Plagiarism, credit, and culture

[csjhs@eiu.edu (Jeanne H. Simpson)]

Stephen

I think you have raised a significant issue, one I have struggled with
more than once.  I recall having to explain (with only marginal success)
to our writing competency exam advisory board that originality is a very
high value in western rhetoric, but that it isn't at all a value in some
eastern rhetorical systems.  The imperial civil service examinations in
China, for example, focussed on how many sages and other sources of wisdom
could be incorporated into a written statement.  Originality was not
valued at all in this system, and this cultural background is still
occasionally evident when one works with students from China.  

Easy to dismiss this as weird and to say, yes, well the Chinese invented
the clock and then just regarded it as a mildly engaging toy, too.  But we
have to ask ourselves, what, exactly, have we gained by the system of
attribution and "ownership" of intellectual property that is such an
integral part of the academy.

Let me give an example of where I think this emphasis may have produced
some questionable results.  One of my jobs is to review and approve as
conforming to our faculty collective bargaining agreement the departmental
statements of criteria for retention, promotion, and tenure. 
Occasionally, I find a statement saying that single author works will be
valued more highly than works with shared authorship.  I find myself
puzzled by this value.  It is about ownership and credit--Professor X gets
all the credit.  It is all about our vision of young Tom Edison slaving
away alone in his cold laboratory, feverishly looking for the right
filament for the lightbulb.  It is about whether Shakespeare or somebody
who kinda looked a lot like him wrote Hamlet.  We are intensely focussed
on who gets the credit.

But if Tom had dozens of helpers, if Shakespeare's name was really Wilson
or Jones, if Stephen wrote a really useful article along with a colleague or
two, the outcome is the same: we get lightbulbs and the sonnets and an
occasional really good article.   Sometimes--often, in fact--lots of
heads are better than one.  

And one of the realities of history is that any invention or idea will
get worked on and adjusted and subdivided and added to, sooner or later.
Gutenberg invented moveable type (except he didn't invent it totally
alone--the idea was built on another idea and another and another). 
We have no idea who invented writing or the wheel. Does it really matter,
over the centuries?  

How often have you fallen asleep over a "review of the literature"
section of an article, thinking, yeah, yeah, read that, read that, read
that...?   

We build large and complex systems on this idea of credit for doing
something. And sometimes the result is good.  But a lot of times it is
at least questionable if not downright destructive.  We want the wild
freedom of the internet but also have squadrons of lawyers figuring out
how to protect people's "property" on this system.  Is this even
possible? And if it is, is it a good idea? 

I would like to see the academy do some serious thinking about this whole
value system.  Yes, Nell, I agree that students need at least to be
warned about the minefield they tread, but bless me if I think it can be
explained with completely defensible logic.

Jeanne Simpson
csjhs@eiu.edu