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Notes

notes

This essay is a revised and expanded version of a piece that appeared in Australian Humanities Review 46 (2003): 19–23.

1 In Australia, Curtin University of Technology and Newcastle University each made headlines in the popular press for passing and subsequently awarding degrees to students who had been found by academic staff to have submitted plagiarised assignments. For a summary of the incident at Curtin and the events that followed, see Pyvis. For an overview of the Newcastle case and the findings of a formal investigation of the incident, see Burke.

2 Davies quotes Coventry Vice-Chancellor Professor Donald Pennington as saying that the university had resolved to adopt a “strict new approach”: “it was a conscious decision to make [plagiarism] a high profile issue,” the Vice-Chancellor said, and “to tackle the issue head-on to prevent students from assuming they would get away with it” (Davies).

3 There is a trend in the USA, led largely by the Center for Academic Integrity (CAI) (www.academicintegrity.org), to encourage students to sign – voluntarily – an “Honor Code,” pledging to uphold five “fundamental academic values”: honesty, trust, fairness, respect and responsibility. The CAI website lists in excess of fifty North American universities and colleges that have adopted Honor Codes based on the CAI vision for academic integrity.

4 See, for instance, Zobel and Hamilton: “Cheating, and particularly plagiarism – in this context, the inclusion of someone else's work in an assignment without acknowledgment – is hardly a new phenomenon, but in modern universities it is exceedingly common” (23).

5 More problematic still is the fact that “mastery” of a discipline, especially in the humanities, often entails being able to reproduce particular forms of expression, including technical concepts (so-called “jargon”), syntactical forms (such as the passive voice), and even particular phrasings (“the functions and effects of literary discourse,” for example). The latter, in particular, constitute a kind of “shorthand” for registering ideas and arguments that define or shape the discipline's dominant paradigms (as it were). To that extent, the ideas and arguments represented by those phrasings amount to something like the “base” knowledge of the discipline, which is precisely what students are usually required to demonstrate an understanding of. Consequently – and worryingly, for attempts to eradicate plagiarism once and for all – such phrasings are not only routinely reproduced by academics without any perceived need to acknowledge their “origins” but also function simultaneously as the object of learning and as the means by which one may demonstrate one's attainment of that learning.

6 Some of the key figures in European philosophy, history and sociology who can be seen to contribute to what can be called “the question of ethics” include Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Max Weber, Jean-François Lyotard, and Emmanuel Levinas. Two of my favourite books pursuing a sophisticated speculation on the question of ethics are Charles E. Scott's The Question of Ethics and especially John D. Caputo's Against Ethics, the latter of which sets out to challenge the authority of morality (which Caputo calls “ethics”) in the name of ethics (which he calls “obligation”). For a slightly more “practically” oriented investigation into ethics, see Jeffrey Minson's Questions of Conduct.

7 Consider, for example, the following “Honor Pledge” for Agnes Scott College – “an independent liberal arts college for women” – which is exemplary of the understanding of moral conduct in terms of affirming and acting on the basis of self-evident standards of conduct:

As a member of the student body of Agnes Scott College, I consider myself bound by honor to develop and uphold high standards of honesty and behavior; to strive for full intellectual and moral stature; to realize my social and academic responsibility in the community. To attain these ideals, I do therefore accept this Honor System as my way of life. (See <http://www.agnesscott.edu/studentlife/p_honorsystem.asp>)

8 Both Jeffrey Minson (Questions of Conduct) and especially Ian Hunter (Rethinking the School) are key figures in the study of ethics as praxis. In particular, Hunter's work on schooling and the humanities has done much to re-conceive the ethical self as a particular configuration of ethical competencies that are constituted by specific technologies of person formation, such as those deployed by humanistic education. Minson and Hunter draw heavily from work by Max Weber (see, for instance, Weber) and Foucault (Discipline and Punish and The Use of Pleasure) in formulating their arguments.

9 In this regard, another recent news report may prove instructive. It tells of a student who “over-relied on one source” and failed to provide “enough original content,” and was subsequently charged with and penalised for plagiarism, despite having acknowledged all use of that source. See Revell.

10 Similarly, to the extent that particular forms of expression may constitute the means by which a scholar contributes to an elaboration of ideas, even the notions of “my own words” and “someone else's words” become a little problematic.

11 Here I’m more concerned with laying the conceptual “foundations” for approaching plagiarism as a learning and writing problem rather than with outlining specific pedagogical techniques for overcoming that problem. Still, it can be seen from the emphasis on technique and training that the teaching of ethics, as it were, can be facilitated through exercises and activities that closely mirror ethical practice. In other words, teaching practices that embody effective and responsible use of published work (as distinct from mere acknowledgement of that use) and constitute such techniques as learning objectives may help induct students into an intellectual community, whose goal is to contribute to an existing body of knowledge by way of responding to and commenting on arguments and ideas that are themselves circumscribed by specific contexts of investigation. In teaching even a “key” concept of a discipline, for example, students might be asked in tutorials to familiarise themselves with that concept firstly by identifying those passages in the set readings that define or use the concept in question, and then by explaining, through interpretation, commentary and exemplification, not the concept as such but rather the selected passage discussing that concept. As a practice, this method of learning concepts not only mirrors the practices of citation and commentary that enable correct citation but also underscores the extent to which ideas – even “key” concepts – depend for their significance upon a specific context of investigation.

12 Section 3 of the Monash University Faculty of Arts policy on plagiarism, for instance, prescribes the following response to instances of “unintentional plagiarism”:

When a student is counselled about unintentional plagiarism, the unit co-ordinator must write to the student, confirming that the counselling has taken place, and send a copy of the letter to the Associate Dean (Academic Programs). Students who have already been counselled, and who continue to plagiarise, will face disciplinary action. (Emphasis added)

By contrast, the policy suggests only as a possibility that “unintentional plagiarism” be addressed through pedagogical measures: “Students may also be referred to the Language and Learning Unit of the Faculty or the University, which offer individual guidance and group training in effective note-taking and essay writing” (emphasis added). See <http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/current/policy/plagiarism-policy.php>.