Enemies

Another week, another plagiarism scandal. This one is more complicated than most, but the part that interests me isn't the scandal itself--the plagiarism and the weird institutional response--but the story lurking behind those stories. Briefly: an external reviewer on a tenure case received, from an anonymous source, a long list of allegedly plagiarized passages from a book by the professor under review. He or she then conveyed this information to the in-house tenure review committee.

This is where the scandal begins, but if you want that part of the story, you can Google it. Because I went to grad school with one of the central figures, I'm not going to link, and for the purposes of this blog I'm agnostic about whether the plagiarism was inadvertent or deliberate and what punishment it may have merited. What I'm interested in is this anonymous correspondent, who managed to identify almost three dozen short passages lifted without attribution from numerous different sources. Moreover, since all the passages involve background material rather than substantive arguments, they would have been hard even for specialists to identify. The only people who would seem capable of having immediately recognized the material would be the authors themselves--but anyone who had discovered himself to have been plagiarized would have had no reason to remain anonymous: he could have contacted the author or her publisher. Indeed, that's what the average concerned reader would have done.

Instead, we have someone who wanted to remain anonymous; who had reason to think the book contained plagiarized material; and who was willing to spend whole days or weeks ferreting it out. Tracking down plagiarized material is an outrageous pain in the ass, even when it's a five-page undergraduate paper on Macbeth that borrows exclusively from internet sources. Tracking down plagiarism from printed material, across the breadth of a 200-page book? That's a whole 'nother ball of wax.

Whoever was willing to put in that kind of time--and to do the necessary sleuthing to identify at least one of the author's external reviewers (usually confidential information)--is a personal enemy. Whether it's a deserved or undeserved enemy, I can't say, but it's someone motivated by something more than the usual professional jealousies or resentments. It's someone fueled by rage.

Assuming the tipster is a professional enemy (rather than, say, an enraged ex-lover), it's a cautionary tale without a clear moral: obviously, one should not plagiarize, and obviously one should not make a habit of pissing people off in such a way that they become enemies. But it isn't the case that only assholes acquire enemies. Someone's capacity to attract enemies is sometimes only a function of being successful or high-profile or privileged in some way that garners envy and resentment. An enemy's fury may have very little to do with one's own behavior.

That said, there are ways to decrease the likelihood of making enemies. First, there's the obvious: don't be a jerk. Don't be nasty, don't use other people for your advancement, and avoid behavior that's unprofessional or that leaves other people cleaning up your messes. (And if that happens despite your good intentions, apologize!) But being friendly and gracious and interested in others--especially if you occupy a high perch in the profession--is also a generally smart move. And try to avoid feelings of rivalry or jealousy yourself, because sometimes your own competitiveness interpellates the other person as a rival.

Personally, I tend to assume that I'm not important enough for anyone to truly dislike--I mean, seriously! what do I have that's worth envying or resenting?--but I know that that's not true (there's at least one person foolish enough to say nasty things about me to our mutual friends), and that thinking that way is a species of the problem I discussed in this post, of only being oriented upward toward one's seniors and "betters," rather than thinking about how one treats or appears to those with less standing.

One can't eliminate the possibility of making enemies though no fault of one's own, and in rare instances enmity can actually help the profession: I have a friend (in a different discipline and at a different institution) who was so enraged by a colleague's bad behavior with students and faculty alike that she started poking around in his vita. In relatively short order she learned not only that he had never completed the PhD he claimed, but that he'd never even been enrolled in a PhD program. His asshattery earned him an enemy who successfully purged a fraud from the profession.

I try to squelch my own feelings of envy and rivalry, and I certainly don't hate anyone enough to do what this anonymous tipster did in the way he or she did it. Still, I can at least imagine a scenario in which I might act similarly. For me the offenses would have to be really outrageous, and they'd have to combine the personal with the professional. Let's say a junior professor whom I considered a major phony had also sexually harassed a friend of mine, and she eventually had a nervous breakdown and dropped out of the academy. If he was up for tenure and I knew enough about his work to know I could probably find proof of fraudulence? Yeah, I might do it. But that's a pretty high threshold: his merely being a fraud or merely being a shitty human being wouldn't be enough on its own.

I get outraged easily, but I'm not good at holding on to anger. If someone else has behaved badly--well, usually I'm content to wait for the whirlygig of time to do his thing.


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Because this post is not about the specifics of the plagiarism case itself, please do not use the comments to weigh in on the plagiarist's behavior or the response of her university. Any such comments will get deleted.

Welcome to the panopticon, girls and boys

While grading papers for my two Shakespeare classes, I made a distressing discovery: 25% of them were on the same topic. They weren't just responding to the same prompt, but applying that prompt to the same rather narrow subtopic--a subtopic that was not among the handful I'd suggested.

You know what came next: I Googled it, and discovered that there are approximately a million hits for this topic. It comes up in every discussion of the relevant play and there are dozens of free essays available on the web.

It also happens to be a stupid topic. It's simultaneously obvious and really difficult to do well; if anyone had run it by me, I'd have warned him off. But because it's so obvious, and suggests only a couple of possible lines of argumentation, it's impossible to tell whether any given essay is borrowing ideas from the internet, recapitulating a half-remembered discussion from high school, or doing original (if uninspired) work. Nothing is directly plagiarized: I put in the long hours ascertaining that. But other than writing a motherfucking airtight prompt for next time, what's a girl to do?

I did the only thing I felt I could: I announced to both classes that I believed a number of their essays--giving no specifics--contained ideas derived from uncited sources. I emphasized that it was okay to get information or inspiration from elsewhere, if they were otherwise doing original work, but that they absolutely needed to credit all sources. I told them I would give them 48 hours to get me a new bibliography (and, if necessary, a new copy of their paper with any previously-omitted citations), but that otherwise their grades would be affected.

I should have been able to predict the results.

My students examined their consciences, and at least dozen emailed me confessions. One acknowledged that he hadn't cited a source for the date of the battle of Actium. Another revealed that her decision to write about women in Coriolanus had been inspired by a discussion about gender roles in her Russian Novel class--and she apologized for not crediting that professor. They were, all of them, so very sorry.

I guess guilt-tripping is never a waste.

Better than I thought/worse than I thought

As my previous post suggests, I'm knee-deep in academic dishonesty paperwork. But in the course of chasing down one apparent case of plagiarism, I made a new and possibly more horrible discovery.

Without going into the specifics, let me present a roughly analogous fictitious example. Let's pretend that I'm teaching a 20th-century American novel, and I get a pretty good essay with one entirely gratuitous paragraph claiming that some event in Chapter Five is an allusion to the French and Indian War.

This strikes me as mildly odd: it's not impossible that there's an allusion to the French and Indian War--I can see what the student is talking about--but there's no reason why there should be; it doesn't add any layer of meaning to the scene or to the novel as a whole. Moreover, it's a little weird that a student should make this particular observation (I mean, the French and Indian War? The average undergrad doesn't know squat about that).

So I run a few checks, and bang! There that claim is, in SparkNotes--a whole stupid argument about this stupid supposed allusion (which I'm now even less convinced by). The student hasn't taken anything verbatim, and nothing else about the essay seems suspicious--but come on: The French and Indian War! A twentieth-century novel! It can't be a coincidence.

I haul the kid in, and he's surprised and terrified. The student stammers out that he loves this novel, and read it in high school, at the same time that he was taking a class in Early American history. He remembers this allusion, because he thought it was so neat, the first time he read the book, to know what his English teacher meant when she referenced the French and Indian War--because he'd just studied that in history class.

Oh.

Got it.

His high school teacher was cribbing from SparkNotes.

Imagonna bang my head against a wall for a while now.

Same shit, different semester

Remember this post from last fall? Yeah. What I said then. Again.

Goddammit it to hell.

Plagiarists are people too

I catch an average of one plagiarist a semester, or roughly one per sixty students. Once in a rare while I've have two, in different classes, and a few times I've had none, but the average has remained steady over my six years at RU. I hate catching plagiarists and I hate being always on the alert for plagiarists, but it's a part of my job and I've more or less made my peace with it; I may still leap from the sofa and shout "goddammit!" when I find one, but I no longer take plagiarism as a personal insult. Plagiarism happens when students are lazy or scared or under pressure; it's about them, not me.

But not taking it personally doesn't mean that it's not still emotionally exhausting, and this semester has been a doozy: in one single class I've had two clear-cut cases of plagiarism, with two or three additional papers that I believe were influenced by outside sources--but in a relatively minor way and to a degree that I wouldn't be able to prove anyway. Moreover, they were all on the same paper assignment.

For privacy reasons, I won't go into details, but we're not talking about a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears freshmen, or lazy-ass non-majors. This is a smallish class with good energy, and I genuinely like all the students in it.

And that's what's hard about catching and prosecuting academic dishonesty. When you take it personally, it's easier to nail the kid; you've got the righteous (or maybe self-righteous) sense of indignation to carry you through: "Ha-hah! Play me for a fool, will you? Here's your violation report, asshole." But when you like the kids and have taken some pride in their intellectual growth--and especially when you have some knowledge about the shit going on their personal lives--the anger is different. You're pissed off at them for being stupid and for fucking up, and you're pissed off that they've trapped both of you in a legal process where it's hard to say what you want to say and where what you want to say probably wouldn't be heard anyway.

I gave my class a lecture in the quiet, Angry-and-Disappointed-Mommy voice, and it freaked them all out and maybe it helped and maybe it didn't; part of the problem is that "plagiarist," like "racist," is a term that doesn't allow for gradation or nuance, and no one believes he can be that thing. But although the reality is that not all forms or instances of academic dishonesty are equal, any suggestion that some might be lesser or more deserving of leniency could only come back to bite me in the ass.

So this is what I'd like to tell my plagiarists, and what I wish they'd hear and believe:

"You did something unethical, and you knew it was unethical; 'giving you a break' would be unfair to your classmates and it would be unfair to you; it's my job to enforce academic standards and to see that you wrestle honestly with tough intellectual tasks. You're selling yourself short when you think that you can't come up with good ideas or write a good paper on your own. You will fail this class and the academic dishonesty charge will go on your record. But if you repeat the class, the 'F' will disappear, and if this is your first violation--and you never have another--you'll get to stay at RU and there will be no indication of this on your transcript.

"This doesn't make you a bad person. It makes you a person who fucked up, and there are consequences when you fuck up. But you can make things right over the long term, if you want to."

This shit breaks my heart.

What is truth? Said jesting Pilate

This semester, not for the first time, I've had a student I've charged with plagiarism who remains in my class for weeks or months while the charge makes its way through the university's courts of appeal.

Some students respond by slinking into back-row seats and avoiding eye-contact at all costs, while others (pathological liars, sometimes, or just really fucking ballsy) show up every day determined to perform their diligence and sincerity. One of them wrote me a RMP.com review in which she accused me of being a power-mad egomaniac who goes around charging students with plagiarism with absolutely no proof--and then showed up in class the next day and spoke all period long, smiling shyly and winningly at me from beneath her bangs.

As awkward and occasionally enraging as such a situation can be, it can also be perversely fun: there's my plagiarist in the front row, hand continually raised, and there I am being smiley and affirmative, both of us engaged in a performance whose falsity only we know. It's a kind of brinksmanship.

But although our motives are different--I'm mostly just trying to keep the class running smoothly, and I'm as happy to have smart comments from a plagiarist as from anyone else--I wonder whether our temperaments are so different: aren't we both showing off and taking pleasure in our own power (of self-control, if nothing else)? And aren't we both displaying a spectacular capacity for deception?

I know, I know: the motives matter. But when I wonder whether my plagiarists haven't, somehow, convinced themselves of their own virtue, and cluck my tongue over the bizarre mental malfunction that permits this--I have to acknowledge that I, too, have a powerful ability to make myself believe what I want to believe. I don't lie often and I don't lie about big things, but when I do rearrange the facts a bit, whether to save someone's feelings or to excuse and explain a minor misdeed, I almost never feel that I am lying; I guess I have to believe that what I'm saying is in some sense true, or I couldn't say it.

White lies aren't something I'm prepared to worry about, but I wonder whether it's a slippery slope. Just a few days ago I was skimming my archives and came upon a favorite post from last fall, one that begins with a brief autobiographical anecdote. I smiled as I read it, reliving the event--and then stopped. Oh, right: that detail I just "remembered"? It's fictitious. The real story wasn't much different--I needed to cut down on explanatory backstory, so I switched a few facts around--but in rereading that post I vividly recalled the event in a way it had never actually happened.

Rearranging details to paint a more understandable, agreeable or simply useful version of reality--well, that's what writers do, and I'm a frequent invoker of "the larger truth" of a situation. But I also believe in the importance of knowing the facts. And I guess I'm wondering whether my ability simultaneously to know certain things to be true, and yet convince myself they aren't, makes me so different from my front-row, gold-star plagiarists.

A herald of the season, like unto the first robin of spring

Today's Labor Day, but if I had any doubts that the semester was already well underway, those doubts have now been dispelled.

I have a plagiarist.

Yes, ALREADY: one of my students turned in a reading response that she'd lifted almost entirely from SparkNotes (it's all paraphrase, but it's a very close paraphrase).

And so it begins again.