Continuing with my post from last night and thinking specifically about the issue of plagiarism that currently preoccupies the composition faculty at my college and many others. I see three relevant issues that must be explored:

1. The ethics of plagiarism.
2. Plagiarism in the context of technology, copyright, and intellectual property.
3. Pedagogical contexts.

1. We must begin by understanding that copying ideas and even words without citation is ethical under certain conditions. Derrdia can write about Marx or Freud or Plato without having to cite every reference he makes. If I want to write a sentence like “Deleuze’s concept of the rhizome suggests ______,” I wouldn’t cite such a passage by marking the many places where this concept is discussed by Deleuze or others. Yes, in the context of writing an academic text, a direct quote needs to be cited. But outside of this context, is this so? If Milan Kundera quotes Nietzsche in a novel, does he cite it?

The insistence that students cite everything is an implicit judgment on their status (or lack thereof) as authors. Students have no author/ity. A romanticized concept of individual genius might imagine authors invent original ideas, but generally in rhetoric we approach invention as a process of incorporation, as participation in an existing discourse. Authors are those who take existing ideas, mix them together, and produce something from that mixture.

However, lacking author/ity, students are not granted this capacity. Their writing is perceived as only being able to reproduce, unaltered, existing concepts. Conventionally, student writing serves as evidence that they can repeat discrete pieces of information. It is thus necessarily unoriginal and must be cited or plagiarism.

In other words, here it is necessary for us to recall Foucault’s analysis of discourse and ethics. Ethics is a technology of subjectivity: that is, it is an ideological discourse that establishes identities within a community. In part, when we discuss the ethics of plagiarism in relation to students we are reifiying the subject position into which they are interpellated by the institution. We need to examine our motives for doing so.

2. Our concept of plagiarism must be situated within a cultural-historical context of how we understand writing and invention. That is, we must begin by acknowledging that our notion of “originality” and intellectual property is not shared by every culture on the globe, nor has it always been the dominant value in Western culture. It is specifically a product of early industrial capitalism and is an important link between the marketplace and our dominant notions of individuality. We need to remember that while in theory these notions protect the rights of individuals, in practice they primarily protect the profits of corporations.

Of course we can see this notion crumbling all around us, beginning with Modernist practices of collage through pop art. Now technological innovations give us sampling, file sharing, and open source programming. Perhaps our goal should not be to stop plagiarism but to teach students how to plagiarize well. This would mean asking the question, “how do we make copying into an intellectually and socially productive practice?”

3. This is the point I made in my previous post, but I want to revisit it. I would argue that certain pedagogic contexts increase the likelihood of plagiarism as an attempt to escape the consequences of evaluation. Having recently gone through the tenure process, I can assure you that no one likes to be judged. Evaluation is an important part of learning as students need feedback that will help them develop. However, one must ask what the pedagogic value of the consequences tied to evaluation might be?

This is particularly true in the case of our CPN program where students have the threat of being forced to repeat the course if they fail the portfolio evaluation (a possibility even for students who were passing the course otherwise).

So put yourself in this position. If you had repeatedly been told that your writing was inadequate, if people responded to your writing largely by pointing out grammatical errors without ever taking any interest in what you might be saying, if the writing you were asked to produce essentially asked you to repeat or summarize existing information, and if you were faced with the threat of having to do it all over again, might you not take the risk of plagiarizing?

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