Re: Plagiarism, credit, and culture

[Stephen Newmann <newmann@msmary.edu>]

Jeanne, I could not agree with you more.  I think we spend inordinate
amounts of time and energy trying to figure out who should get the credit
(or the blame) for something.  But I doubt wcenter or even "writers" will
have much impact on changing that value system.  This country is founded
on the notion of competition rather than cooperation.  I personally much
prefer the latter and most of the time I loath the former.  But I don't
really see that value system changing in my lifetime.  Unless I move to
the orient.  I became aware of how this difference plays out in writing
and crediting ideas and words when I began working in our writing center
with the Thai students from our MBA program here.  To "help" these
students we need to explain muc more than the 'rules' to them.  We need to
explain the entire concept of "intellectual ownership" and I have found
that very difficult to do.  Oh, I can explain it alright but it sounds so
illogical and egocentric when I do.  I can explain it but I could never
defend it.  Shall we begin a revolution?
				--stephen

On Fri, 7 Feb 1997, Jeanne H. Simpson wrote:

> 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    
>