Something to Consider

Editorial in the Chicago Tribune from October 22, 2007

Plagiarism with an Asterisk

There is no firm consensus on the defining features of plagiarism."We're quoting here from a memo by R. Gerald Nelms, an associate professor of composition and rhetoric at Southern Illinois University who was asked for an opinion on whether SIU President Glenn Poshard plagiarized parts of his 1984 doctoral thesis.Nelms conducted his review at Poshard's request, while a separate faculty committee was assessing allegations, first aired by the student newspaper, the Daily Egyptian, that Poshard's dissertation contained at least 30 examples of text lifted from other sources.
Neither Nelms nor the committee found much to be concerned about. Acting on the committee's recommendation, SIU's board of trustees decided Poshard was guilty of "inadvertent plagiarism" and asked him to fix his footnotes and resubmit the paper. He'll keep his job, unless he yields to a faculty revolt: Last week, the faculty senate at SIU's Edwardsville campus voted 45-5 to ask Poshard to resign.We've been scratching our heads about this debate ever since we examined a copy of Poshard's thesis alongside the materials he's accused of copying. Though it's possible to chalk up any single infraction to carelessness instead of theft, there are too, too many of them -- and too little original material left, once the cribbed passages are subtracted. It walks like a duck, and it talks like a duck. It's a duck.But things are rarely so simple in academia. At SIU in particular, there's a great deal of confusion about what constitutes plagiarism. A professor at the Edwardsville campus who was fired for copying another instructor's teaching philosophy statement is suing SIU, saying he was unfairly singled out. His supporters have formed a truth squad to root out other plagiarists. Even before they trained their sights on Poshard, the president appointed a task force to develop a plagiarism policy.The oft-stated premise throughout this exercise has been that, gosh, nobody really knows what is or isn't plagiarism. That surely comes as a surprise to the legions of students worldwide who have been flunked for forgetting to footnote, accidentally or on purpose.Is there really no clear definition? Let's try Webster's New World Dictionary: Plagiarize: to take ideas, words, etc. from another and offer them as one's own. SIU's student code of conduct says plagiarism is "representing the work of another as one's own work."Even the task force Poshard appointed begins its working definition with a straightforward declaration: "Plagiarism is defined as presenting existing work as one's own." It should have stopped right there.By the time the task force was finished equivocating, though, the faculty committee reviewing Poshard's dissertation had plenty of wiggle room to declare the president guilty of "inadvertent plagiarism" -- carelessness, in other words. This is not to be confused with "uneducated plagiarism," which suggests the writer truly didn't know better, or "intentional plagiarism," which might as well be defined as stealing someone else's work and admitting it once you're caught. Anyone smart enough to get into college ought to be smart enough to exploit the "inadvertent" loophole.The task force draft policy and Nelms' memo are both loaded with excuses for the next SIU plagiarist to employ in a lawsuit against the university. If you think plagiarism is plagiarism is plagiarism, then you don't know about "cryptomnesia," which is what happens when a writer internalizes someone else's ideas so completely that she forgets she didn't think them up herself. Another writer, in striving to imitate the lingo of his subject matter, might lift too much verbatim wording, but that's not plagiarism -- it's "patchwriting."Nelms' memo -- and the work of the task force, of which he is a member -- argues that plagiarism isn't 100 percent black and white, and that zero tolerance isn't always the best policy."We must always balance our high standards for research and scholarly publication with our need to not impede the free exchange of ideas," Nelms wrote. "The world can withstand a few unprosecuted citation infractions."Yes, it probably can. But 30 of them, from a doctoral student -- who is now the university president? Absolutely not.