I'm delighted that Mike Reddy has made his views so clear - even Frank
Furedi couldn't misrepresent them as crassly as he did in his recent
THES article. But why does Phil Baty continue to treat Furedi as an
expert on plagiarism? Baty was at the JISC conference, and he knows the
names of dozens of real experts, unlike that ex-Marxist turned
reactionary who doesn't seem to have read anything on the subject (which
is at least one way of avoiding plagiarism). I hope Mike will agree
that, after students have been given extensive training, with plenty of
feedback, in how to conform to the rules of academic literacy, then
plagiairism should be treated as a criminal act in the rare cases of
those who persist.
I also agree with Christina Mainka, as against Stephan Botes, that it
isn't really relevant whether the plagiarism is intentional or not. An
analogy would be a club treasurer who didn’t know how to keep proper
accounts, and accidentally transferred funds into his private account.
He would still be culpable. At most one might say that deliberate,
blatant plagiarism should carry a heavier penalty.
It is also misleading of Stephan to use the metaphor of theft (though,
as he implies, the metaphor is as old as the concept of plagiarism
itself - at least as far back as the Roman poet Martial). A student
plagiarist doesn't deprive the author of anything (not even lost
royalties), and plagiarism is plagiarism whether or not property rights
or permissions are involved. The work may be out of copyright, or the
author (e.g. a fellow student) might have given permission. The crime is
that the student gains a marketable qualification by fraud.
Robert Muller's question is a good one, and I am sure there are
disciplinary differences. For example, philosophers cite far less than
social scientists. Even within a single discipline, I defy anyone to
give a neat and workable definition of what counts as common knowledge,
since it is context-dependent. For example, I wouldn't normally expect a
student to give chapter and verse for the statement that Descartes was a
dualist. But if the student were writing an essay on whether or not
Descartes really was a dualist, then citations would be necessary. Of
course, making an unsupported claim in your own words is not the same
thing as plagiarism (expect in institutions which stupidly include ideas
in their definitions). Getting a feel for what can be taken as common
knowledge takes a long time, and lots of feedback from teachers. My
advice to students is: if in doubt, cite! (as Ciara Donnan says).
On the other hand, I don't agree with Ciara and Verity Brack on the Kent
case. The student concerned may have been taught to patchwrite while at
school. Whether or not he had read the rules on plagiarism in the
university handbook, the fact that he was getting good marks for
plagiarised work would reinforce his bad practice. It wouldn't take a
very clever lawyer to argue that his university teachers were
professionally negligent in failing to notice how he was putting his
essays together.
Erik Borg raises a couple of issues which have led some people to deny
that plagiarism is wrong, or even that it is conceptually possible
(though Erik himself rightly doesn't go down these roads). Postmodernist
philosophers have argued that, since meaning is intertextual, it does
not reside in the author's intentions - indeed, there's no such thing as
an author to be plagiarised from. Anticolonialists have claimed that
individual originality is a Western idea, and that it is a form of
cultural repression to insist on international students following our
local rules. I say more about these in my paper for the plagiarism
conference: 'Plagiarism really is a crime: a counterblast against
anarchists, postmodernists, and others' (available at
http://www.philosophy.leeds.ac.uk/GMR/public/CounterblastRevised.doc).
George.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
George MacDonald Ross
Director
Philosophical and Religious Studies Subject Centre
of the Higher Education Academy
School of Philosophy
University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT UK
+44 (0)113-343-3283
[log in to unmask]
http://www.prs-ltsn.ac.uk
*************************************************************************
You are subscribed to the JISC Plagiarism mailing list. To Unsubscribe, change
your subscription options, or access list archives, visit
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/PLAGIARISM.html
*************************************************************************
|