[lit-ideas] Re: Top politician toppled by plagiarism
- From: Judith Evans <judithevans001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 2 Mar 2011 10:05:09 +0000 (GMT)
Yes, there's an awful lot of plagiarism around...
>>>>>>>>>>>
Donal (quoted by Veronica):
<Somewhere Prof. Joseph Agassi suggested that the requirement of "originality"
is rarely demonstrated in any very significant way by a doctoral thesis, at
least in philosophy and the humanities. Where nearly everything has been said
before...>
Veronica:
"If this is the case, then why make people go through the Ph.D. program, at
least in these fields? Perhaps to give professors more power over people than
they ought to have?
At the school I went to, one of the top ten in the US, there was a professor
who assigned a term paper to undergrads in a history class. She taught
everyone how to do it, how not to plagiarize and said she would check all
sources"
<<<<<<<<<<<<
I imagine Agassi is talking about genuinely new data/ideas. Ph.D. theses that
are scrupulously referenced, whose sources are impeccable and impeccably
presented, may contain nothing new. Many will contain nothing original, except
in the most attenuated sense. The Ph.D. is a rite of passage. (This is so in
science too, perhaps, even more so.)
But that does not mean plagiarism should be ignored. There's a difference
between failing to be truly original -- anyway not required -- and deliberately
copying chunks of other people's work. Universities are, now, mainly too wary
of enforcing their own rules on plagiarism.
> In my undergraduate years at Sussex I never heard the term
> "plagiarism."
I don't think I did (Manchester). But my first department there could assume
people were well taught, Sussex then, presumably, could too.
Autre temps, autre moeurs...
York faced new students with a plagiarism policy/warning and a requirement
their work consist of new facts and ideas, on pain of penalty. I once had to
spend a whole hour discussing this with a (slightly belligerent) student who'd
seen how stupid it was and wasn't satisfied with assurances that we didn't
expect the equivalent of the work of (insert name of allegedly totally
innovatory thinker here).
Did the university then enforce its plagiarism policy? Did it even fully
enforce as-it-were-ancillary bans on copying wholesale without attribution?
Did the powers that be back up grass-roots attempts to enforce it?
Guess...
Judy Evans, Cardiff
--- On Wed, 2/3/11, David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Top politician toppled by plagiarism
> To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Date: Wednesday, 2 March, 2011, 6:00
> Those of you who ignore my Sunday
> stories, at your risk and peril as the French say, will have
> missed the reference to appropriation, which is what artists
> currently call...well a move that is somewhere between
> plagiarism and quoting. The problem is that a painting
> or installation or piece of hybrid media art cannot have
> footnotes. If you take a chunk of someone else's art
> and put it in your own, only those who don't know you didn't
> paint the Mona Lisa will know you're quoting. And if
> the reference is more obscure, they may make the mistake of
> thinking you have originality you do not, in fact, have.
>
> And what do art college faculty think about
> plagiarism? Of course they are against it, but in
> support of Veronica I cite one dean who, when I explained
> that a student had cut and pasted something from Wikipedia
> and therefore deserved an "F," came up with the following
> objection: an "F" was indefensible because I had not
> published a handout explaining that cutting and pasting from
> Wikipedia is wrong. This same dean once produced for
> us a policy on plagiarism...photocopied...with a small note
> in the corner...indicating that it was the copyrighted
> property of another university.
>
> As I wrote not long ago, I'm struck by how much some of my
> studio colleagues who "appropriate" are sticklers for MLA or
> Chicago or other styles. To them plagiarism is a
> formal issue, just as bowing was a formal issue in European
> and Japanese courts.
>
> In my undergraduate years at Sussex I never heard the term
> "plagiarism." You were supposed to cite sources, but
> the whole point of education was to find out what you,
> yourself think. Lectures were optional. No one
> gave instruction in the formal conventions of
> footnoting. The only concern was that when you read
> your paper aloud each week, or every other week, you had
> something interesting to say.
>
> David Ritchie,
> originally not from Portland,
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