, political, business, and cultural life? If so, do we need a new paradigm to deal with the matter of intellectual and cultural property in an age of mass duplication and duplicity?

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Art, Baruch College, Faculty Development, Higher Education, Internet, Literacy, Media, Plagiarism, Politics, Scholarship, Search Engines, teaching, Technology, To Ponder, What if . . .

Tales From a Ghostwriter

November 15, 2010 By 2 Comments

keyboard ~ blur
Creative Commons License photo credit: striatic

This is the point during the semester when my Facebook feed starts to fill up with laments from my teaching friends about the scourge of rampant plagiarism by their students.* Plagiarism is, indeed, the bane of my teaching existence, and I know that no matter how hard I try to “plagiarism-proof” my assignments, or threaten my students with the wrath of the grading sword, some poor sap is going to try to get away with swiping text from Wikipedia anyway.

When I get papers from students that seem to be too polished, or do not match up with their previous writing efforts, off to Google I go, to try to weed out the plagiarists. If I get a match–bingo. If I don’t, should I assume that the students did in fact write the paper themselves? Because I’ve been so focused on battling plagiarism, I haven’t given much thought to another form of academic cheating: paying ghostwriters. How common is this, anyway?

Ready to be scared? The Chronicle of Higher Education just published an essay apparently written by a guy who sells papers. He claims to have written about 5,000 pages for his clients. 5000 pages! And it’s not just undergraduate work either–he also claims to have written masters and doctoral theses. Dude writes, oh so smugly:

I live well on the desperation, misery, and incompetence that your educational system has created. Granted, as a writer, I could earn more; certainly there are ways to earn less. But I never struggle to find work. And as my peers trudge through thankless office jobs that seem more intolerable with every passing month of our sustained recession, I am on pace for my best year yet. I will make roughly $66,000 this year. Not a king’s ransom, but higher than what many actual educators are paid.

Read the whole thing. It is quite troubling. But, it also reminds me of one of my favorite under-appreciated television shows: “Undeclared.” Here’s a clip of Will Ferrell, playing a–what-else–ghostwriter for lazy college students:

*See also these previous cac.ophony posts on plagiarism here.

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Education, Plagiarism

Starting at the top: Notes on cliché and seduction in academic titles

November 4, 2010 By 4 Comments

As a writing fellow, I’ve had a few glimpses into the importance, faculty tell their students, of doing research. Part of this activity inevitably involves going to the library, or at least the library website, and scouring publications for pertinent scholarship to one’s inquiry. Since conducting “original research is a novelty for undergraduates, and since the electronic media offer myriad sources of information ready for the cutting-and-pasting, it make sense that a professor would be concerned with (1) making sure the student does not plagiarize others’ work and (2) instilling a sense that one’s research must enter an already ongoing conversation. So much of instructors’ pedagogical emphasis tends to lie in two fields: the moral and the intellectual, oftentimes in that order. I suspect that students do not make the connection between the two, too terrified of not (appearing to) tread on someone else’s intellectual toes to recognize that the point is to stand on their shoulders. Or, for those enterprising cheaters, the exercise may consist in, as Hillel Schwartz puts it (since I have no original way to put it), “mak[ing] their name by standing on shoulders buried in sand.” But my point here is to draw attention to a third register of the research experience: the aesthetic. Every stroll down the stacks aisles, every click through JSTOR articles, what faces the browsing scholar are titles, titles, and more titles. There soon appear patterns, styles, conventions, some kind of comforting regularity to the vastness of knowledge. Here I want to make some observations of the norms of titling in academic writing. These remarks are not (all) disparaging or snarky about the re-use, mis-use, or abuse of certain linguistic conventions in academia; I simply want to draw attention to how scholars label their work, reproducing in playful or unintentional ways specific kinds of headlines.

  • Present participles: This seems to be a symptom of the interest in and championing of processual approaches, that is, to present the world as in motion, in circulation, always becoming. The title of this post is parodying this cliché of the -ing verb. I am looking at my bookshelf right now and can spot them everywhere: Re-Presenting the City, Losing Control, Colonising Egypt, Exploring the City… I also see some clever variations on the theme: for example, where the title referencing another, more famous title (Coming of Age in Second Life), or where the present participle suggests multiple meanings (Enduring Innocence). Generally, however, the present participle has become a tired trend in titles. (I credit a former boss in publishing for bringing this to my attention and making it a minor obsession of mine.) Moving on…

  • The colon: You know you’re reading academic work when the title is cloven in two by the two dots. There’s not a precise anatomy, but generally the title proper is allusive in tone. The subtitle buttresses it with an explicatory phrase, as in: Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism. The latter part is the only bit you really need to get a sense of the topic of the book. Usually the title itself is, ironically, a stylistic flourish, as if to communicate that the book also contains some panache and wit (not a guarantee).
  • Quote as title: I feel like this became vogue during the 1990s when high postmodernism celebrated the voice of the Other and pastiche between high and low culture. But you will still encounter titles, especially in anthropology, that headline a pithy phrase uttered by an ethnographic informant, or a Biblical or other textual bit. I suppose the function of this strategy is to convey some sense of the author’s egalitarianism vis-a-vis her subject.
  • The casual approach: This can go either way. “Notes on…” or “Reflections on…” or even “Some thoughts on…” can communicate the sense that the text will not be especially pedantic, written merely as some loose ideas that suggest more than they argue. Of course, if upon reading the piece disappoints and betrays the airy mood of the title, it can become a marker of pretentiousness.

In a winking gesture, I’ve tried to incorporate all these features in the title to this post. But I wonder what the undergraduate novice, wading through vast oceans of titles, makes of these kinds of conventions, if she makes anything at all of them. The title is not only the first thing you see about an article or book, but in the case of those you don’t actually sit down with–that is, the majority, the title can also be the last thing you read.

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Art, Asides, Copyright, Education, Fun, Higher Education, Language, Literacy, literature, Pedagogy, Plagiarism, Scholarship, Style, To Ponder, What if . . .

Cheating for Adults

September 24, 2010 By 1 Comment

Earlier this week, at the first Great Works faculty roundtable of the semester, faculty and fellows discussed the overlapping worlds of plagiarism and assignment design.  Toward the end of the session, talk turned to the role classroom conversations about plagiarism play in the larger context of teacher-student power dynamics.  So often plagiarism reduces the complicated acts of composition and grading into a parent-child chase marked by sneakiness, discovery, and punishment.


Sherrie Levine shoots Walker Evans

Do we do our students a disservice by failing to place plagiarism in the larger spectrum of discourses about linguistic re-use? It seems that to really usher them into “adult conversation” would be to move beyond invokation of rule-based compliance and to acknowledge and explore the larger arena of poetic re-use.  The point is not at all to re-brand academic plagiarism as acceptable or as poetry, but rather to open up the dialogue so that students themselves are responsible for naming and analyzing varieties of borrowing and stealing, and become full-fledged participants in the larger contemporary cultural dialogue involving writers and artists such as Kenneth Goldsmith, David Shields, and Sherrie Levine.

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Pedagogy, Plagiarism

Testing As a Weapon

April 5, 2010 By 2 Comments

Photo credit: Robert King/Getty Images

A bill that will link individual teacher’s salaries to student performance and effectively destroy teacher job security was passed by the Florida state Senate last week.

Besides its obvious anti-unionism (pretty much business as usual for Florida politics), this bill will most likely serve to punish rather than help schools that are facing a number of difficult obstacles while rewarding those that are already relatively successful. It’s unfortunate that the war against public education in recent years is so often waged using the tools of accountability and evaluation, both concepts that might actually be put to good use. Even historian and former assistant secretary of education under Bush Diane Ravitch, a long-time supporter of standardized testing and No Child Left Behind, seems to be reversing her position on the matter in her newest book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.

If the bill passes (as it most likely will given the comfortable Republican majority in the House and the willingness of Florida Governor Charlie Crist) notoriously inaccurate standardized testing outcomes will be used to evaluate teacher salaries and job security, essentially using one inaccurate form of evaluation as a foundation for another; however, it will also have a much more direct effect on learning. When Florida teachers begin “teaching to the test” in a desperate attempt to hold onto their jobs and a decent standard of living, it seems inevitable that the teaching of many important written and oral communication skills will quickly drop out of the curriculum.

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Administration, Assessment, Politics

Vanilla Ice All Over Again

February 17, 2010 By 1 Comment

Yesterday I spoke with a faculty member about her frustration with plagiarism by students. One “innovative” technique that she noticed some students employing was the pastiche: whole paragraphs comprised of phrases and sentences culled from websites, press releases, newspapers, and textbooks, mashed together without any attribution or acknowledgment that the words were not entirely their own. While some students probably knew that they were plagiarizing but thought they could get away with it, others apparently have more benign intent: they haven’t yet internalized academic norms about appropriate use of sources and citation. Perhaps we can call these two types of plagiarism “bad faith plagiarism” and “good faith plagiarism.” Both types deserve penalty, but it is the former, I believe, that deserves more scorn. Students who plagiarize because they don’t know any better are students who are capable of learning proper citation techniques.

With this conversation fresh in my mind, I’ve been thinking about the recent case of plagiarism in Germany by a 17-year-old novelist. Apparently, author Helene Hegemann lifted passages, including an entire page, from someone else’s novel. Unlike the 2006 scandal involving teenage author Kaavya Viswanathan, who claimed that she had plagiarized in good faith, Hegemann readily admits to using another author’s words in her novel without any attribution–what I would call “bad faith plagiarism.” She claims, however, that her novel is akin to a musician who remixes or samples.

Some of Hegemann’s defenders claim a generational defense. The Guardian UK’s Robert McCrum argues that Hegemann’s novel is actually an example of “good faith plagiarism”:

Disentangling fact from fiction in a spat that looks like a nasty blog-war is tricky, but it’s clear from the reports I’ve read that Hegemann, a child of the internet age, simply does not understand, or recognise, the charge of plagiarism. To her, coming from the cut-and-paste world of blogs and Facebook, what she’s done is no more than “mixing” (she seems to use the English term, by the way.)

Laura Miller isn’t having it:

Kids these days, this Cassandra-ish line of reasoning goes, have unfathomably different values, and their elders had better come to terms with this because children are, after all, the future. You can’t tell them anything! It’s as if people under 25 have become the equivalent of an isolated Amazonian tribe who can’t justly be expected to grasp our first-world prohibitions against polygamy or cannibalism — despite the fact that they’ve grown up in our very midst.

The New York Times article hints that in addition to a generational defense, culture plays into it too. That is, remixing is just part of Berlin youth culture:

Ms. Hegemann finds herself in the middle of a collision — if not road kill exactly — between the staid, literary establishment in a country that venerates writers from Goethe to Mann to Grass, and the Berlin youth culture of D.J.’s and artists that sample freely and thereby breathe creativity into old forms. Or as one character, Edmond, puts it in the book, “Berlin is here to mix everything with everything.”

My issue with the “Oh, she was just remixing” argument, however, is that Hegemann did not merely incorporate someone else’s words into her novel. By not acknowledging her sources, she was, in effect, passing off the entire novel as her own, and this, from my perspective, is what some of us stodgy old folks used to call “stealing.” Remixing and sampling can be great, innovative art forms. I’m a fan of Creative Commons. I think copyright rules are too strict. However, if you are going to riff on another person’s words, music, or ideas, you should at least give them credit for it.

If Vanilla Ice couldn’t get away with it, why should Hegemann?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rog8ou-ZepE[/youtube]

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Copyright, Plagiarism

Give or Take a Few Hundred Billion

May 18, 2009 By 2 Comments

I recently came across a particularly glaring plagiarism that highlighted the goofy (and troubling) game of telephone that can happen to information as it circulates through the web. I’ll call the student Cac. It didn’t take me long to diagnose Cac’s speech outline as an out-and-out plagiarism. It was a shoddy piece of work all around—supposedly an outline for a Persuasive Speech about Plastic Bag Recycling, Cac had left out the requisite Topic, Central Idea, and Specific Purpose Statement that belongs at the top of each outline. Cac also neglected to shove his stolen text into a speech outline format—it was laid out in bullet points, obviously ripped from an advocacy website’s FAQ.

Suspicious, I pulled out a short phrase and googled it: “about 2.5 billion plastic shopping bags.” The first hit did the trick. Cac had copy-pasted the entire script, complete with headings—“Facts about Plastic Bags,” “What We Can Do,” “Benefits of Using Reusable Bags.” But did Cac realize, I immediately wondered, that he was plagiarizing from the National Environmental Agency of Singapore?

But I soon wondered which website Cac had ripped this info from; my search for this “about 2.5 billion plastic bags” factoid revealed the same info on many, many sites. Some were repeating it in the context of Singapore (which it no doubt belongs in, given that one of the facts relates to landfills in that country), but many weren’t. The first example I found drew conclusions about Malaysia’s plastic bag usage based on Singapore’s. No biggie. But then I saw a website for RV-lovers based in Canada that used the very same stat for Canada’s plastic shopping bag usage. And Todaysparent.com claimed that “Ontarians alone” used 2.5 billion shopping bags yearly. Even the city of Alexandria, Virginia employed the same stat for justification of their Environmental Action Plan, although in their usage it was unclear who used that many, just that they were used. An online Pakistani daily newspaper listed almost all of the very same “facts about plastic bags,” and they made the 2.5 billion stat sound as though it was global, not national. Even an American company peddling reusable bags used this fact, suggesting that it was the U.S. that used 2.5 billion plastic shopping bags.

I could go on.

Doing some quick Internet research of my own pulled up figures for U.S. yearly plastic bag usage between 100 billion and 380 billion—even more stunning numbers than the 2.5 billion Cac was so impressed by. (And the global annual figure seems to be closer to 1 trillion. If my sources are to be believed.) False information on the web isn’t much of a newsflash, but this incident quickly became less about plagiarism for me (a separate issue) and more about the minefield of Google when used by students for (legit, non-plagiarized) research. Sure, 2.5 billion is a persuasive number any way you slice it, and it’s being employed to make the same argument each time: plastic bags are bad, and we use an awful lot of them.

Somewhere In The World

Somewhere In The World

But each of these filchers was too careless to put the stats in context, or to read closely enough to figure out exactly what the stat was referring to. It calls to mind Jeff Jarvis’s question (referencing Nicholas Carr) at the recent Symposium: does Google make us stupid? (And another of one of his questions: how do we structure the information that we have?) The breaking down of media orthodoxies through Jarvis’s “conversation as content” model perhaps works best when it relates to an individual journalist/blogger taking corrections and comments from a diverse and vibrant peanut gallery, but there’s easily 2.5 billion cases of downright incorrect information streaking across the web, posted on sites without external or internal fact-checkers.

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Blogs and Blogging, Higher Education, Internet, Plagiarism

The ethics of email…

March 3, 2009 By 1 Comment

08ethicist-1901Here is the letter to the NYTimes Ethicist:

“I am a tenured professor. My provost asked me to evaluate an overseas colleague. I did so, responding in an e-mail message. The provost then contacted the colleague, quoting my report and attributing it to me. I was stunned: such evaluations are assumed to be confidential. When I complained, the provost replied, “If it’s in an e-mail, it’s public,” adding that our colleague deserves to know what is being said about him and by whom. Your opinion? J.H., NEW YORK”

What do you think? I am surprised that the provost thought that email being the mode of communication, somehow changes the fact that it is still an evaluation. Who is right?

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, E-mail, Higher Education, Interpersonal Communication

“Students today are…”

January 8, 2009 By 2 Comments

Branford Marsalis provocatively lays it down. Thoughts?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rz2jRHA9fo[/youtube]

Via RateYourStudents.

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Grading, To Ponder Tagged With: , ,

Google Burn-out as Occupational Hazard

July 22, 2008 By 1 Comment

While imbibing Lorna Hutson’s introduction to Ben Jonson’s collected plays, I was intrigued by this passage about the thematic and stylistic differences between Shakespeare and Jonson:

“In fact, Jonson has a complex sense of human psychology, but his interest as a dramatist lies more in the psychology of habitual behavior than behavior in the transitional moments of life crisis for which Shakespeare’s plays are often metaphors. He is also interested in the way that human desires, anxieties and creative energies are affected by the material conditions of their communication.”

Jonson’s interest in these material conditions birthed some good stuff, like Epicoene, a play in which the character “Morose” develops a nervous reaction to the noise and congestion of London; he double-lines his walls, insulates his windows, seeks a silent wife, and even plans a silent wedding. While reading Morose’s comic antics, I was reminded of a recent posting on the blog Burnt Out Adjunct, who writes about the ‘Research = Google’ phenomenon that’s pitting frustrated professors against usually-clueless students in universities across the country. (World?) Maybe it’s all in a name, but suddenly, the familiar plight of poor Burnt Out seemed to strangely echo the desperate shutting-out attempts of Morose.

“Contemporary students come to college with a different set of expectations than they did even ten years ago,” Burnt Out notes. “These students are not agog at the level and breadth of information available to them. Rather, they expect to be able to, within a few key strokes, to gain access to whatever information they seek.” Cut to cranky professors trying to hold their research high ground, sputtering “but…but…” while the well-meaning libraries scramble to catalog information in new and easier and more searchable ways that do everything but deliver e-journals to students with a side of fries and a coke.

Perhaps for many of us though—especially those of us still in the slow drip of a doctoral program—both sides of the battlefield make sense. Sure, we grew up with Atari and eventually graduated to SuperNintendo, but many of us went to school before there was a computer in every classroom, and attended undergrad right around the time that card catalogs were transforming into still-lifes in the hallowed halls of our libraries. We know what Burnt Out knows—that “the Net does not cast the skein that one might assume.” And so while I’ve plenty of times found myself “just checking” the exact date of which Dumas was which on Wikipedia, I’m still made uncomfortable by a student relying on it as one of their sources for a speech or paper. (And it’s very easy to somehow dump on Wikipedia first; wisegeek.com and answers.com seem to be just as popular these days, and there are of course plenty others.) If only it were as simple as the use of pure plagiarism sites like dreamessays.com, but those kinds of offenses are the most easily detected and argued against.

Earning his moniker, Burnt Out ends his posting on a negative note: “So, committees will form, grants will be given and studies will recommend that individual professors seek to imbue a research skill-set into their objectives. And without a standard (either a collective standard (MLA) or an organizational approach (ie Google)), the Natives and the Profs will continue to lament just how odd, lazy, out-of-touch, etc. the other is.” I’m not ready to feel quite so despairing—perhaps because I think that imbuing a research skill-set can go a long way, depending on its implementation— but also because I’m somewhat wary that a collective standard issued by MLA will really connect to the heart of the problem (especially given the reality of the student population found at so many large universities, which seems to prohibit a one-size-fits-all approach from the get-go). And also because I wonder what the point of frowning in the face of the coming tide will really accomplish.

It raises an interesting question, to be sure: what part of the problem is just plain ol’ insistence on things being as we were taught? And how can we embrace the challenge of defending why an article on Walt Disney from the Journal of Popular Culture is preferred (and required) over one from Wikipedia? How do we rise to the task of communicating these reasons to our students in innovative and effective ways, rather than just putting a big “X” through wisegeek.com in their Bibliography? After all, as much as Morose tries escaping the noise, he’s the one who ends up looking like an absurd old man and unsympathetic spoiler—easily polarizing characterizations that risk getting in the way of communication most of all.

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Blogs and Blogging, Higher Education, literature, Pedagogy, Search Engines
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