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A Heartbreaking Problem of Staggering Proportions
Richard Wightman Fox
| In spite of all the recent news about plagiarism in history writing, I doubt there is any more intellectual fraud among historians today than there was in the past. It makes the headlines today not because there is more of it, but because famous popular historians were caught red-handed. The sad spectacle of Joseph Ellis claiming other people's experiences as his own (in his Mount Holyoke College lectures) helps magnify the revelations about Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin inadvertently using other people's words as their own. Historians' foibles also make news because they appear to be riding a wider cultural wave. One cultural icon after another, from the Nobel Peace Prize winners Martin Luther King Jr. (1964) and Rigoberta Menchu (1992) to Bob Dylan and the formerly august New York Times, is at least accused of publishing borrowed or fabricated work. The news gets amplified further because it is so useful in the ongoing culture wars. Do a Web search for "King plagiarism" and note the glee with which some Web sites are still publicizing the revelations made over a decade ago by Clayborne Carson and his colleagues at the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers at Stanford University.1 |
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When I ask my students what they know or think about all this, they typically say three things: they have heard about some of it, they understand that stealing other people's words is wrong, and they think that knowing it is wrong will not stop (other) students from doing it. Given their difficulties in writing and their huge workloads outside of class as well as inside, many students will plagiarize to survive. Insofar as they plagiarize to cope with hectic schedules, they resemble popular historians who have claimed that urgent deadlines contributed to their innocent error of mistaking note cards filled with other people's work for original thoughts of their own. I suspect that some students plagiarize because they find it thrilling to cheat and get away with it. In any case, there is nothing new about students plagiarizing. Students were buying term papers long before the Internet. We need to punish students for plagiarism whenever we detect it, but there is a larger battle to fight. |
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The heartbreaking problem of staggering proportions is not that so many students plagiarize, and not that students do not know what plagiarism is, but that so few students grasp what constitutes the true opposite of plagiarism: a well-conceived and well-developed work. Too many students graduate as history majors without ever having tried to write scholarly essays using primary and secondary sources to forge arguments of their own. I think the best response we can make to the plagiarism crisis is to use it to educate our students about what they should do, rather than just railing about what they should not do. We can take a leaf from Gerald Graff's response to the literary canon wars of the 1980s and 1990s: teach the conflicts. In the process we can sharpen our understanding of what counts as "originality" or "excellence" in our own work.2 |
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Is the first sentence of the previous paragraph, and the title of this piece, plagiarized? Not if you are familiar with recent American literature. Plagiarism is contextual: if you know I am borrowing from Dave Eggers, or can easily find out, then I am not stealing or borrowing, I am asserting that we historians are part of a general intellectual and literary world. The fault is not in me, but in whichever readers do not know their literary stars. Nor do I need to give a citation to William Shakespeare for that last bit of theft. Even if I were to use his exact words—the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves—it would not be plagiarism since we like to think we all know such literary staples. Intellectual work depends upon an evolving body of common knowledge, including exact or approximate verbal expressions, which a community of thinkers and writers can take for granted. There is no reason not to mention Dave Eggers or Shakespeare, except that mentioning them will appear silly if "most" readers are assumed to know the provenance of the phrases.3 |
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