Plagiarism: Morality and Metaphor

PLAGIARISM: MORALITY AND METAPHOR

A Dissertation by BRANDON DULANE BARNES

Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University-Commerce in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY December 2014 PLAGIARISM: MORALITY AND METAPHOR

A Dissertation by BRANDON DULANE BARNES

Approved by: Advisor: Bill Bolin Committee: Donna Dunbar-Odom Tabetha Adkins William Thompson Head of Department: M. Hunter Hayes Dean of the College: Salvatore Attardo Dean of Graduate Studies: Arlene Horne

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ABSTRACT PLAGIARISM: MORALITY AND METAPHOR Brandon Dulane Barnes, PhD Texas A&M University-Commerce, 2014

Advisor: Bill Bolin, PhD

The purpose of this project is to analyze, in recent select plagiarism commentary both within and outside composition studies, the practical definitions of, proposed methods of preventing, and common ways of punishing or responding to plagiarism, bringing explicit attention to the moral reasoning that may justify or not justify each and devoting particular attention to metaphors that signal and advance such reasoning. My aim in this study is to encourage members of the composition field and other teachers of writing to approach plagiarism with critical, deliberate clarity, resulting in an enhanced ability to articulate to themselves and their relevant audiences (colleagues, students, public) why teachers and scholars approach plagiarism in the ways they do. I close this project with two recommendations for further inquiry which may help to resolve seemingly unnecessarily unresolved questions regarding instruction in citation conventions.

DEDICATION

I dedicate this work to my family, especially my parents, Robin Harvey, Garry Barnes, and Ruth Barnes; and my sister, Brooke. Your fervent, unending support of my education— moral, spiritual, and intellectual—made this possible.

To Amber, ever the equanimous Leia to my impetuous Han.

To the late Katherine Norris, my welcoming grandmother-in-law. Her last words to me were “Get it finished.”

Finally, to my daughters, Elizabeth and Katherine, apples of my eye. May your moral compasses always point to true north.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank everyone, especially Josh, who ever said an encouraging word to me about this project and who ever asked, with interest real or—politely—feigned, what it was about. The practice these opportunities afforded me to wrench specific from vague notions proved invaluable toward the project’s sluggish but eventual completion.

I wish to thank, of course, the members of my committee; their support, patience, and personable exchange of ideas made lighter the burdens of writing. Special thanks to Dr. Bill

Bolin for sharing his humor as well as his guidance in this subject of mutual interest.

I want to extend very warm thanks to my colleagues. First, to my fellow graduate students in The Merce: Toni, CJ, Michelle, Sean, Melissa, LeAnn, Jonne—the food, wine, and washing machine I thank you so much for—and JP. Second but no less important, the Tarleton

Crew: Rochelle, Marc, Ben, and Chris. Who can say, fellow graduate students, just how much your many invigorating conversations propelled me through? My colleagues at Trinity Valley

Community College deserve special mention for their enthusiastic support of my efforts. Bill,

Michael, Chris, James, and Amy—thank you. I work on one of the friendliest halls in academe.

Special thanks also to James, who goes by “one of my colleagues” in an ensuing page.

I would like to thank very much my wife, Amber, who understood, just as Virginia Woolf insisted, that a room of one’s own is necessary to write, and who listened again and again to my thinking aloud. She did more than read this dissertation: she lived through it with me. I love you, Amber.

I must thank the late Dr. Randall Popken of blessed memory. You, sir, made a happy rhetorician of me after all.

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Finally, my deepest gratitude to Dr. Cleatus and Connie Rattan, whose warm sponsorship and dialogues over fifteen years have been of untold value, and from whom I have learned, perhaps more than from any others, that the life of the mind is self-justifying; and whom it simply would not have done to disappoint should I have failed to complete this project. I offer it, completed, as a pledge of my abiding affection for them.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER

1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Plagiarism and Metaphor ...... 4

Outline of Chapters ...... 8

2. REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ...... 11

Moral Philosophy ...... 11

Egoism ...... 13

Natural Law ...... 18

Utilitarianism ...... 22

Respect for Persons (Kantianism) ...... 25

Virtue Ethics and Care Ethics ...... 30

Metaphor ...... 35

Plagiarism ...... 42

Before 1995 ...... 42

After 1995 ...... 50

3. DEFINITIONS ...... 63

Definition and the Practical Syllogism ...... 63

Plagiarism Is a “Viable Option” ...... 69

Plagiarism Is Collaboration with Texts ...... 80

Plagiarism Is Bad Manners/Breach of Convention ...... 92

Plagiarism Is a Literacy Practice? ...... 100

Plagiarism Is a Means to Keep the Gates ...... 106

Plagiarism Is a Sin ...... 116

Plagiarism Is an Offense to Education ...... 122

Conclusion ...... 127

4. PREVENTION ...... 128

The Plagiarism-Proof Assignment: “More Ethically Satisfying”? ...... 132

Instruction in Source Reading: From Dancing to Digestion ...... 139

Exhortation: Of Preaching and Teaching ...... 148

The Threat of Getting Caught: Poison, Prison, and Pacts with the Devil ...... 156

Conclusion ...... 169

5. PUNISHMENT AND RESPONSE ...... 174

Expulsion: “Death Penalty”? ...... 176

Failure for the Course: “Dramatic Device” ...... 184

Grade Reduction, Including Zero: Plugging in Formulas ...... 194

Mandatory Revision: Liberation and Deficiency of Anger ...... 201

Conclusion: Further Difficulties ...... 220

6. CONCLUSION ...... 232

Plagiarism Metaphors: Which Should Stay, Which Should Go? ...... 234

Moral Theories in the Literature ...... 238

Remaining Challenges of Theory: Definition and Acquisition ...... 243

WORKS CITED ...... 258

VITA ...... 275

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

This project’s goals—explicating the recent morality and metaphorization of plagiarism primarily in composition studies—might be best understood if placed in a broader context. The field of composition studies is rife with publications exploring the social, political, and economic impetuses and implications of its concepts and practices. By comparison, the ethical and, still more, the moral appear to receive far less explicit attention. This result is, I suspect, the product of two or possibly three causes: (1) the term “moral” too readily connotes or is synonymous with priggishness and authoritarianism; (2) scholars in the field may practically assume that what is meant by “ethical” is more or less self-explicating within the wider social and political goals of liberation fairly commonly espoused in recent literature, and (3) those wider social and political goals appear to be the site of real struggle, morality occupying too small a position for scholarly work motivated by those goals. In my admittedly limited reading of the field, I get the sense that

Robert Briggs is representative of the broader attitudes toward the “moral” and “ethical” when he limits the moral to the conventional and the ethical to the “highly contextualized [sic] practices and decisions, seeing all decisions and practices in terms of their many potential and not always foreseeable consequences or outcomes” (67).

For Briggs and, I assume, for many others in the field, the ethical is preferable for the

(ethical) reason that it attempts to peer into long-range consequences rather than to be guided by the more narrow constraints of conventional attitudes and practices. To be sure, many composition theorists and practitioners dedicated to enacting some form of ideological critique hold the conventional at arm’s length, applying a hermeneutics of suspicion toward their students’ as well as their own places in unequal power relations as well as underscoring the different ways of knowing students bring with them to the classroom and its often conventional

2 tasks. In this intellectual context, the moral, then, where it does suggest conventionality, issues its own warnings against its use as a controlling term for analysis and inquiry. If this position on the ethical as opposed to the moral—if they may usefully be so opposed—does hold fairly widely, as I believe it does, then it is probably not to be wondered at that composition studies should have, relative to the social, political, and economic; little to say explicitly in connection with it.

Bringing explicitness to what is implicit can prove an energizing source for further action. In her famous Justice and the Politics of Difference, Iris Marion Young explains that the process of politicization as feminist advocates carry it out has resulted in the far-reaching criticism of quotidian practices, including jokes and pronoun usage, noting that such criticism has been largely effective in altering formerly accepted, unquestioned practices into problematic or unacceptable ones (87). To be sure, the field of composition has carried out this criticism, resulting in a change of teaching practices, as instanced by moves to share authority with students or, more simply, provide instruction in non-sexist pronoun usage.

My goals are somewhat different, albeit parallel in operation. In calling for a moralization of writing instruction in this chapter, I am suggesting that conventional or traditional practices as well as liberatory, critical, or progressive practices—or any practice constituted as a principled departure from the conventional—be subjected to the scrutiny of what is considered moral itself. Despite Briggs’s evidently confining view of the moral, the kind of analysis I will perform in the following chapters embraces a fairly wide range of theoretical understandings, allowing for a plurality of moral rationales, some with a view to immediate or long-range consequences, others with a view to duties broadly or narrowly defined, and still others with a view to the character of the agent always, though relatively stable, in a state of

3 formation or process. This range of theoretical perspective, I believe, is wide enough that it can share borders with the social and political concerns of writing instruction as currently conceived, as well as offer narrow focus on the immediate actors concerned in any given instance of pedagogical practice.

Moreover, the analyses I perform in this project offer something that a social and political analysis may overlook or underemphasize: rhetorical analysis of the arguments put forward for any given concept or particular act in the realizing of one’s pedagogy may yield insight into the intensely private reasoning of individual people. It is one thing to understand ideologies in operation in wider social structures; it is another to understand the reasoning of real colleagues and the processes by which they may have arrived at their conclusions. To be sure, the possibility that one’s deliberation and stated rationales are less the reflection of one’s true convictions and more the educated anticipation of someone eager to justify conclusions to a wider and skeptical audience is real, as Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca have well noted. Yet, as they also state, “These new reasons [arrived at through self-deliberation] may intensify […] conviction, protect it against certain lines of attack [one] had not thought of originally, and make its significance clearer” (42-45). An analysis of moral reasoning may help to show the sources as well as further supports of intensified conviction about pedagogical practice in writing instruction and so better unfold the minds of our colleagues to us.

Because plagiarism often marks the failure of either the teaching or the learning of writing, I believe the moralization of writing instruction can begin and be illustrated most fruitfully by exploring the moral theories implicit in how scholars and commentators define, propose to prevent, and respond to plagiarism. While I obviously see those explorations as worth consideration in their own right and while that consideration is the substance of this

4 project, I hope its conclusions, however tentative, may provide ample reason to encourage still further reflection on the potential benefits of moralizing our practices.1 To suggest how this may be possible, consider the following preliminary, if admittedly rough, illustration.

Plagiarism and Metaphor

Plagiarism is a metaphor so widely circulated that it has largely ceased to be a metaphor.

That is, its status as a technical term (cloaked in Latin) whose obligatory appearance in institutional policy and pedagogy is so taken for granted that it cannot be unknown even to the most inattentive, occludes the fact that it was once the clever, creative, and perhaps arresting analogy of a single person—the coinage has been confidently and consistently credited to

Martial (see Bowden, “Coming”; Howard, “Textuality”; Selle; Seo)—expressing an evident moral judgment of certain textual practices. Departing respectfully from this consensus for just a moment, however, what if we cannot be so sure that Martial deserves the credit for this use of the term? Is it conceivable he overheard another’s clever equation of literary misappropriation to kidnapping and then introduced the term into circulation without attribution? If overheard in this way, is it not further conceivable that Martial’s hypothetical source was parroting still someone else?2 This state of affairs would be neither altogether surprising nor unprecedented: many such coinages lie beyond the discovery of some of our best discursive archaeology, to use Foucault’s terms, and thus unaccountably many strokes of brilliance are doomed forever to go unacknowledged and so leave the memories of their creators unadorned. Though doubtless the

1 It will be noted that I do not use “moralizing” in the sense that means to pronounce self- righteously; instead, I mean to analyze with strict attention to moral assumptions and their implications. 2 Seo mentions that Martial is building on another popular metaphor, that of the book as a kind of slave (575). If he is the first ever to have used plagiarism in this way, Martial does so by building on premises already well established for him. Such an observation is highly congenial to the poststructuralist concern with showing that all that we call originality is subject to influence.

5 idle wish if not outright goal of many an ambitious writer and clever person, citational perpetuity is not likely to be the destiny of even the most magnificent ideas, phrases, or even entire works; even where the duty to cite is in some way generally assumed.

Seen in this way, the very term plagiarism stands as an apt illustration of, and compelling invitation to consider, the concept’s inherent issues. Because of the fortuitous self-referentiality involved in the example, I would argue that the term is perhaps the best illustration and invitation. Consider the following points of interest. First, its probably inevitable fate has been to be a clever coinage (a) whose usage would demand citation in contemporary academic writing for some considerable time were it the recent published product of an identifiable scholar and yet in fact (b) whose cleverness was not enough to cement an evident, widely known proprietary relationship to a single author—almost but not absolutely certainly Martial—in the imagination of the wider public or even of those who use the term with considerable understanding and emphasis. Many of us who teach writing have to be informed that it was Martial who coined the term; his having coined it, in other words, is not “common knowledge.” Here is evidence of the vital differences and relations between attribution, origination, and circulation.

Second, the metaphor’s unrecognizable status as a metaphor and recognizable status as a technical term (again, almost certainly helped by its Latinate form) point to the concept’s tendency, or at least ability, to function as ideology as defined by Iris Marion Young: “Ideas function ideologically, as I understand that term, when they represent the institutional context in which they arise as natural or necessary” (74). Recent scholarship on plagiarism in composition studies particularly emphasizes contextualizing academic citation historically, socially, institutionally, and even disciplinarily to show a plurality of norms governing writing with sources in disparate contexts contemporary with as well as preceding modern writing courses

6 and wider academia. Such demonstrations, scholars hold, have a salutary effect on pedagogy and so to aid the criticism that ideology may sometimes, in Young’s words, “forestall” (Young

74). As I will illustrate in subsequent chapters, interrogations of metaphor can help to understand and assess the rational bases for comparisons as well as to “de-naturalize” them where they may have gone insufficiently examined. After consideration, we may find some metaphors worthy of their currency, whereas we may reject others as unequal to their moral and rhetorical tasks. To return to the case of plagiarism, we could begin with the following questions: What does it mean for a text to be a slave and one, moreover, forced to leave the service of one master into another (see Bowden, “Coming” 82)? Why are texts and ideas seen in terms of, as Rebecca Moore Howard points out, a master-slave relationship, or as, perhaps, a parent-child relationship? What does this mean when texts are misappropriated (“Sexuality”

479)? Are these metaphorical relationships theoretically warranted? Such are questions which plagiarism and traditional authorship frequently provoke.

Third, if plagiarism can be “de-naturalized,” the textual practice or practices to which it refers may be vulnerable to withering scrutiny and the authorities who frame and punish plagiarism as part of the necessary exercise of their authority subject to the same. Comparative citation investigations, for example, pose considerable challenges to the legitimacy and exercise of academic authority, a point I will illustrate at length in the following chapters. For now, it bears noting that comparative citation investigations in principle resemble studies in the sociology of morality, a study which has resulted in a notably ambivalent response from ethical theorist W. D. Ross. While Ross finds such study intriguing and potentially rewarding, he also cautions against its potential to cultivate corrosive skepticism toward “conventional morality.”

Ross insists on the limited use of such studies and disallows for their substituting for the very

7 different reflections proper to moral philosophy as such (Right 13; cf. MacIntyre, After 199).

Some in the field of composition recommend the comparative study of writing conventions to better explicate how citation conventions work in academic contexts and so to assist students to progress in their sometimes difficult literacy apprenticeships. Along with historicizations of modern authorship, these recommendations correlate with the recommendations for a less severe or ameliorated exercise of academic authority.

It seems difficult to doubt, as I will show, that a considerable tendency in the recent literature is toward such amelioration. Throughout this study, I will call any and all attempts to lessen the severity of plagiarism’s definitions, to lessen its chances of occurring, and to lessen the severity of responses to it as Ameliorism and its exponents as Ameliorists, a term not to be confused with the opposite of the Meliorism school in social philosophy. Rather, in this study,

Ameliorism it is to be contrasted with Traditionalism and its exponents as Traditionalists. I briefly explicate the Traditionalist position the first part of Chapter 3, “Definitions.”

Plagiarism is only one of numerous metaphors circulating in the discourse of composition studies, as will be seen in subsequent chapters, and, though the subject of this project is plagiarism, I do not return to the metaphor with any special emphasis. Here, however, it is salutary to recall that plagiarism, where the concept marks the item for discussion, is the essential, central metaphor whose origin—even if reasonably well established—has been largely forgotten and whose metaphorical nature has been likewise largely and effectively forgotten.

The legacy of such forgetting, as several have argued, has been to help generate strong emotional responses to textual misappropriation when it occurs and to result in the penalties both supported and decried by faculty members. It hardly needs stating that the most influential legacy one can have obtains precisely when its origin has been forgotten.

A fraught moral and practical question, what to do with plagiarism and with plagiarism touches on many important areas of study with inviting unresolved matters all their own: authorship theory, educational philosophy, educational psychology, political philosophy, the problem of free will, and so on. More limited in scope, my study will, as already noted, be fairly rigidly confined to questions of rhetorical analysis with an emphasis on metaphor and moral theory. My goal is to foreground moralities in evidence in selected portions of plagiarism- related scholarship and commentary, primarily in composition studies, and the metaphors that signal and illustrate such moralities, as well as to entertain criticisms and offer alternatives where it seems to me that such criticisms and alternatives suggest themselves. I believe a serious reading of these criticisms and alternatives may prove a valuable contribution not only toward a better understanding of one’s own pedagogic-moral reasoning as well as that of colleagues, but also toward encouraging the representation of moral reasoning not commonly found in the field

(see also Chapter 6, “Conclusion”).

Outline of Chapters

In Chapter 2, I review literature pertaining to three areas: moral philosophy—including an explication of six major moral theories informing my interpretations—metaphor, and plagiarism studies. In each of the three following body chapters, Chapters 3-5, I proceed by isolating and analyzing moral statements (both their assertions and justifications) made by plagiarism scholars and commentators, including interrogation of salient metaphors used by scholars to advance their moral positions.

In Chapter 3, “Definitions,” I isolate and analyze moral-practical definitions of plagiarism, as distinguished from textual definitions (see Robillard, “Situating” 36).

Specifically, I consider plagiarism as a means of assistance to students, as textual collaboration,

9 as a breach of etiquette, as practice with literacy, as an institutional means of gatekeeping, as a sin, and, finally, as an offense to education. Owing to the complexity of the subject, I have been necessarily selective in choosing both definitions and metaphors, but I believe my selections will prove fruitfully suggestive toward further reflection and inquiry.

In Chapter 4, “Prevention,” I consider several major pedagogical options facing teachers of writing and other academic faculty: the plagiarism-proof or -resistant assignment, exhortation, instruction in reading sources, and, finally, issuing threats of catching plagiarism, including and emphasizing discussion of plagiarism-detection software as a means to such threats. Closing that chapter, I consider whether prevention, while having won overwhelming scholarly consensus as the preferred general approach to encouraging legitimate writing practices, may be rivaled by a different moral approach.

In Chapter 5, “Punishment and Response,” I consider four major responses, three punitive and one non-punitive, to plagiarism: expulsion, failure for the course, simple grade reductions up to and including zero, and, finally, mandatory revision. This chapter, covering those actions taken by teachers where preventative measures, however well intended or crafted, may have failed; invites the readiest and perhaps deepest moral reflection, not only for the question of short- and long-range consequences to policies, but also for the relative weight assigned to students’ as well as teachers’ intentions and characters, actual or merely perceived, behind their respective actions. I close the chapter, as in Chapter 4, by considering another position not well represented in the literature.

In Chapter 6, “Conclusion,” I revisit and, in summary fashion, assess the metaphors discussed in preceding chapters, venture tentative generalizations about the moral theoretical climate in plagiarism studies in composition, and once more consider the warrantable

10 implications for commonly invoked poststructuralist theories of authorship and language as well as pedagogical claims for situated learning. My chapter terminates in two suggestions for the sub-field of plagiarism studies toward resolving questions which, as I argue, remain unnecessarily unresolved.

Though I have my own moral commitments regarding this issue, my aims in the present study are less to decide ultimately between the always already competing moralities where plagiarism is implicated than they are, somewhat as Richard Fulkerson in his famous “Four

Philosophies of Composition” did, to “clarify, though not to resolve, a number of the major controversies in the field” (344). As I believe the ensuing chapters will show—if it was not already evident—there is a probably irresolvable moral pluralism with respect to plagiarism and, indeed, to writing instruction as a whole. Not only are the several measurements proposed to prevent and punish plagiarism of varying severity and justification, but some entertain positive values to plagiarism in certain contexts (see, e.g., Pennycook; Randall). How we are to approach, or even oppose, these differences may well lie in how we approach pedagogical diversity in composition pedagogy as a whole, but that remains to be seen. For now, I turn to review of the relevant literature.

Chapter 2

REVIEW OF LITERATURE

As hinted in the previous chapter, plagiarism issues a standing invitation to moral responses; even when adamantly denied that plagiarism warrants a moral response, it will be soon discovered that even these denials are made for undeniably moral reasons. Not only does this moral atmosphere hold good among the public, but it also holds among experts of writing. If at all invested in their work, writing teachers faced with plagiarism will, like the ghost of

Hamlet’s father, look frowningly. And, if their writings are any indication, they will often frown, also like the ghost, in countenances more in sorrow than in anger. Such writers are concerned deeply for what plagiarism signals about the nature of pedagogy, the investment of students in their studies, the support available to students in our institutions of higher learning, and the amount of power wielded by writing teachers who may act as gatekeepers using plagiarism as the means or the excuse to shut people out. On the other side, some worry that plagiarism signals a profound disregard for, misapprehension of, and even disdain for academic values and virtues. The purpose of the following chapters will, again, be to analyze these statements and sift their most commendable rationales, but in order to do that, we will need a firm working understanding of the moral theories in play, as well as the common metaphors used to frame these moral discussions to provoke emotional reactions and practical responses.

Finally, we will need to have some working sense of the discussion about plagiarism in academic circles to date.

Moral Philosophy

Julianne East’s “Judging Plagiarism: A Problem of Morality and Convention” could well belong in the primary texts for this project as well as those in the review of literature. Since,

12 however, East’s project is in very important respects similar to my own, I choose to include her article here. East is concerned, as I am, with the differences among instructors’ responses to plagiarism and shows that a sense of justice animates those responses, regardless of difference.

East here resonates with my own conclusions about the importance of sustained study on this topic:

Acknowledging that moral judgments are brought to decisions about plagiarism

deals with reality and so provides opportunities to develop a frame to analyse

current practice and approaches to decision making. […] While there might not

be resolution there will be opportunities to better deal with the problem of

plagiarism and direct teaching and learning advice. (70)

East moreover points to the clash of “different interests” pursued by both teachers and students, showing that ethical pluralism will most certainly continue (70). East’s article is to some extent informed by a familiarity with moral philosophy as well as psychological theories of moral development; however, I find her study limited in that she is concerned primarily with the ethical problems in punishing (or not) plagiarism and to a lesser extent with defining plagiarism itself.

She makes very little mention of prevention.

The basic framework for this project comes largely and primarily from moral philosophy.

Providing the primary theoretical basis for this study is C. E. Harris, Jr.’s, 2007 primer Applying

Moral Theories, 5th edition. Harris, in general terms, explicates six moral theories, egoism and utilitarianism (both consequentialist), natural law and respect for persons (both nonconsequentialist or deontological) and Aristotelian and care ethics (both virtue-based ethics), applied to various case studies. His summary of basic moral concepts and highly accessible treatments constitutes a valuable contribution to this project.

Harris’s helpful differentiation between moral judgments, moral principles, and moral standards (44-50) helps to clarify the baselines of commonplaces and first principles in scholarly arguments about plagiarism. My textual analysis in the following chapters aims to isolate claims which “cannot be defended by referring to a higher moral standard” (52)—those ethical premises by which we demonstrate but are themselves indemonstrable—to determine just where the source of consensus and dissensus among composition specialists and non-specialists may lie.

Harris’s account of the six moral theories, though useful, does not exclude from this project primary accounts of those theories. For egoism, I rely also on Ayn Rand’s The Virtue of

Selfishness; for utilitarianism, Mill’s Utilitarianism; for natural law, Aquinas’ Summa

Theologiae; for respect for persons, Kant’s Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals; and for virtue ethics, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as well as Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice, which Harris places under the heading of virtue ethics partially to counterbalance the strongly patriarchal bent of Aristotle’s Ethics. However, because I am greatly indebted to his summaries for my own understanding, the next several pages will include a nearly point-by-point outline of

Harris’s major points with some reference to the primary texts to which Harris himself is indebted. Along the way, I will take occasion to hint at some of the implications each moral theory holds for a discussion of plagiarism, while reserving more detailed discussion in Chapters

3-5.

Egoism

Egoism’s opprobrium among trained philosophers, Harris observes, results in its being summarized unfairly, and, as a corrective, he attempts to offer a version of it that will appear as

“plausible” as possible. He thus quickly passes over what he calls an individual ethical egoism, where the interests of all people are subservient to the interests of one person, in favor of

14 universal ethical egoism, a view Harris aligns with the objectivist writings of Ayn Rand, specifically, The Virtue of Selfishness. Writes Rand: “the objectivist ethics holds that the actor must always be the beneficiary of his action and that man must act for his own rational self- interest” (qtd. in Harris 64). Because egoism run rampant will bring human beings ineluctably into the undesirable outcome of a Hobbesian state of nature, a circumscribed form of egoism, complete with rules and contracts, must obtain if it is to obtain at all. Harris cites Rand again, who insists that carte blanche is not issued by her form of egoism: “It is not a license to ‘do as he pleases’” (qtd. in Harris 68). And yet, even with “moral side constraints” in place, Harris says, this kind of egoism warrants only so much ethical action: while it very strongly legislates, in the form of “moral rules,” against actions such as lying or theft, it imposes no duties in the form of

“moral ideals” (68-69).

Harris also distinguishes between two types of egoism, namely, act egoism and rule egoism, in this way:

Act egoism focuses on the actions of individual egoists and specifies that I should

evaluate every act in accordance with whether it promotes my well-being within

the moral side constraints. Rule egoism focuses on questions of social policy and

general social import. It looks for rules that would meet egoistic criteria if

generally followed. This means that the rules must be those (such as the

prohibition of killing) that would (1) in general benefit the individual proposing

them; (2) secure agreement from other egoists; (3) conform to the moral side

constraints. Rather than evaluating his actions directly by asking whether they

promote his self-interest, the rule egoist evaluates his actions by asking whether

they conform to certain rules, the rules themselves being justified by these three

criteria. (69-70)

In view of this, Harris lands on the following egoistic moral standard, also worth quoting in full:

Those actions (or rules) are right if and only if, within the moral side constraints,

they promote the person’s self-interest at least as much as any alternative action

of if they harm their self-interest the least or as little as any alternative action.

Moral rules must also be agreeable to the audience of egoists, within the limits of

the moral side constraints. (70)

Harris’s analysis of universal ethical egoism rules out absolutely pursuing self-interest by illicit means: “it is wrong to kill, lie, steal, break promises, or cheat, even to achieve their own goals” (67). On the plus side, then, universal ethical egoism—or objectivism, to use Ayn Rand’s term for it—is entirely compatible with classroom policies that forbid plagiarism as a form of cheating and violating the trust of the teacher-student relationship. However, though also consonant with Harris’s description, a teacher operating by the objectivist ethics is under no positive moral obligation necessarily to construct and enact a pedagogy that makes plagiarism nearly impossible to commit (a measure that removes, to some extent, “temptation” and thus, to that extent, free will) and that scaffolds assignments to help novice students learn the conventions of academic citation—unless, of course, the teacher has rightly determined that doing so is in his or her best interests. (Being helpful in this way may best ensure better teacher evaluations, for example.) This brings up perhaps the most controversial point of ethical egoism, namely, its “reject[ing] all positive obligations to others” save in the event that such obligations best serve overall the egoist actor’s self-interest,” in which case such action becomes morally obligatory (73). In short, one’s positive moral obligation is entirely, from beginning to end, to

16 oneself. Taking a broader view, Harris shows that a state operating by objectivist principles might well be limited, indeed libertarian, wherein “no enforced benevolence” must obtain in the form of taxes and that all paternalism must be eschewed. In fact, “[a]ny law must be rejected that can only be justified paternalistically” (73-74). Harris also notes, however, that egoism might allow for the difference principle of John Rawls, a principle of distributive justice not congenial to libertarianism, with which objectivism is perhaps most commonly associated (74-

75).

Some may balk at Rand’s description of selfishness as a virtue, and, to be sure, the title of her famous book is deliberately provocative (vii). In the spirit of Harris’s attempt at fair summary, I reiterate Harris’s point that selfishness, on Rand’s view, is a virtue precisely because the individual who exercises it will not intrude upon another’s “equal right to pursue his or her own self-interest.” This position, then, is moral insofar as it is perfectly answerable to the necessary condition to adhere to “impartiality” (Harris 64). An egoist of this order will, as Rand frequently mentions, assign full faith and credit to another person’s free will and will permit another person to reap the consequences, good or ill, of their actions. Here follows Rand’s most salient challenge to altruism, her blanket term for any moral philosophy that lays upon the actor the duty to assist others regardless of relationship, by subsuming assistance to others as being essentially a self-determined, self-directed action. Saving a person from drowning is “morally proper,” she explains in The Virtue of Selfishness, “only when the danger to one’s own life is minimal.” Morally proper here appears to mean not merely permissible but obligatory, as in another example she states that “a man who values human life and is caught in a shipwreck, should help to save his fellow passengers (though not at the expense of his own life)” (55, emphasis added). Rand is elsewhere clear that a rescuer may lose his life in the attempt if the

17 rescuer has deemed the person essential to his or her happiness according to the rescuer’s self- determined “hierarchy of values,” having determined that life would simply not be worth living without them (52). The should in the quotation just adduced derives from a person’s value in potentia to the rescuer, and this is consonant with a “generalized good will and respect for the value of human life” (54).

At issue in emergencies, Rand continues, is not self-sacrifice, which she repudiates absolutely, but integrity: “the policy of acting in accordance with one’s values, of expressing, upholding, translating them into practical reality” (53). Rand is furthermore clear in her chapter,

“The Ethics of Emergencies,” that emergency ethics is highly qualified as being, by definition, exceptional. She defines emergency as an “unchosen, unexpected event, limited in time, that creates conditions under which human survival is impossible—such as a flood, an earthquake, a fire, a shipwreck.” In her view, “poverty, ignorance, neurosis or whatever other troubles

[people] might have” do not qualify as emergencies (54-55). According to a strict reading of

Rand, then, there are no academic or pedagogical emergencies. No teacher must offer a chance to revise a plagiarized paper on the ground that the plagiarized paper places a student’s academic standing in a precarious position. Such a position, in Rand’s words, is “part of the normal risks of existence” (55). Reading Rand a bit more loosely, however, assuming that such a state of affairs does constitute an emergency from the student’s perspective, a teacher is still not morally obligated to offer revision, involving extra work for the teacher, unless the teacher has determined that his or her own happiness as a teacher is inextricably bound up with the student’s passing the course or learning proper citation conventions.

Rand is clear that rights to property are essential if there is to be any recognition and support of human rights. As she explains, “Since material goods are produced by the mind and

18 effort of individual men [sic], and are needed to sustain their lives, if the producer does not own the result of his effort, he does not own his life.” The alternative, she claims, is reducing people to mere state-owned “chattel” (106). Rand’s objections to collectivism are well known, but in a discussion of plagiarism specifically, an objectivist ethics would very likely be opposed to many of the points of poststructuralist critique of plagiarism. Indeed, it would seem that an objectivist and a Rebecca Moore Howard, for example, could not be readily if at all brought to agree on a plagiarism policy.

Natural Law

Natural law, the next ethical theory summarized by Harris, like egoism, posits human happiness as the goal of the ethical life, but, unlike egoism, this happiness is naturally and not individually determined. This natural basis for ethics, claims Harris, endows natural law with

“an objective quality that egoism lacks” (89). Difficulties arise, Harris notes, in that this objective standard or law is neither descriptively accurate nor prescriptively effective in all cases.

Harris explains that the rules of natural law are prescriptive but, so the theory goes, universally applicable “because they are rooted in human nature itself” (90). Aquinas, whom Harris cites as most representative of the natural-law tradition, leaves room for argument when applying rules to specific cases, though other natural-law philosophers strongly emphasize the “historical dimension” to natural-law thought. These considerations aside, however, Harris emphasizes that natural law absolutely precludes skepticism and relativism. Precisely because views in specific cases diverge, however, human freedom, even within natural law, does find full expression in the ongoing search for truth (90-91).

Harris shows that, in natural law, goodness and badness are determined teleologically: something is good insofar as it fulfills its design and purpose. Since human nature does not

19 readily signify teleology in the way a pencil, car, or tomato plant (Harris’s examples) does, direct observation of humans in action realizing goals may yield highly probable conclusions about their operating nature. Harris posits this moral standard: “Those actions are right that promote the values specified by the natural inclinations of human beings” (92). Following Aquinas,

Harris lists the following values: survival, procreation, knowledge, and sociability (93). Though the first value may be said to apply to a discussion of plagiarism when educational certification is concerned (see Chapter 5), the final two values apply especially since, as often happens, condemnations of plagiarism are made on the ground that students have defaulted on knowledge, and sometimes in favor of pursuing social lives. More values than are listed, “play and aesthetic experience,” for instance, exist (Harris 93). As plagiarism is bound up with considerations of style—a matter of play and aesthetic experience—these matters deserve at least cursory mention here.

Harris continues by discussing natural law’s moral absolutism, a characteristic of its nonconsequentialist premises: natural law posits the incommensurability of life, procreation, knowledge, and sociability, so any action that would “violate” these values directly must be morally impermissible, due in part because we simply do not have enough data to know the effects of violating something of such great, indeed, infinite worth. For example, forcing mortally injured passengers overboard in a boat filled over capacity, even though it would result in saving the lives of other passengers, is impermissible according to natural law. Harris does note, however, natural law’s important qualifying principles, which hold consequences in view.

The first is the principle of forfeiture, whereby one party who threatens another’s basic value forfeits his or her own right to that basic value; the second, the principle of double effect, which provides for testing the permissibility of an action with both good and bad consequences. In

20 summary, an action that will have both good and bad consequences must satisfy the following conditions: the goal of the action must itself be obligatory or permissible; the bad effect must itself be unavoidable; the bad effect must not be a necessary condition for performing the otherwise morally permissible action; and, finally, the good and bad effects enjoy roughly equivalent importance. This test also includes the test between intention and action, vital in natural-law reasoning (93-99).

Natural law is typically negative in its evaluations and pronouncements because, Harris explains, it is quite clear when one violates a basic value but not always so clear when one fails to promote one. Although there are four basic values agreed to by natural law theorists, the issues of life and procreation receive the most attention, evidenced by frequent discussions of suicide, abortion, birth control. Harris does note, however, that one may violate others’ fundamental values of knowledge by stifling curiosity in children as well as lying. People also have a duty to nurture these basic values in themselves. According to natural-law theory, the state, unlike that of the libertarian state friendly to an egoist position, must be structured in such a way as to foster these values in its citizens and so “enforce natural-law morality” (100-06).

Aquinas, in his “Treatise on Law” from the Summa Theologiae, is clear that whereas virtue can be privately counseled but never mandated, the purpose of law, for the common good, is to encourage virtue and to punish the ill-disposed, whom neither nature, nor parental influence, custom, nor divine influence has swayed. If humans employ their naturally bestowed reason properly, they reach warranted conclusions about conduct and attain the goods to which nature also inclines them. Nature, essentially, is always impelling humanity to realizing the good.

Thomist tradition holds that God’s eternal law creates natural law, to which human laws must properly be subordinate. “Rational creatures,” explains Aquinas, “participate in eternal reason in

21 that they have a natural inclination to their proper ends and actions” (46). The ends to which humanity is naturally inclined include those already mentioned by Harris: life, procreation, knowledge, and sociability. Failure to educate, on Aquinas’ view, would constitute not only the lack of a good but a positive evil.

Implementing human law will help curb these evils. Humanity arrives at human law through the use of reason to which nature “directs” him (Harris 92). Writes Aquinas: “all the things to which man has a natural inclination are naturally apprehended by the reason as good and therefore as objects to be pursued, and their opposite evils to be avoided. Therefore the order of the precepts of the natural law follows the order of our natural inclinations” (49). As it may be objected that a law which sanctions the natural inclinations is problematic in that different people are differently inclined, Aquinas argues in anticipation that since the use of reason is a natural inclination as is anything else, reason may arbitrate where passion or ambition would lead astray. It is in this context that Aquinas explains, moreover, that practical reason begins from universal principles but which, when applied, lead to different conclusions depending on the circumstances. His example is that while it is generally right and proper to repay a loan, it would be morally wrong to repay a loan if it effectively amounts to financing war against one’s own country (50-1). As already noted, Harris explains that in practical moral judgments the possibility for error increases as specifics come into view (90).

The idea of private property, essential to the discussion of plagiarism (as well as its related issue of copyright), may be accounted for in Thomist thought as an addition to the already existing natural law. Aquinas does not allow that communal property is a part of natural law except in the sense that private property must be constituted by rational human invention.

Because private property, however, has been deemed useful by human beings exercising their

22 rational faculties, Aquinas defines it as an addition, not an alteration, to natural law (52).

Additionally, Aquinas explains how custom “obtains the force of law” because custom is evidence of the exercise of a rational will: “In this sense custom has the power of law, it abolishes law, and it acts as the interpreter of law” (57). How custom in academic writing conventions may be viewed as the exercise of reason in accordance with natural law will not be explored; however, it will be briefly considered how current theories of writing have been applied in ways consonant with natural law to argue the moral inappropriateness of requiring certain citation conventions and punishing students for not following them.

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism, Harris explains, marks a kind of compromise between the objectivism of

Ayn Rand and the altruism she so roundly condemns: because it assigns equal value to every human being, utilitarianism warrants an actor’s equal consideration of both his or her own happiness as well as that of others. Moreover, it is “probably the basic moral philosophy of most nonreligious humanists today” (121). As such, it may be supposed likely to surface, and surface often, in academic discussions of plagiarism. For utilitarians, all values, explains Harris, find root in human existence, and the utility—happiness or pleasure, or, as Harris terms it,

“preference satisfaction”—though difficult to define to universal satisfaction even among professional utilitarian philosophers, of those implicated by decisions and actions must arbitrate all moral decisions. Harris’s moral standard for utilitarianism runs as follows: “Those actions (or moral rules) are right that produce the most utility, or at least as much utility as any other actions

(or rules)” (122). Harris notes that the view of “most utilitarians” to distribute the greatest number of happiness units when justice, defined as equal distribution, must be satisfied, makes application of the utilitarian standard problematic (124). Intellectual pleasures, for Mill, rank

23 higher than those pleasures human beings have in common with animals. Harris here recalls

Mill’s famous pronouncement that an unhappy Socrates beats a blissful fool any day (122).

More immediate to my purposes, Harris considers the example of a student who asks for the addition of ten points to his final grade on the (true) grounds that his graduation and his ability to provide for his family hang in the balance (126). While most people would likely consider this an instance of fallacious special pleading, Harris observes that act and rule utilitarians would be divided on the issue. An act utilitarian would decide that, given that (a) the student will indeed be able to provide for his family, (b) other students will be graded by the normal standards, and (c) the act will be never be known to anyone except the teacher and the student making the request, then, notwithstanding some possibly unpleasant feelings arising from the professor’s and student’s knowledge of having awarded and received an unearned grade, this action is perfectly defensible for act utilitarians (127). The ethical standard assumed in such case is entirely situational (see also Chapter 5 in the section “Mandatory Revision”). Harris goes on to show how, most likely, a rule utilitarian would reason differently, since to operate by the assumption, “Professors should assign grades according to the needs of students,” brings on fairly obviously unwelcome results. Of the two views, Harris clearly sides with rule utilitarianism as the more generally plausible, and he explains that, to be testable, all rules by which rule utilitarians operate must satisfy three conditions: “(1) the rule should describe all the features of the action that are relevant from a utilitarian standpoint; (2) the rule should not include features that are morally irrelevant; (3) the rule should be as broad and inclusive as possible, without leaving out morally relevant features” (134).

Harris is keen to underscore the consequentialist nature of utilitarianism to a degree he does not when discussing egoism/objectivism. When any two acts have the same demonstrable

24 outcomes, Harris notes, it is morally indifferent from a utilitarian perspective which of the two actions one takes, a feature not at all shared by natural law (135-36). To consider, say, plagiarism-detection software for the moment, it does not matter from a utilitarian perspective whether a teacher uses it or not so long it is agreed that plagiarism-free papers are best for all involved and if plagiarism-detection software arguably leads to realizing the higher pleasures of intellectual engagement.

While Harris notes utilitarianism’s roots in Jeremy Bentham’s writings, I here limit myself to the theory as explicated in John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism. Like Rand, Mill contends that “happiness is the sole end of human action, and the promotion of it the test by which to judge of all human conduct; from whence it follows that it must be the criterion of morality, since a part is included in the whole” (273). Here, however, Rand and Mill part ways, for Mill’s

Greatest Happiness Principle, which he also calls Utility, directs the moral imperative to human happiness away from any single individual and on to society as a whole: this principle “holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness” (239).

In his concluding chapter, “On the Connexion Between Justice and Utility,” Mill discusses at some length the complicated morality of punishment. For some, Mill observes, punishment to make an example of the punished is immoral because the punished has not given consent for this treatment. For others, punishment justified on the grounds that it is conducive to the punished’s welfare amounts to “despotism”—today commentators might also charge

“paternalism.” For still others, punishment is wrong because a person cannot be held responsible for the character to which education and environment have predisposed him. Mill suggests that both free will, whereby the last argument is refuted, and the idea of a social contract, often

25 thought sufficient to refute the first two objections, are both convenient fictions and, to be sure,

“very uncertain presumptions” by which the business of the courts is to be carried out. Still more powerful than any other justification for punishment, Mill notes, is the Judeo-Christian principle of the lex talionis, which Mill believes has a rather strong private appeal even where public policy has moved very much beyond it (293). For deciding between these solutions, Mill offers but one criterion: “Social utility alone can decide the preference” (294).

Respect for Persons (Kantianism)

The ethical tradition called respect of persons, though closely aligned with Kant, is not to be completely identified with Kant’s writings; indeed, Harris acknowledges his debt to but insists he is “not giving an exposition of Kant” (155). For convenience’s sake as well as for its association with Kant, however, I will refer to the theory throughout simply as Kantianism.

Rooted in Hebrew-Christian and Stoic philosophy, Kantianism insists on each person’s equal inherent dignity that precludes another’s being used as merely as a means. Harris identifies two principles in operation with this moral reasoning, the universalization principle and the means- ends principle. Harris formulates the standard for the first as follows: “An action is right if you can consent to everyone’s adopting the moral rule presupposed by the action” (155), a statement students of ethics will readily recognize as Kant’s categorical imperative. An important resemblance between rule utilitarianism and the categorical imperative here may be noted in that in respect to both one must ferret out the operating assumption behind an action before that action’s morality may properly be judged. What Harris calls the self-defeating test, applied to the rule, will yield the first important evaluation. Adducing Kant’s own (famous) example of using a false promise of repayment to obtain a loan, Harris shows how such an action’s rule fails the self-defeating test: because everyone’s doing the same thing would get in the way of one’s

26 doing so, no one could wish this rule’s universal adoption. Applying this test often proves difficult in that it involves, as with rule utilitarianism, finding the happy medium between an overly general and overly specific formulation.

The second principle, the means-end principle, is useful when the universalization principle can be of no real assistance: “Those actions are right that treat human beings, whether you or another person, as an end and not simply as a means” (160). Human beings, as conscious moral agents, are self-determining agents who act for themselves. Enslavement on this view is morally impermissible because it sets this moral agency at naught. Harris points out, however, the important qualification stated by the phrase “simply as a means”: people must treat people as means to some degree, as when students “use” professors as means to their life goals (160).

Presumably, this same necessary concession, to call it that, applies to professors who “use” students as means to earning a livelihood. So long as the “humanity” of the parties involved remains in respectful view, Harris says, no moral infringement has been committed (160). These tenets of respect of persons become especially important when critics allege that plagiarism- detection software companies “exploit” students—i.e., use them as a means—a view that may or may not consider all morally relevant factors.

Moral agency, explains Harris, requires freedom from coercion and violence; even consent, when “given” under compulsion, is not an act of free moral will (161). Critics may reasonably raise the question, on a Kantian view, whether students who give their consent to plagiarism-detection software do so under compulsion, or whether, if so, such compulsion is warranted. Harris also speaks of the morally necessary condition of “nonsubstractive goods,” that is, goods above and beyond basic goods (food, clothing, shelter) without which goal- fulfillment is impossible. Rights to privacy, among other things, ranks among these goods (161),

27 and it is precisely the right to privacy that some critics of plagiarism-detection software allege is being violated. Character virtues and “owning property, having a sense of well-being and self- respect, and being treated in a nondiscriminatory way” all rank among the so-called “additive goods” required for realizing still higher personal goals (161-62). Here again, critics of plagiarism-detection software allege that institutions and teachers using such technology create toxic, accusatory atmospheres for students, presuming them guilty before they have had even the chance to commit an academic infraction. (See Chapter 4 in the section “The Threat of Getting

Caught.”)

Two more principles, those of forfeiture and equality, here insist on their relevance. As for natural law, for respect of persons the principle of forfeiture is an important qualifier: those who impinge on the freedom of others yield, to a certain extent, their rights to freedom.

According to the principle of equality, all actors must be afforded equal consideration in view of certain unavoidable violations to freedom. For example, a doctor asked to perform sterilization may refuse on the grounds of conscience; though the patient may be sorely inconvenienced, this obstacle cannot tip the scales when the doctor’s conscience hangs in the balance (164). Harris recommends two tests, a positive and a negative, for testing the moral worth of an action. They are, in order, “Does the action override my own or others’ freedom or well-being?” and “Does the action assist oneself (or others, in certain circumstances) in achieving one’s own (or others’) freedom and well-being?” (164-65). It is in applying the second test, Harris explains, that a form of “weak paternalism,” whereby one overrides, to preserve freedom in the long run, another’s self-determination in the short run, may be justified to guide and protect those who have not matured intellectually (166). Measurements to prevent and/or detect plagiarism, such as so- called plagiarism-proof assignments and detection software, when viewed as products of a weak

28 paternalism, may arguably be in consonance with the preservation of freedoms and self- determination in the long term as intended by the positive test. Harris goes on to explain that the positive test may be best applied when those parties involved are in “a special relationship of moral obligation,” and when assistance poses little risk to the one offering assistance. At this point Harris turns to the stand-by example of saving a drowning person. Not to save a drowning person crying for help in no way violates his or her freedom (the negative test), but it does not help another to realize his or her goals (the positive test) and so fails (168).

Briefly summarized, one’s duties to self and others involves preserving each person’s status as an end, even when “using” another as a means. By the same logic, the state must implement and enforce those policies that show respect for the fundamental dignity of all people and in no way use people as mere ends to others’ goals, but Harris offers no guidance more than that on whether a state would be left- or right-leaning in following these principles (172-73).

A moment’s pause to consider Kant’s rationale for approaching duty will prove worthwhile, precisely since duty, according to Kant, trumps emotion entirely. In his

Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals, Kant claims that a good will, “regarded for itself, is to be valued incomparably higher than all that could merely be brought about by it in favor of some inclination.” By this standard, the best of intentions, though completely ineffectual, “would still shine by itself” and merit all praise that may be due something of true moral worth. Fully aware that this might rankle utilitarian sensibilities, Kant states plainly that, in his evaluation, “no allowance is made for any usefulness” (8), and it is this statement that places his theory squarely in the deontological or rule-based category. All that matters for moral evaluation is this good will. For Kant, it is even morally insufficient that an action be performed in accordance with duty—i.e., that one simply performs the action duty demands. Rather, the action must be done

“from duty,” i.e., because it is one’s duty and for no other reason. Acting on this motive alone secures the worth of an action. According to Kant, then, a person acting beneficently toward fellow creatures because he simply enjoys being kind merits no moral commendation, even if this disposition is praiseworthy for its “agreeable” quality. By contrast, if a person of no warmth of humanity acts kindly toward those for whom he has no sympathy, yet acts because he has a respect for duty, this person, unfeeling as he is, has earned moral commendation. Worse people could be found, Kant says, than the person whose coldness of temper inures them to their own and others’ suffering and yet who can “find within himself a source from which to give himself a far higher worth than what a mere good-natured temperament might have” (12). It is this superlative importance of the duty-motive in Kant’s theory that has led some to think his morality too cerebral and even uncongenial if not inimical to pleasure (e.g., Lewis, “Weight”).

Essential to Kant’s moral vision—and as Harris’s summary would suggest—is a

“kingdom of ends.” This “kingdom,” he explains, is a “systematic union of various rational beings through common laws.” He continues that “all rational beings stand under the law that each of them is to treat himself and all others never merely as means but always at the same time as ends in themselves” (41, italics in original). Whereas everything in this ideal kingdom has value, not all things can have price: persons, not things, have an immeasurable, unquantifiable

“dignity” (41-42).

Kant’s moral theory, it should be noted, presupposes autonomy of the will, though it cannot be readily accounted for, he admits, in his theory. His famous distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal world partially explains this, so it is worth noting that freedom of the will has a place within a specific epistemology, however unaccountable it may be. For Kant, it is enough to say that, in the phenomenal world of objects, of which the human body is a part, a

30 whole host of influences and inducements acts upon the body, demonstrating a heteronomy of the will that well anticipates the postmodern insistence on the fragmentation of the subject. In the noumenal world, however, autonomy reigns supreme. Even a scoundrel’s wish to improve his moral standing spurred by his witnessing and admiring some good moral example is some evidence, Kant claims, of this reasonable will’s answerability to the categorical imperative, which, to repeat, is to do nothing you would not at the same time wish were a universal law for all rational beings.

Kant’s moral theory becomes particularly relevant in discussions of the prevention and punishment of plagiarism. Whether instructors and institutions treat students as a kingdom of ends or whether they are treated as instruments of the institution appears as a salient point of critique. Moral agency in a Kantian view, explains Harris, presupposes both “voluntariness” as well as “well-being—namely, the goods necessary for carrying out one’s freely chosen purposes.” Harris notes consent is of no moral worth if no real freedom of choice exists (161); whether students enjoy truly free choice, for example, to submit their papers to Turnitin.com, for which students must click their legally binding consent to have their papers assimilated into a permanent database owned by a for-profit company, is one of the ethical issues involved in plagiarism prevention and detection. So, too, is the question of voluntary or non-voluntary plagiarism.

Virtue Ethics and Care Ethics

Virtue ethics is concerned with “being a certain kind of person or having a certain type of character,” not with following rules. Turning its eye to those excellences of character that enable moral living, or virtues, and those characteristics that enable the opposite, or vices; virtue ethics goes back to the “most important work in ancient moral philosophy,” Aristotle’s Nicomachean

Ethics (194). Harris extends his treatment of virtue ethics, however, to include the ethics of care as explained by Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice.

The moral standard for virtue ethics may be formulated in this way: “An action is right if and only if it is what a virtuous person would do in the circumstances” (194). As Harris explains, four advantages to virtue ethics over rule-based ethics commend themselves. The first is that in asking people to take ethical cues from a model person, virtue ethics becomes morality with shoes on, that is, “concrete and realistic” and, to be sure, “closer to the way we actually think about troubling moral issues.” Second, virtue ethics allows us assignations for evaluating people, and Harris notes the widespread use of “the language of virtues and vices” for just this purpose (194). I would here add that virtue ethics does license some quite marked vocabulary.

While not using it for every person who commits actions judged as bad, Aristotle throughout the

Ethics does not shy away from using terms such as “bad person.”

Harris pays some attention to this moral theory’s tendency to assign strong labels not so much to actions but to characters when he provides the example of Michael, who lies to his boss,

Al, about blowing the whistle on him. Michael, after “looking in the mirror and saying to

[himself], ‘You are a coward and a liar,’” eventually admits to his boss that he had been the one who reported Al’s malfeasance (192). Virtue ethics, Harris notes, demands that the self- reflective, rather than inquiring into matters of duty or utility, should ask one rather simple question: “What sort of person do I want to be?” (195). A person who wishes to be generous, on this view, ought not to inquire into whether utility or duty demands whether giving to charity is required, but whether giving to charity is the sort of thing a generous person would do. In an academic context, students would have to ask themselves whether they wish to be the kinds of students who willingly commit plagiarism to acquire academic credit, a person a virtue ethicist

32 would label a “plagiarist,” and teachers must ask themselves whether they wish to be the kind of teacher who defines, prevents and penalizes plagiarism in particular ways. Some teachers abominate the idea of becoming a “cop,” for example. Such statements are not necessarily slights on police but rather ways of saying that actions befitting a police officer are in no way proper to a teacher, or, at least, that a cop-like teacher is not the sort of teacher one wants to be.

Third, virtue ethics explains the moral phenomena of acts of supererogation in terms of a person living out their desirable character. Fourthly, emphasis on different virtues goes hand in hand with different lifestyles. Harris explains that self-discipline is a necessary virtue for a scientist, whereas a social worker will require virtues such as care and empathy. One conclusion to derive from this would be that certain roles dictate the necessity of certain virtues and may even exclude others. Alasdair MacIntyre corroborates: “The unity of the notion of an aretê resides […] in the concept of that which enables a man to discharge his role” (After 127).

Virtues require continual exercise for one to qualify for virtuous character, and character, once formed, is difficult to change (Harris 196). It might be added that actions in themselves derive their worth from their place in the broader, weightier project of “building character,” and Harris explains that the term “second nature” acquires considerable moral significance here because moral exercise can instill what nature does not. Notably, for virtue ethics, school and the public arena as well as home are proper sites for moral education (196).

Requirements for character run deep. With proper exercise, acting virtuously yields a concomitant pleasure. Attitude may not be everything, but it is essential; a person who does a good action but resents having to perform it cannot be properly said to be virtuous (196-67).

MacIntyre makes the point succinctly: “Moral education is an ‘éducation sentimentale’” (After

149). Virtue in precisely this way becomes its own reward when the person seeking to do well

33 seeks it for the “goods internal” rather than those “goods external and contingently attached”

(188). Because virtue ethicists depend on models, detailed “virtue portraits” become necessary

(Harris 197). Gordon Marino provides a roughly contemporary example of reliance on the virtue portrait in observing the “What Would Jesus Do” bracelets (Marino 44).

Harris continues with Aristotle’s (admittedly male-centered) virtue portrait of the magnanimous man. Ever confident and self-assured of his being entirely deserving, he is for all that neither arrogant toward inferiors nor obsequious to his betters, and he remains even- tempered at all times. Among his excellences are things such as “slow movements, a deep voice, and calm speech, for he is not in a hurry.” Finding fault with this portrait is possible, Harris acknowledges, even while seeming to commend as admirable people of both sexes possessed of

“a certain aristocratic bearing and nobility about them that is not arrogant” (198). The virtues exhibited and exercised by such noble characters exist as a golden mean between two vices.

Courage, for example, is the mean between cowardice on the one hand and rashness on the other; practical wisdom (phronesis) aids the virtuous person in deciding on the golden mean in most situations. Notably, “the young cannot be expected to have it to the same degree” as the more experienced (200).

Friendship ought to exist between people who are attracted by the virtues they find in each other. Aristotle acknowledges human beings’ natural sociability and deems friendship the

“the greatest external good.” In the universal pursuit of happiness (eudaimonia), or “flourishing in accordance with virtue,” friendship may be a means to this end. Luck, however, may make mincemeat of best laid plans, putting the happy life beyond the reach of some. Aristotle, of course, offers no solution to this luck (201-02). Critics of Aristotle may here introduce the

34 accidents of social, political, and economic conditions as they impinge on the lives of those who feel themselves at the mercy of outside forces.

In sharp contrast to the aristocratic picture Aristotle paints, Harris also offers Carol

Gilligan’s In a Different Voice, which posits characteristic and equally valuable differences between men’s and women’s moral reasoning. Rights and rules, Gilligan maintains, are the basis of men’s moral reasoning; relationships form the bedrock of women’s. This ethics of care asserts a primacy of interdependence over independence. Nel Noddings, Harris explains, further develops Gilligan’s ideas, demanding that people recall moments when they have given or received care arising from the naturally determined matrix of a mother and child, for example, to overcome self-involvement in relieving the suffering of others. Noddings rejects the Kantian view that natural sympathy has no moral value, and she sees it as evidence of a unwarranted mind/body split, and she furthermore states that “separatist thinking” resulting in clearly drawn boundaries between us and them are morally corrosive (qtd. in Harris 206).

At this point Harris emphasizes that no list of virtues can be exhaustive or universally recognized, even while noting an overlap between Aristotelian virtue ethics and the ethics of care as explained by Gilligan and Noddings. Such “virtue pluralism,” he says, prompts questions about cultivating role-specific virtues, as in a career, for example. While the virtues of care and

“a strong sense of justice” may benefit physicians and lawyers respectively (208), it remains the case that some professions in flux may experience, or even suffer from, a lack of definition.

Perhaps in partial answer to this problem, Harris observes that virtues may conflict and that a hierarchy of rights and virtues may need to be erected to handle such situations. Where such proposed hierarchies may not satisfy all, Harris invokes again the arbitrating authority of

Aristotle’s practical wisdom (208).

Duties to self include cultivating “those virtues that would support our own chosen vocation and lifestyle,” once again emphasizing that virtues are hierarchically organized relative to social roles. For Aristotelians specifically, exercising practical wisdom is at a premium; for care ethicists, choosing to be empathetic and learning to facilitate interpersonal dialogue are primary virtues. Self-realization, a lifelong goal, must guide one’s self-directed duties.

Interestingly, Harris notes that some stages of life call for certain virtues more than others: receptivity in childhood, for example, and openness in adolescence (211). The implications for education in childhood and late adolescence here suggest themselves. Duties to others include, largely, encouraging virtue in others, through friendship, example, and painting clear virtue portraits. According to the view of David Norton, a “developmental democracy” is the state best suited to cultivating the virtues in its citizens, where they must assume personal responsibility for their roles in civic affairs. Rights guaranteeing education and self-determination are paramount

(Harris 213). Though a subset of virtue ethics, for clarity I will from this point refer to ethics of care simply as ethics of care or care ethics, and Aristotelian ethics as virtue ethics.

Metaphor

Moral statements gain and maintain currency not necessarily because of but certainly always in conjunction with powerful metaphors. As the analysis will later show, metaphorical construals of textual and pedagogical practices are therefore correlative with moral attitudes toward plagiarism, so a modest working theory of metaphor will inform this study.

I. A. Richards’ 1936 Philosophy of Rhetoric provides at least one important theoretical insight to this study: in contradistinction from Aristotle’s claim that metaphor is an ornament to language, metaphor is rather “the omnipresent principle of all [language’s] free action” (90). Richards continues:

In philosophy, above all, we can take no step safely without an unrelaxing

awareness of the metaphors we, and our audience, may be employing; and though

we may pretend to eschew them, we can attempt to do so only by detecting them.

And this is the more true, the more severe and abstract the philosophy is. As it

grows more abstract we think increasingly by means of metaphors that we profess

not to be relying on. The metaphors we are avoiding steer our thought as much as

those we accept. (92)

To the end of turning rhetoric into a more “discussable science” (94), Richards proposes as much overdue the terms tenor, or the “underlying idea or principle subject” and the vehicle, or the “figure.” Together, these two form the metaphor (96-7). For example, in the first two lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet XVIII, the metaphor at once proposed and rejected unites the beauty and temper of the beloved, the tenor, and “a summer’s day,” the proposed but rejected vehicle.

The speaker proceeds to reject the metaphor because the “darling buds of May,” vehicle to the tenor of the beloved’s beauty, can be shaken by rough winds, itself vehicle to the tenor of life’s changes. “Summer’s lease” is “too short” to warrant the comparison—especially because he proposes to immortalize the beloved’s beauty in the poem’s “eternal lines”—so the relationship between vehicle and tenor, the duration of the beloved’s beauty, is found wanting. In Richards’s terms, then, a metaphor is a failed metaphor if the tenor and the vehicle are ill matched. Sonnet

XVIII becomes a proving ground for a metaphor, really an extended analogy in this instance, made somewhat more “discussable” by the addition of Richards’ terms. Throughout succeeding chapters, I will draw explicit attention to the vehicles and tenors of those metaphors that seem to me to warrant interrogation.

Eugene F. Miller’s 1979 “Metaphor and Political Knowledge” examines the role of metaphors in political discourse and three different frameworks for explaining how metaphors work: the verificationist, constitutivist, and—a term of his own coining—the manifestationist.

The first two Miller finds wanting, in that the first does not account for how new political realities can be created by metaphors, while the second does not readily allow that political reality is a fact-riddled field that can be verified as other scientific facts, independent of the model through which they are viewed. A manifestationist view, Miller argues, brings out the best of both worlds to political life, where metaphors are powerfully in play and are simply unavoidable (162). Miller shows how constitutivist views of metaphor, as embraced by Lakoff and Johnson, still have value for those who may not hold that reality is entirely constituted by language.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s classic Metaphors We Live By provides valuable insight for this study consonant with Richards: that metaphor, far from being mere ornamentation and stylistic flair, is inextricable, indeed foundational to language itself. Metaphor constitutes reality itself in that conceptualization and action are animated by understanding rooted in metaphor. The all-encompassing importance of metaphor they make plain: “We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of a metaphor” (158). Lakoff and Johnson’s deeply incisive, comprehensive examination of how this is evident in language of course extends even to moral evaluations. As they write, “our values are not independent but must form a coherent system with the metaphorical concepts we live by” (22).

Lakoff’s more recent Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, takes his analysis a step further into moral judgments and ongoing struggle of politics. He shows, with

38 considerable force, that the reason conservatives and liberals are so often mutually unintelligible and consistently good at earning the pronounced moral censure of the other is that they reason from fundamentally different metaphorical “clusters.” Political morality, he says, is rooted in the idea that the nation is a metaphorical family; just who should be leading that family divides conservatives and liberals, both who nominate two strikingly different figures. For conservatives, that figure is the Strict Father, ready to watch closely over his children and to mete out punishments for violating hard-and-fast rules in order to teach morally essential self- reliance. Liberals, on the other hand, embrace the Nurturant Parent, who teach self-care so that others may enjoy fulfilling, happy interpersonal relationships. This sort of happiness, says

Lakoff, is the object of Nurturant Parent morality. Lakoff does assert that many academics, while often politically liberal, often embrace a Strict Father morality in the academy.

Applications to the writing classroom as well as to what to do with plagiarism could hardly be plainer: the Strict Father, in a mixed academy, is very much under attack by a Nurturant Parent, who in much scholarship seems on the ascendant. Making these categories suitable to the proposed analysis will entail showing just how each fits in with the five moral theories herein considered.

Lakoff’s book devotes a chapter to “Crime and the Death Penalty.” His analysis can be used to illustrate why, for example, Rebecca Moore Howard’s challenge to plagiarism as an academic crime warranting the academic death penalty resonates so much with a scholarship rooted in a Nurturant Parent model. To a morality rooted in this model, the very idea of an academic “death penalty” is necessarily repugnant. Howard’s fairly successful framing of plagiarism using the death-penalty metaphor thereby invokes progressive moral condemnation and transfers it to Strict Father-like responses to plagiarism. Is expulsion from the academy for

39 plagiarism, in Lakoff’s terms, an “abuse of state power” (206)—or simply of institutional power when the education is privately funded? As divisive as the death penalty is, Lakoff points to the larger issue: “Arguments against the death penalty […] are about how the state should be conceptualized and how it should function in general”—as a Strict Father or Nurturant Parent

(209). A more complete discussion of this point will be found in Chapter 5, “Punishment and

Response.”

Ernesto Grassi’s Rhetoric as Philosophy, particularly Chapter 2, “Rhetoric and

Philosophy,” makes the convincing case that, despite a traditional separation, philosophy and rhetoric each are part of the other necessarily. A certain ingenium, or ingenious insight into the world, accounts for human capacity to impose order on the world by means of analogy-making imagination. Grassi points out that, very possibly, metaphor lies at the root of all logical deductions, so that first principles have their origins precisely in human ingenuity. It would seem to follow that human morality, where constrained by metaphor, is so far rooted in ingenium. From this it also follows that new, arresting metaphors have the potential to reconstruct and redirect moral sentiment.

Andras Sandor’s 1986 “Metaphor and Belief” takes an anthropological approach to the study of metaphor. He argues that ethnocentrism is often at work in anthropological study where metaphors are said to be in operation where the people’s utterances are taken to be metaphor by the anthropologist but a literal statement by those who made it. Sandor explains that modern anthropologists may be misled by their own worldviews to construe a statement as metaphorical because, for them, the only way to assimilate such a statement without “absurdity” is to call it metaphorical. Sandor also reminds that the word “is” need not be taken as a statement of identification; it can denote identity, but also membership in a class, entailment, and existence

(109). The form of the utterance, what he calls the verbal form, can be of no necessary help either way. His example, “Sally is a block of ice,” may be interpreted metaphorically—Sally is unemotional—or literally—Sally is the name given to a block of ice. The content of

“predication,” he says, must be determined by the context of the utterance, a context that must include the worldview of the speaker. Sandor’s warning is well taken. Writers in the area of plagiarism often allege that plagiarism is metaphorically stealing, and that this metaphor is worth exploring for its metaphorical import and its revealing evidence about the worldview of those who make it. However, it may well worth be considering that “plagiarism is stealing” may have more than a simple metaphorical intent on the part of those making the statement.

James Seitz’s 1991 “Composition’s Misunderstanding of Metaphor” is his castigation of the field of composition for not appreciating and revising its understanding of metaphor as permeating language. His criticisms may be largely tardy, but a reminder is salutary. Seitz’s contention is that it will not do to teach metaphor as ornament to be used or not at will; rather, he maintains that it is misguided to suppose metaphor can be gotten away from. One statement, of whose metaphorical nature Seitz cannot be unaware, is particularly striking: “we cannot catch up to the speed of figuration nor somehow hold it still with literal language” (290). Yet we must try. Since metaphor is inescapable and the very “ground” of even everyday discourse, Seitz asks that we listen carefully to the metaphors students use—or that control—their speech as clues to their “insight” (italics in original). This suggests affinity with Grassi’s ingenium as the ground of metaphorical understanding as well as with Lakoff’s view that morality is metaphorically constrained.

Like Sandor, Richard Sheehan in his 1999 “Metaphor as Hermeneutic” states that it is not the form of the metaphor but how it is used in context that determines whether it is a metaphor.

Sheehan in this article has no truck with the inner workings of metaphor, a domain he assigns to cognitive psychologists and linguists. His attention instead is on how “metaphors are used to urge us toward further invention of meaning as we play with the unexpected connectives to which metaphors draw our attention.” On a rhetorical view of metaphor, then, the analysis is pragmatic and with an eye to metaphor’s generative properties. He contends that a metaphor’s significance “is in the eye of the beholder” and that a reader must locate his or her interpretation

“within a contextual narrative” (54). Sheehan explains the meaning-making process with metaphor in three major steps. First, the interpreter identifies that a metaphor is being used because the interpreter cannot accept the literal meaning without, at the same time, allowing for

“contradiction or absurdity” in the narrative already in play (62). Here Sheehan notes what

Sandor notes, in that what is taken as contradiction or absurdity is context-dependent and revealing of the worldview of the interpreter—not necessarily the speaker.

Second, Sheehan continues, the interpreter “invents a meaning, or narrative, that brings the metaphor into coherence with the overall contextual narrative.” Here Sheehan acknowledges that both interpreter and speaker may inhabit different narratives and so construe the verbal form differently. For example, he says, a corporate official who says the company is a “family” may spark different understandings of the company in the speaker and the interpreter’s minds relative to their respective understandings of family (59). Third, the interpreter in the narration stage, in which the metaphor may find its place in the overarching metanarrative of the culture, as “time as money” has become so assimilated into our narrative that the metaphor is hardly noticeable as a metaphor. At this point, Sheehan says, the narrative becomes “dead”—and a cultural “theme” at the same time—though it may be “revived” if an interpreter were to point out its metaphorical status (identifies it) and thus begin the process of invention all over again (61-2).

The interpretive role assumed on the part of the person using and interacting with the metaphor cannot be ignored. Metaphors compel, but do not determine, conclusions. For example, plagiarism as stealing—if it is “just” a metaphor—compels us to the conclusion that misattribution must be punished. As More’s Utopia remind us, however, stealing itself does not always warrant extreme punitive measures, especially if, as Raphael Hythloday there argues, institutions do in fact create the very criminals they later punish. We will see more on this point in Chapter 3.

I wish to underscore the role of metaphor here with some emphasis because, to recall

Richards’s terms, the tenor is often the proposition one wishes to be accepted, albeit cloaked, as it were, within the vehicle. To put it metaphorically, the vehicle is the Trojan horse: once welcomed inside on account of its attractiveness, the tenor can, in a way, come inside and do its potentially destructive work. I am by no means saying that all metaphors are insidious; I am saying, however, that the process of inferring the tenor from the vehicle can present potential problems if the vehicle is not first thoroughly examined.

Plagiarism

Before 1995

Glances into the past show how logics for approaching and “remedying” the problem of plagiarism can be instructive in that it allows us to see how finite our approaches—definitionally, preventatively, and responsively—really are. The following articles selected for review will show evidence suggestive not only of trends in moral orthodoxies, but also for how very little has changed, even with the entrance of poststructuralist challenges to common-sense views about language, originality, and textuality.

This review begins two centuries ago with “On Originality and Plagiarism,” a highly instructive, enlightening 1813 letter to the editor of The Belfast Monthly Magazine from a practically anonymous “S. E.” defending an equally anonymous poet (perhaps S. E. him- or herself?) from the castigations of readers incensed by the poet’s plagiarism. A bit remarkably, the author rehearses several arguments, some compelling and some sophistic, for mitigating charges of plagiarism widely known and used today. Pared down, S. E.’s argument is that, first, originality is lacking among more than writers—doctors, teachers, lawyers, small-town editors— and, second, that everybody does it (even Vergil did it!), a fact that does not excuse the action but should, says S. E., give critics pause to consider why they bother to pick on one plagiarist.

The argument that the same principle applies when doctors follow predecessors’ tried- and-true procedures and methods to a tee and when poets write is fallacious on its face.

Moreover, doctors are not primarily praised for their being brilliant improvisers, but for their being well trained. More to the point might be S. E.’s comparison to teachers who give lectures based on the thoughts and findings of others without attribution—a question of pedagogical inconsistency that continues to be raised (see Howard, Standing). An objection can be made to this, too, however: the point of producing poetry may well be, as Pope famously suggested, to say with extraordinary grace what everyone has already thought, only a bit more prosaically (see

Rose 76), whereas teachers can legitimately be praised for breadth and depth of reading, presentation style, and, according to some, engaging students. Even if the school-master has, as

S. E. claims, “stolen from the key and the translation,” it might be replied that students who got the wrong idea of their teachers’ “genius and erudition” cannot lay their misimpression at the lectern’s feet. The teacher was, as Fish might put it, simply “doing his job” (Save 18).

Bertha M. Kuhn’s “Perspective on Plagiarism” from a 1957 College Composition and

Communication is an earlier example of what I call the Ameliorist pedagogical approach to plagiarism, that is, it exemplifies the pedagogical imperative and, indeed, imperiously mandatory injunction always to think the best of students. Accusing students of plagiarism for what today might be called patchwriting, Kuhn suggests, is a rookie mistake. In place of failing the paper outright, she recommends going the extra mile in one-on-one conferences to discuss note taking and summary and thereby, in her words, win the student’s cooperation. Throughout her brief article, Kuhn rounds up several of the usual suspects besides dishonesty that might well account for students’ plagiarism, and she puts a heavy burden of proof on instructors to protect students from any unnecessarily ill effects of academic failure and, she adds—citing a reason fairly uncommonly articulated today—to shield teachers, when reflection and real maturity do finally after years set in, from painful memories of acting foolishly. This final reason is the note on which Kuhn ends her piece, giving her appeal to teachers for their own sake a certain recency effect and noteworthy emphasis. Additionally, she fully acknowledges dishonesty among students but insists it is rare; to make her point, she employs the following analogy, which may be notated as follows: business man : instructor : : bad check : plagiarized paper.

Just over a year later, Leo Hamalian in his 1959 “Plagiarism: Suggestions for Its Cure and Prevention” piled on more advice. Saying in a mixed metaphor that only the unfailing, unflagging single-mindedness of the “bloodhound-watchdog” will totally eradicate classroom plagiarism—and rejecting the impractical idea—Hamalian goes on to explain several causes for student plagiarism and offer his more salutary recommendations. In order, they are bad time management and last-minute desperation, which can be mitigated by the “cheerful” offer of a no- penalty extension (suggestive evidence that it was not then a common practice); tedium, relieved

45 by student-proposed and teacher-negotiated assignments; and unteachability in “drifters,” solvable perhaps by teachers’ going the extra mile to reach out and facilitate an epiphany by discussing “down to earth” subject matter. Still other solutions receive summary treatment: clearly defining plagiarism, requiring evidence of process, scaring students straight, scaffolding, and spelling out “objective” evaluation criteria. Hamalian’s article, which reads much like common sense acceptable to plagiarism scholars today, contains, however, somewhat mild execrations of students straight from the faculty lounge (e.g., “Usually this deluded freshman is not a genuine sneak, but merely a youngster who has not learned to organize an effective work schedule. There are three to ten of his kind in nearly every class” [51, emphasis added]).

Reading this article with contemporary eyes suggests that here is a disciplinary artifact showing the field on the cusp of moving into a more student-centered discourse—and with it, adopting a new moral compass—but not having yet left the older, “teacher-centered” model with its sanctified (some might say, “sanctimonious”) grousing entirely behind.

R. G. Martin, as another example of growing student-centeredness, in his 1973

“Plagiarism and Originality: Some Remedies,” nominates several causes for student plagiarism, including writerly ineptitude and pedagogical encouragement. As some do today, Martin discourages assignments that seem to invite plagiarism in favor of highly context-dependent prompts that force students to grapple with course material, effectively turning any willing collaborator into a willing student. In the event that a paper is still demonstrably plagiarized, however, teachers should return the paper, requesting revision, all the while avoiding completely the explicit accusation of plagiarism itself. This approach, Martin claims, will have one of two likely effects. In the case of the deliberate plagiarist, face will be saved and an original rewrite will result. On the other hand, unconscious plagiarists, baffled, will consult with the instructor

46 and during that consultation likely find his or her own truly original thoughts on the subject, which the student will then be asked to write and submit in place of the offending submission.

The goal of the course—students’ producing original works—will thereby be preserved.

Augustus Kolich’s “Plagiarism: The Worm of Reason” from a 1983 College English invokes the metaphor of teacher as “avenging god”: we “righteously punish offenders with the lightning revenge of instant failure” suggestive that to exact these penalties is for the teacher to play God (142), the student perhaps being an unfortunate Uzzah who dared to touch the sanctity of the ark. Doubtless Kolich’s intention here was humorous, but surely there are fewer metaphors more loaded than this one. Big Brother or the panopticon (see Zwagerman), by comparison, is mild. By pulling back the curtain to reveal a vulnerability of the teacher whose dignity and authority has been threatened by the plagiarist, Kolich seems to suggest that our punitive measures have more to do with hollow pretense than with real justice. Virtue, he claims, is a red herring, or, perhaps better, a smokescreen behind which lie angry fumings of childish—so not very virtuous—professors. He does not deny that “the act [of plagiarism] does show unmistakable disrespect, perhaps even contempt” (145); however, turning into a man- eating shark to address this injury is “unbecoming” a teacher, and trust in the student-teacher relationship is consequently eroded.

Like Alice Drum (see below), Kolich believes compulsory outsourcing of plagiarism cases to disciplinary boards ties the hands of teachers and compromises pedagogy. Insisting on teacher-decided, case-by-case judging of the evidence and the character of the student, Kolich denies university bureaucracy the moral right to decide moral questions in his classroom:

“Ultimately, we [teachers] are the ones who must explain moral responsibilities of learning and thinking.” His justification is revealing: in the absence of this adjudicating power, “we come

47 close to admitting that what we teach are only writing skills” (148). In other words, writing teachers teach more than writing skills; they teach morality. As if his vocabulary weren’t enough to draw the conclusion, Kolich’s line in the sand shows he presupposes the classroom as the site of moral education, as any virtue ethicist would. Not being allowed to educate in this way, argues Kolich, is an open invitation to plagiarism. Kolich suggests that preventative pedagogy— engaging students out of the temptation to plagiarize—diverts attention to weightier matters, that is, to the underlying question of originality and free inquiry, and that students must develop the necessary virtues for this demanding endeavor. Kolich’s claim to the right to comment on the moral character of students—his confession that his aims are not purely pedagogical— distinguishes him from more recent statements on plagiarism in composition studies, where such a claim is not only not made but denied any instructor of writing.

Alice Drum’s Staffroom Interchange contribution from a 1986 College Composition and

Communication, “Responding to Plagiarism,” begins with the pathological metaphor so often criticized by Ameliorists on the grounds that it both toxifies the discourse and is unsupportable by facts: “Plagiarism is a disease that plagues college instructors everywhere. I believe that our reliance on the classic argument against plagiarism may be one of the reasons for its continued virulence” (241). She argues that focusing on the ethical and legal ramifications of plagiarism tends to elide the more immediately necessary—and more likely efficacious—discussion about completing an assignment. Acknowledging the conscious nature of much student plagiarism,

Drum further explains her approach by saying that “[w]hen students fail to comply honestly with an assignment, the pedagogical process breaks down” (242), as though to say to teachers,

“Forget morality and legality: plagiarizing students didn’t do the assignment.” Notably, then,

Drum’s entry uses the commonplace of the pathological metaphor not to agitate the waters of

48 moral panic but seemingly to appeal to teachers’ desire to see evidence of “intellectual maturity” in their students. Viewed in this way, her opening sentence reads as a lamentation that students aren’t doing their assignments, not a jeremiad that morality in our society has deplorably eroded.

She recommends administrators award full faith and credit to teachers to deal quickly and humanely with cases of plagiarism since teaching the student is, after all, the teachers’ responsibility and since students may be more receptive to correction and punishment from the teacher they have come to know. Responses including the arguably though not certainly more effective “second chance” may be given by the teacher, whereas automatic penalties of failure can be too harsh as well as generate more bureaucratic headaches in the form of student protections than they solve. Drum’s note again shows that teacherly concern for students to get and demonstrate that they get the point of the assignment leaves no elbow room for the severity of some punitive measures, including the academic death penalty of expulsion.

Richard Murphy’s notable (and oft-noted) 1990 “Anorexia: The Cheating Disorder” reads engrossingly as a tragicomic fleshing out of the teacher-as-detective metaphor. Placing two suspected cases of student plagiarism side by side for our close consideration, Murphy shows the banal, somewhat humorous, somewhat pathetic obsession that exercises the suspicious writing teacher. At times, his time-consuming detective work pays off. After going through the entire bureaucratic disciplinary process, Murphy relates, a student hitherto confirmed in his denial at last relents under the weight of the evidence Murphy has painstakingly amassed, confesses, and earns a prompt suspension. The second case, involving a young woman’s writing about her experience with anorexia, a heart-wrenching tale of hospitals, angry and comforting parents, and self-loathing, ends on a different note. After an indelicately handled inquest, the student earns a zero on the personal-essay assignment for confessing to having written the paper about her

49 friend. Upon review of the portfolio submitted at semester’s end, however, Murphy sees, in poignant black and white, his student’s journal entries, showing the agonizing and apparently sincere—and assumedly not outsourced—thoughts of a young woman struggling with anorexia and societal expectations for feminine perfection. Murphy, in the end, feels like a heel.

Much more arrestingly, and more imaginatively, than those complaining of plagues and epidemics, Murphy offers the accurate simile of the “thin wood splinter in the edge of one’s thumb” that is the probably plagiarized paper (899). Convinced a student has plagiarized,

Polonius-like, Murphy goes round to work in search of the smoking gun. This kind of detective work, and this kind of suspicion, he says, simply ought not to characterize the work of teaching.

In other words, Murphy finds himself becoming the kind of teacher he does not want to be. He has raised the question, however implicitly, that would define the issue for any professor of writing embracing a virtue ethic: “What sort of teacher do I wish to be?” Recalling the conference with the young woman with more than a pinch of self-accusation, he writes a clipped, powerful sentence: “This was a parody of a writing conference” (901). Murphy’s travesty furnishes us with a fairly extreme example of confronting a student with plagiarism, causing any sensitive reader to wince at the invasion of privacy he deemed necessary at the time to flush out the confession he so eagerly sought, asking probing questions into a student’s anorexia. While I think what this painful example really does is argue compellingly against the personal narrative assignment—or at least for placing severe qualifications on “personal”—Murphy’s point is that a desire to probe more deeply into a text’s composition can lead into unprofessional and unethical probing into a student’s private experience. This point is well taken.

After 1995

In this study, which will cover publications from 1995 forward, I propose to begin with

Rebecca Moore Howard’s 1995 College English article, “Plagiarisms, Authorship, and the

Academic Death Penalty,” in its own right something of a discursive event in plagiarism studies, as well as her impressive 1999 monograph, Standing in the Shadows of Giants, where she was most forcefully to challenge the notion that patchwriting is inherently a morally transgressive act, as well as to launch a concomitantly aggressive and, in many ways, compellingly erudite investigation into the history of textual and authorial values. Howard’s continued advocacy to translate poststructuralist theory of writing and authorship, including her 2000 “Ethics and

Plagiarism” and 2008 collection of essays co-edited with Amy Robillard, Pluralizing Plagiarism; into decisive changes in moral pre- and proscriptions both in composition classrooms and wider society demands careful attention for a study focused on plagiarism and moral theory.

Ron Scollon’s 1995 “Plagiarism and Ideology: Identity in Intercultural Discourse” argues despite commonsense understandings that plagiarism is relative; his own work with L2 English writers shows him that L2 students’ difficulties with citation conventions may evince

“unconscious resistance to an implicit ideology to what has been called ‘the potent private self’”

(6). Scollon explains eight reasons why plagiarism, so seemingly clear cut in popular, supposedly legalistic forms of its definition, invites more complex understanding of the situations and cultures in which written discourse circulates. Among these reasons is the complicated nature of authorship: “the concept of the unified animator/author/principal, presupposed in most discussions of plagiarism, is not an entity easily found in normal discourse”

(8). Other reasons involve socio-linguistic factors such as enactment and footing, but, worth some consideration for this study, “metaphors of the self and communication” (22). Like others,

Scollon roots the idea of plagiarism in the historical development of copyright in England, specifically in the 1710 Statute of Anne, demonstrating the Enlightenment roots of the concept and citing the commonplace that Romanticism and bourgeois enterprising underwrite plagiarism, making it nearly impossible even for a person aware of its roots to resist its emotional potency.

Most notable, perhaps, is Scollon’s confession to his “rancor” upon learning his own work had been plagiarized, a fact that became the partial emotional genesis to the article. Evidently chastened through his own thinking and the review process, Scollon closes his article by saying that he is enmeshed in the throes of cognitive dissonance: his scholarly pursuits urge him to question and challenge the cultural given-ness of plagiarism; however, he feels sorely tempted to invoke legal sanction against the plagiarist, thus explicitly erecting a dichotomy with scholarship on the one hand, and the “just personal or legal” on the other. As further chapters will suggest, this dichotomy, which raises questions about intellectual goals and virtues—and even the reasons for forgiveness—exerts a force that continues to be felt in present-day scholarship.

Much more at home in his anger, however, is Thomas Mallon, whose 1989/2001 Stolen

Words, a detailed play-by-play of middle- to high-profile plagiarism cases, including the fall from academic grace in Jayme Sokolow, former professor of history at Texas Tech University.

Mallon’s book extends beyond roughly contemporary academia, however, in that he covers writers as disparate Charles Reade in the nineteenth century to novelist Anita Clay Kornfield and her legal action against the producers of Falcon Crest for alleged copyright violations in the

1980s. In his recent afterword to the 2001 edition, Mallon addresses questions over the rise of the Internet and whether there truly are any special implications the Internet poses to the decorum and definition of plagiarism. Mallon’s answer is no, and, while he is at it, he takes

Rebecca Moore Howard to task for claims she makes in her famous “Plagiarisms, Authorships,

52 and the Academic Death Penalty,” specifically her statements meant to erode trust in the idea of originality itself. In the end he reasserts confidence in originality as a kind of subversive act in an atmosphere permeated by poststructuralist assumptions, citing favorably Harold Bloom. With much moral certainty, for which Howard would later criticize him, Mallon shows little patience for plagiarists. Writing much in the style of an accomplished novelist, Mallon guards literary convention and ethics fiercely and wittily, littering his prose with metaphors and similes at times provocatively representative of the pejorative side of the argument. It is easy to wonder whether

Mallon’s own ability to craft language well leads him to be so unforgiving to plagiarism where it occurs.

David Leight’s 1999 “Plagiarism as Metaphor” in Buranen and Roy’s collection briefly surveys several textbook and handbook definitions of plagiarism, including “stealing,” “ethical violation,” “borrowing,” and “intellectual laziness.” Noting his study’s limitations to textbooks from the 1980s and 1990s, Leight suggests scholarly publications, wherein theoretical assumptions about authorship are debated, as a direction for further study along metaphorical lines. While not conceived as an answer to this call for further study, my project is largely concerned with analyzing scholarly publications, though I am not interested in Leight’s question over whether authors of textbooks represent plagiarism in line with statements they have made in scholarly publications (229). Additionally, I find Leight’s chapter limited in that he restricts ethical and moral concerns to a couple of his metaphors, thereby separating the ethical and moral from other metaphors. It is my contention in this project that all metaphors for plagiarism have a moral and ethical component and that they cannot be neatly separated from them. Finally, I find

Leight’s analysis lacking not only with respect to moral and ethical reasoning, but also with respect to the range of metaphors he selects.

Margaret Price’s 2002 “Beyond ‘Gotcha!’: Situating Plagiarism in Policy and Pedagogy,” heavily indebted to Howard, urges composition teachers to revisit assumptions about plagiarism as encoded in institutional policy. Specifically, she examines three policies, two already in effect at the University of Massachusetts and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and another proposed by Howard. She furthermore emphasizes that students, for whom concepts of proper citation practices and plagiarism are initially alien, can be substantially instructive to instructors and scholars. To further dialogue about legitimate and illegitimate textual practices, Price recommends making room in university plagiarism policies for student questions, which, she says, even experienced teachers “may have forgotten” even how to ask (110). Price surveys a number of issues, each with moral import, including poststructuralist scrutiny of the author, matters of ignorance and intent, taking on discourse community membership and values, and contextual relativism involved in source attribution. Price closes by reminding teachers that plagiarism is an ever “evolving” (a word she heavily favors) construct, subject to revision—a revision in which even novice students may be helpful participants. It follows from this that moral judgments about plagiarism must be likewise evolving. For an article that broadly covers recent discussion about plagiarism as well as offers some suggestions for how to proceed in the ambiguous poststructuralist paradigm, Price’s is a fairly good place to start. However, while her recommendations about the kind of questions students might answer in a dialogic policy are clearly stated, a full example of the kind of policy she envisions is lacking.

Relevant also is Katherine Valentine’s 2006 “Plagiarism as Literacy Practice:

Recognizing and Rethinking Ethical Binaries.” Valentine’s simple thesis is that “plagiarism is a literacy practice; plagiarism is something people do with reading and writing” (89). She argues that plagiarism is a context-dependent definition, and that learning how to write legitimately is a

54 matter of “negotiating identity for students” (90). She continues that plagiarism, because it is so often constituted as an ethical issue, erects an often impassable barrier between instructors and students. She wonders how it is that “features of texts” can be spoken of as a moral issue as it commonly is in university policies. Finally, she makes the commonplace recommendation that plagiarism citation conventions should be explained to students, but in such a way that their

“rhetorical purposes” come to the fore (93).

While I in no way accept that textual features and moral judgments are mutually exclusive, I would argue that Valentine’s attempt to clear away the ethical brush from the discussion of plagiarism and instead holding forward features of texts puts us more squarely in a position to make what Ayer would call “genuine propositions” about them. In other words, should we keep the matter as much as possible to the stasis of substantiation (claims of fact and claims of definition), we will not so quickly run into the (arguably) more difficult stasis of evaluation.

Valentine claims that plagiarism issues in academic contexts are matters of identity, or, as

James Paul Gee states, a “social role that others will recognize” (qtd. in 93), but it is not always clear, as here, what identity is supposed to mean or what constitutes an unwarranted encroachment on an identity. Like voice, identity at times does more to obfuscate than to clarify, yet due to the inextricable relationship between identity and morality, the term may not be easily scrubbed away. Nevertheless, in its place, however, it seems fruitful to consider adopting the term authority (Fountain and Fitzgerald) and, more precisely, textual authority, a subject position that may be more readily inferred on the evidence of empirically verifiable text. No panacea, however, is hereby proposed.

Bronwyn Williams’ 2007/2008 “Trust, Betrayal, and Authorship: Plagiarism and How

We Perceive Students” links reactions to student plagiarism to teacher anxieties over new technologies, even though, he says, the judgment that students are “lazy” is what continues to dominate public discussion. Moreover, he rehearses the recent scholarly commonplace that plagiarism is founded upon Romantic, autonomous notions of authorship. Learning how to write for academic contexts, he says, is like learning a “nuanced set of cultural attitudes,” very much like learning good manners (351)—a comparison I aim to take very seriously in the following chapters. Students are now in a “‘sampling’ culture” thanks to online literacies, Williams points out, so they are culturally predisposed to see authorship in a communal, social way. The very premises from which they reason about legitimate textual practices are incompatible with

Romanticism and its imposing authorial figure. I will consider this article in more detail in

Chapters 3 and 4.

Bill Marsh’s 2007 Plagiarism: Alchemy and Remedy in Higher Education is a rather unusual contribution to the discussion of plagiarism. Predictably but also thoroughly, he begins his book with discussion of two high-profile plagiarism cases, following not only the events themselves but the discussion about literary propriety and morality that followed in the media.

Distinctively, however, he discusses the mystical lore that grew around alchemy and the metaphorical fodder it became for writers interested spiritual perfection: just as base metals were to be transmuted in alchemy into gold, so the soul was to be transmuted from base to rare and precious materials. Marsh suggests that the spiritual tradition begun here remains culturally compelling and that any text which does not fully transmute source material into a rare and precious product amounts not only to authorial but also to spiritual and moral failure. Alchemy,

Marsh says, becomes a lens through which to view the value of originality in authorship.

Amy Robillard’s 2007 “We Won’t Get Fooled Again: On the Absence of Angry

Responses to Plagiarism in Composition Studies” is a refreshing, necessary exploration into the real, often justified, often unfortunately conflicted indignation writing teachers sense upon learning their students have plagiarized. Robillard suggests this sense of conflict comes from two very different sources. First, writing teachers, as textual experts, detect outrageous insult in students’ attempts to pass off another’s words as their own as though their professors were, to put it bluntly, too stupid or incompetent to tell the difference. Second, many of these same teachers, as is essential to their training, have been inculcated with the moral assumptions of a critical pedagogy or some other form of student-centered pedagogy, leading them to suspect themselves before their students as worthy of blame in the unfortunate, regrettable event plagiarism has been committed, further evidence that plagiarism is being effectively defined as a pedagogical rather than moral failure (see also Howard , “New” 90). Teachers’ political implications in a hierarchical educative system makes them, writing teachers may feel, responsible Robillard shows examples of self-sponsored writing by writing teachers that expresses more honestly the anger that, she claims, is decidedly absent in composition scholarship sponsored by peer review. So our understanding of the real complexities of plagiarism may be more fully appreciated, she argues, this anger, and its causes, should be taken very seriously and not effectively silenced by pedagogical orthodoxies, even while remembering theoretical complexity, to wit, that varieties of textual practices sharing the label plagiarism do exist, each warranting different, proportional responses. Robillard concludes her article with the pragmatic appeal that allowing composition studies to carry on its inquiry into plagiarism with this gaping lacuna will likely have two undesirable consequences, psychological and public- relations. Failing to deal in healthy ways with this anger and encouraging, on the contrary, a

57 professional atmosphere where there is no legitimate place for it, Robillard warns, teachers may internalize that anger, and our colleagues may feel justified in supposing composition studies to be a mollycoddling field that defaults on its duty to demand and enforce intellectual rigor. I will examine this article in more detail in Chapter 5.

Wendy Sutherland-Smith’s 2008 Plagiarism, the Internet, and Student Learning:

Improving Academic Integrity sketches theoretical challenges to and historical reasons for the concept and construct of plagiarism in early chapters. In the third chapter she presents, as a

“definitional model,” Diane Pecorari’s six elements of plagiarism—“an object (i.e. language, words, text) which has been taken (or borrowed, stolen, etc.) from a particular source (books, journals, Internet) by an agent (student, person, academic) without (adequate) acknowledgement and with or without intention to deceive”—to help keep matters straight when institutional responses encoded in policy are the objects of discussion (70-71). Sutherland-Smith believes the

Internet has altered the way information is perceived by users, including students, and that authorship rules may be redrawn in light of new informational practices (122). She also discusses the role of Turnitin.com and the negative and positive uses to which it has been put and devotes one chapter each to teacher and student perceptions of plagiarism, providing further valuable qualitative information to suggest conclusions about the moral atmosphere in which plagiarism is defined, prevented, and responded to.

Sean Zwagerman, in his 2008 “The Scarlet P: Plagiarism, Panopticism, and the Rhetoric of Academic Integrity” presents one of the most forthright cases for the Ameliorist argument.

Deeply suspicious of the motives for the prevention and punishment of plagiarism, Zwagerman, like Valentine, narrows his disciplining gaze in the direction of instructors rather than the instructed, blaming the general academic atmosphere for making marks on transcripts such

58 weighty matters that the idea to cheat in order to achieve high grades would even be a blip on students’ radar of practical solutions. Continuing to place a high premium on grades,

Zwagerman argues, encourages cheating as a “sensible strategy when the stakes are high and the dice may be loaded” (686). Further, Zwagerman has considerably unkind things to say about plagiarism-detection technology as an indefensible erosion of student trust and liberties. While fully allowing the effectiveness of Turnitin—having tested it himself on his own writing—he counters that it shamefully instates a Foucauldian panopticon inimical to the purposes of a critical pedagogy. In one revealing instance, Zwagerman flatly excuses students of submitting plagiarized papers on the grounds that the assignment in question was unworthy of the effort to write it in the first place and adds, quite astoundingly, that, were he in their shoes, he probably would have plagiarized the paper himself because he would have found the assignment insufficiently engaging. He emphasizes ingenuity students often show in cheating; his criticism of this cheating is not that students have committed an immoral act, but that their taking cracks at

“beating the system” are only “self-destructive” exercises in further solidifying their place in that system, and teachers seeking to punish this behavior only end up making enemies of those who should be friends and partners in the educative enterprise.

Chris M. Anson’s 2008 “We Never Wanted to Be Cops: Plagiarism, Institutional

Paranoia, and Shared Responsibility” in Howard and Robillard’s collection Pluralizing

Plagiarism right away brings the power of metaphor to constrain and control the conversation to the fore. Anson is highly representative of those scholars who express an aversion to the very idea that the role of a composition teacher should, in any respect, involve policing students. As a field for controlling metaphors, Anson’s text is rich, with the following terms appearing: hunt, guardian, sleuthing, panopticon are all—used in earnest—among the first few pages of his

59 article; later he lines up and rejects all pathological metaphors for plagiarism. As in the case of

Williams and Lynn Z. Bloom, Anson is in search of “good teaching practices” (155; italics in original) which will render the role as a cop obsolete.

Susan Blum’s 2009 anthropological approach to plagiarism, My Word!: Plagiarism and

College Culture reviews the now common arguments about authorship, intertextuality, and originality. Her primary contribution lies, I think, in that she presents and interprets several one- on-one interviews with students at Notre Dame to understand how they view college life generally and writing practices particularly. Notre Dame, which goes by the fictional Saint U. in her book, imposes an honor code on its students, which is not unexpected at an openly religious institution. Blum finds, perhaps unsurprisingly, that such honor codes do not necessarily have an effect; indeed, she finds what many jeremiads about plagiarism have both asserted and bewailed: a career-motivated expediency motivates many students for whom the researched paper is, at best, mere exercise and a lowly means to a much better end of the social capital that comes with a degree. Blum’s findings are more complex than this, however, revealing a range of student responses to the issue. In no way can it be said of the students in her book that students flatly side with one view of plagiarism against the morally vigilant professors. Her conclusions call for a balanced approach, blending education and punishment. A commitment to standards is evident, and among the scholars writing on the subject with whom I am familiar, she appears almost unique in the assertion that views of plagiarism among students may be linked to their adolescence and all that implies.

Robert Briggs, whom Sutherland-Smith notes for his labeling of a “moralistic” approach to plagiarism, writes in his 2009 “Shameless!: Reconceiving the Problem of Student Plagiarism” rehearses the disciplinary commonplace that plagiarism is a term that is more complex than its

60 usual synonyms may let on, whether those synonyms are copying and borrowing or the more morally charged stealing and cheating. He correctly notes methods of detection and prevention follow directly from our definitions of plagiarism; distinctions therefore must be made among different types. Moreover, the marked vocabulary of moral judgment, he argues, makes handling matters with students unnecessarily difficult and advises invoking moral statements only when absolutely necessary and applicable (67). Removing the word “moral” from the equation becomes a good idea, he says, not merely because moral has a more “heavy handed” connotation than does “ethics,” but because there is reason to believe “morality is all about general foundational principles which direct action, while ethics focuses on highly contextualised [sic] practices and decisions,” in effect and in word turning morality into an exercise in legalism, and ethics into an exercise in compassion and responsibility to others. The former is final, absolute; the latter is “problem-solving,” processual, admittedly an oversimplified characterization (67-8).

Briggs recommends that students who fail in the execution of a perfectly documented paper, to which he applies the label of comportment, perhaps ought to be viewed in the light of a cricket player who knows declaratively but not procedurally how to hit the ball. Training, not disposition, he insists, is the relevant factor. Perhaps more interestingly, he takes a metaphor showing the literal meaning of pedagogy, that is, the leading of children, in that he compares teaching students citation techniques to helping small children to cross the road with supervision.

A contributing factor to student plagiarism, he says, is possible misconstruing of what originality ought to mean in an academic setting: students may believe they are expected to come up with ideas they may call completely their own when in fact teachers really want them to show they know how to find relevant, credible information and add their commentary. Briggs acknowledges the moral nature of showing “respect for procedure and community-sanctioned

61 conventions [that] may also cultivate intellectual modesty” (70). Like Hamalian and Martin before him, Briggs warns against “attack on the moral fibre of the student” (72), as it will, to put it colloquially, only make students’ walls go up. Primarily, plagiarism should be framed as a

“learning and writing problem” (73).

Stanley Fish’s twin 2010 New York Times opinion pieces, “Plagiarism Is Not a Big Moral

Deal” and “The Ontology of Plagiarism, Part Two.” Fish’s argument is particularly intriguing in that he quite emphatically does not accept that theoretically overthrowing the concept of originality and traditional authorship must of necessity translate to a change in academic practice. True, Fish neither confirms nor denies the conclusions of critical theory on these matters; what he does is declare their conclusions irrelevant to the confirmed and established practices by which academic writing is carried out. These, Fish affirms, “rest on a foundation of themselves” (n.p.); originality is a concept legible enough to be useful and by which to evaluate the quality of academic contributions. However, Fish, fully aware of a rather egregious plagiarizing of his own work, will not make of plagiarism a “big moral deal,” preferring instead to make it a professionalism matter. Like Williams, he compares citation conventions to learning finer manners, though Fish’s favored analogy is the rules of golf, an insular and exclusive sport if ever there was one. Fish insists that he needs no imprimatur from theorists to justify—or not— academic citation etiquette. Bertrand Russell, who was “prepared to admit the ordinary beliefs of common sense, in practice if not in theory” (n.p.), comes very much to mind. Whatever may be said of that, one weakness in Fish’s article is that he does not make important distinctions between different kinds of plagiarism—whether patchwriting or fraud—and so it is difficult to tell what exactly he is saying does not merit the moral censure which it so frequently excites.

Finally, Chris Anson’s 2011 “Fraudulent Practices” in Composition Studies demonstrates the situated nature of proper citation conventions. Drawing on interviews with members of the military, Anson discusses how the purposes and the constraints of time de-emphasize, and even render counter-productive, the desire for original wording in those military contexts. Such constraints and purposes contrast heavily with academic citation practices. He sees considerable pedagogical value in making plain the differences between academic and real-world writing contexts to novice academic writers.

Forming a small but fairly adequate representation of the issues in recent plagiarism studies, most of these and other sources will appear in the following chapters for textual and moral analysis, after which I will venture tentative conclusions about the moral climate of plagiarism studies and its metaphorical currents. I now will consider the moral and practical definitions of plagiarism that shape recent discussion.

Chapter 3

DEFINITIONS

Definition and the Practical Syllogism

Somewhere between the publication of the first and second editions of their first-year rhetoric, They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing, Gerald Graff and Cathy

Birkenstein reportedly ran up against student concerns that their recommended use of templates, for which they already offered not only explanation but argument in the Preface and Introduction to the first edition, amounted to a license to plagiarism. These concerns, the authors evidently believed, warranted public comment. In the second edition, the authors add to the Introduction a new section, as significant as it is small. Ever ready to exemplify their writing pedagogy, Graff and Birkenstein, to use their words, planted the following naysayer in their text: “But isn’t this plagiarism?” (12). The authors rejoin:

“Well, is it?” we respond, turning the question around into one the entire class can

profit from. “We are, after all, asking you to use language in your writing that

isn’t your own—language that you ‘borrow’ or, to put it less delicately, steal from

other writers.” (12)

They continue, “Students are quick to see that no one person owns a conventional formula like

‘on the one hand … on the other hand …’ Phrases like ‘a controversial issue’ are so commonly used and recycled that they are generic—community property that can be freely used without fear of committing plagiarism.” A succinct definition of plagiarism follows: “it is a serious academic offense to take the substantive content from others’ texts without citing the author and giving him or her proper credit” (13). In substance, their definition is, most will recognize, fairly standard, so standard, in fact, that Pecorari’s six elements are represented:

an object (i.e., language, words, text)

which has been taken (or borrowed, stolen, etc.)

from a particular source (books, journals, Internet)

by an agent (student, person, academic)

without (adequate) acknowledgement

and with or without intention to deceive. (qtd. in Sutherland-Smith 70-71)

Above answering to the description of “the generic definition of plagiarism” (Sutherland-

Smith 70), including hitting the usual points encapsulated in typical metaphors of ownership, stealing, and credit; Graff and Birkenstein’s definition comes with two other, not now necessarily standard—and, while common enough, certainly contestable—qualifiers. First, plagiarism is “serious,” a claim advanced (I think revealingly) without justification, expressed or implied. Pecorari’s standard definition could allow, after all, for a simple faux-pas. Another important qualifier, “academic,” points to the offense’s context-dependence: the authors apparently acknowledge that if plagiarism is a crime that can be “committed,” it might not be committable everywhere—or by everyone (see, e.g., Pennycook 203, 214; Anson, “Fraudulent”).

The “fear” they address, in any case, is a fear felt by novice student writers, who, in a way perhaps particularly characteristic of their role, can find themselves, where goodwill is in operation, offending without knowing it or wanting to. Directing their response to a question riddled with student anxiety and suspicion of their pedagogy, Graff and Birkenstein meet novice student writers where they are standing, believing themselves asked by an authority figure to do what apparently contradicts already confirmed wisdom perhaps picked up from high school or some other educational context. One might argue that such a question derives from “applying prior knowledge inappropriately,” an often stubborn barrier to new learning (Ambrose et al. 17).

If the above transcription accurately reflects real exchanges with students understandably confused by what they see as mixed messages, then even in denying that their method for learning academic rhetorical moves constitutes a license for plagiarism, Graff and Birkenstein use, even if ironically, the language of what is arguably the most deeply entrenched metaphor for plagiarism, theft: “We are […] asking you to use language in your writing that isn’t your own— language that you ‘borrow’ or, to put it less delicately, steal from other writers” (12). No overt attempt is made to repudiate or even interrogate the metaphor; rather, the language is accepted and used ironically. In this way, the severity of the offense, made palpable in part by the language in which it is cast, is at once both reinforced and subtly qualified.

This half-page addition to a recent textbook, I suggest, gives off a few signs about students and how they understand their relationships to their teachers, written of course from teachers’ perspective. Moreover, it says something about how plagiarism is still understood and misunderstood. These two levels, the moral-practical and the substantial, mark an important distinction on which the analyses of definitions considered below will depend. The question,

“Isn’t this plagiarism?” is really about two things. Robillard maintains rightly that “[d]efinitions of plagiarism cannot be confined to the textual,” or what I call the substantial. She continues:

“Plagiarism stands for more than textual theft; it becomes metonymic of the immoral, callous character of the person” (“Situating” 36). I measure my agreement here and assert that the real distinction from the textual or the substantial is not the immoral character of the student—a judgment that may well arise or not in a given instance—but the moral-practical dimension of plagiarism as such. Additionally, at both levels, metaphor performs a necessary role by loading teachers and students with content for deliberations, which, as Alasdair MacIntyre explains, are a precondition for all moral and practical reasoning: “Deliberation is that process of argument

66 which provides the practical syllogism with its premises. The sound practical syllogism is the immediate precedent and determinant of rational action” (Whose 135). So, to make it plain, if we accept the statement, plagiarism is theft, it might enter one practical syllogism in this way:

Major Premise: All theft must be punished severely.

Minor Premise: Plagiarism is theft.

Conclusion: Plagiarism must be punished severely.

The above practical syllogism satisfies the criteria for perfectly valid (formally correct) reasoning; that is, its conclusion cannot be false if the premises are true. This simple example demonstrates how an argument for the conclusion, “Plagiarism must be punished severely,” may invite challenge on two grounds. One may attack the major premise, much as Raphael

Hythloday attacked severe punishment for theft on theological and moral grounds in Utopia, or one may attack the minor premise, thereby attacking the definition while leaving unassailed, and thus effectively granting, the major premise. A. J. Ayer has remarked that, in many moral arguments, “the dispute is not really about a question of value, but about a question of fact”

(110), in which category I would also place matters of definition. In this instance, a dispute over a matter of what Fulkerson calls substantiation (Teaching 40) would be to dispute the definition.

If we were to enter a denial of the definition into a syllogism in this way:

Major Premise: All theft must be punished severely.

Minor Premise: Plagiarism is not theft, obviously no conclusion can be drawn from the information provided in the premises: any attempt to complete this syllogism would prove invalid. Thanks to a simple operation of deductive logic, issuing a denial of the minor premise may serve as a tactic to throw out the major premise as irrelevant, compelling the opponent to go in search of another relevant major

67 premise permitting the completion of a valid syllogism and putting into language the resulting action. A denial, direct or indirect, of the major premise of course does not necessarily preclude the possibility of positing another major premise which entails an equally severe response to the category of action into which plagiarism is, in the given instance, asserted to fall. For example, if one replaces “All theft must be punished severely” with “All lying must be punished severely,” one may then attempt to assert “Plagiarism is lying” as a minor premise, with a comparably similar end result: “Plagiarism must be punished severely.”

Minor premises in practical syllogisms like those completed above have a way of attracting their major premise almost automatically by virtue of the fact that moral reasoning takes place in a social context with a host of shared axioms and first principles, partially accounting for why enthymemes, rather than full syllogisms, appear probably more times than not in day-to-day reasoning. Indeed, the presence of any enthymeme, in which the major premise, or warrant in Toulminian terms, is tucked away, is the rhetorical illustration of a premise that “goes without saying.” Describing R. M. Hare’s thought on this matter, Alasdair

MacIntyre summarizes the dynamic in this way:

[…] the pattern of moral argument is a transition from a moral major premise and

a factual minor premise to a moral conclusion. Wherever I appear to pass from

fact to value (“I ought to help this man because he is starving”), there is a gap in

the argument, a concealed major premise (“I ought to help the starving”). This

major premise may figure as the conclusion of some other syllogism, but at some

point the chain of reasoning must terminate in a principle which I cannot justify

by further argument, but to which I must simply commit myself by choice. (Short

n.p.).

Whether a mysterious operation of arbitrary choice ultimately furnishes us with major premises for moral and practical action is a matter we may leave to others to attempt to resolve. Here I am primarily interested in definition and its role as the minor premise in a practical syllogism, whose often enthymematic appearance underscores the assumed-ness, hence the social and cultural currency, of the major premise. In the example of the completed syllogisms above, should the major premises go unchallenged but it prove desirable to deny the conclusions, one must assume the work of refuting the minor premise, again, giving the indirect challenge to the major premise by rendering it irrelevant.

Let us, for our purposes, posit the above completed practical syllogisms as, for lack of a better term, the “Traditional” or “Traditionalist” position on defining and addressing plagiarism

(see also Scollon 5). Would-be challengers to the conclusion that plagiarism must be punished severely have three possible options: (1) challenge the major premise, thereby challenging basic moral assumptions for action but allowing the definition to remain intact; (2) challenge the definition, thereby allowing the major premise to remain intact while also rendering it irrelevant; and (3) launch an all-out attack on both the major and the minor premise, a radical approach that challenges the thinking of the Traditionalist position on all levels. Which option one chooses provides at least suggestive evidence pointing to one’s membership in a school of thought.

Attacks on the major premise indicate, perhaps more than anything else, that one’s objections are moral rather than objections to a matter of definition. Attacks on the minor premise, which again is definitional in this case, may be morally motivated, but they must be justified on grounds of fact rather than by appeal to moral principle. Attacks on all three are both motivated by morality as well as a differing assessment of fact.

For the remainder of this chapter, I assume the soundness of Pecorari’s “generic definition of plagiarism” as a substantial definition, with this qualification, that Howard’s marking plagiarism into three sub-categories, fraud, insufficient citation, and excessive repetition, may prove useful for refining categorization. I accept these categories, however, without also accepting Howard’s dubious proposal that we “quit using the term plagiarism altogether” (“Sexuality” 475), a proposal even she has evidently abandoned in subsequent publications. As I move forward to consider both moral and practical definitions, both traditional and alternative, to plagiarism, I will keep her distinctions in mind. Finally, as I take up this (by no means exhaustive) survey below, I am mindful of what Marilyn Randall calls the

“power relations present in the perception or act of plagiarism” (132), which of course may be noted of every single metaphor there is for plagiarism.

Plagiarism Is a “Viable Option”

Students, it is commonly noted, may hold their own practical and moral definitions of plagiarism in calculating reserve. Sue Carter Simmons, in her “Competing Notions of

Authorship,” paints a rather bleak picture of writing conditions in the late nineteenth century, conditions she asserts tilled up some “fertile ground for plagiarism.” In order, those conditions are “canned assignments,” absence of instruction in citation, disallowed first-person pronouns, predetermined assignment topics, dictated forms, and, finally, “sheer volume of writing required” (42). Finding the load too burdensome, Simmons concludes, “students may have felt plagiarism to be a viable option.” A feeling of being overwhelmed by the requirements was pretty much bound to happen, she claims, especially because teachers did not permit students to write on subjects on which they were authorities (writing on personal experiences were excluded). (42-43).

Sean Zwagerman, in his “The Scarlet P,” approvingly cites this passage from Simmons, applying her description of this example of late-nineteenth century pedagogy to the early twenty- first century, and he seizes upon her “viable option” with approval. He moreover submits for similar consideration what he believes to be an analogous case in which high school students were required to write essays over their favorite American explorer, something he avers no high school student may be reasonably supposed to have. He, too, sees plagiarism as a viable option in such a case: “to be honest, I think I would have plagiarized that assignment and spent the time saved doing something I actually cared about” (696). Lest, perhaps, anyone mistake

Zwagerman’s hypothetical action would have been followed by some measure of compunction, he continues to criticize pedagogy that “does not invite creativity” and, quoting Howard, that does not ask anything from the “students themselves” (696).

At once the moral analogue to “picking a side” seems to issue invitations. The choice, as

Zwagerman appears to frame it, is between the teachers, with their textbooks, and the students, with their fraternity files or resource of preference. In both instances, the authors evince a preferential option for the student, in that the student’s feelings are admitted as highly relevant factors for determining the worth of the pedagogy alleged to have provoked the act of plagiarism.

The dichotomy is one of unfounded individualism versus realistic, practical collaboration, as evidenced by this phrase: “[t]he individual model of authorship students were taught in school, and the collaborative and collective model of authorship students practiced through plagiarism”

(Simmons 42). In this line of sharply drawn contrast appears the separation between those of the establishment and those of the disenfranchised. The badly mistaken individualist notions teachers and textbooks promote—“textbook,” I suggest, functions in this context as a kind of devil term—was false to reality, and students learned to be collaborative in efforts to flout the

71 intention of the assignments. The students, one might infer, knew very well over a century ago that writing was collaborative in a way our theorists have only recently, and quite belatedly, begun to notice and take seriously. While Simmons, however, nowhere explicitly approves of the students’ actions, Zwagerman’s commends students for their intelligence in a manner similar to that of Jay L. Gordon in a dialogue with Sherri A. Whiteman: “Why give an assignment that, for any intelligent teenager, includes the following unspoken hint”—save yourself the work and get it from the Internet (27, emphasis added)?

To help us understand how fraudulent plagiarism could change from a forbidden form of writing to one more reasonable way to fulfill an assignment, Simmons draws on three metaphors in her sub-chapter, “Fertile Ground for Plagiarism,” that I will focus on here. First, there is the agricultural metaphor of fertile ground. The tenor is the straightforward proposition that classroom conditions are favorable for the appearance of plagiarism and (I presume) that conditions are conversely unfavorable for the appearance of legitimate work. The vehicle is explicitly that of soil, but it also implies other vehicles of tilling, sowing, and reaping.

Obviously, plagiarism is a kind of plant. This interpretation is about as straightforward as the metaphor allows. Several questions arise: Who tills the ground? By what means? What is the seed?

Just as important, who plants it? Even though, in context, Simmons assigns grammatical agency to the “conditions” that “created [this] fertile ground,” those conditions must be the results of decisions made by teachers. Considered further, seeds are seeds of a kind, so if plagiarism is a plant, it also has a seed of its kind. Suppose this seed to be the student’s decision to bypass the requirements and to instead access fraternity files for copies of other papers: the event, that is, in a student’s moral and practical deliberation in which a student begins to posit a

72 certain major premise, which I will identify below. Seeds, however, do not plant themselves, and doubtless some agency is at work in the present instance (as opposed to the literal correspondent to metaphorical wind or bees, say), so that the metaphor is not simply botanical but agricultural. Although never stated outright, then, it could be reasonably inferred that the writing teachers have tilled the ground; the instrument being one, some, or all of those conditions listed above; the ground is the mind of the student; the seed is the major premise that arises in the mind of the student; the planter of the seed is the student; and the plagiarized paper is the resulting plant.

If it is suggested that the seed must be the writing conditions that “gave students the idea” to plagiarize, I can reply that it seems obviously odd to say that a seed creates fertile ground. If it will be replied that the seed cannot be an idea in the mind of the student while the ground is also the mind of the student, so that the ground creates the seed—an idea I admit to be equally obviously odd—I posit some distinction in the mind not exactly along the lines of Plato’s tripartite soul or some kind of faculty psychology, but, for lack of a better term, a “part” of the mind, in the given instance, that (a) is activated to resent writing X amount of Y kind of submissions under Z conditions of time, another that (b) “provides […] premises” (MacIntyre,

Whose 135), and another that (c) decides to act on those premises. If this seems like an unnecessary amount of trouble to go to for a metaphor, and perhaps it is, I could plead that all metaphors, being analogies, break down; but I assert the metaphor communicates assumptions about teaching writing in educational contexts which must be understood to appreciate the terms of the debate.

If my analysis is correct and the teachers are the tillers, the metaphor becomes at once condemnatory for two reasons, namely, that teachers have tilled the ground for an undesirable

73 plant, and, second, that they have done so out of ignorance and incompetence; that is, that they had desired to see original student contributions but instead embarked on a course of action that yielded the crop of plagiarized submissions and had no idea that they would be getting this more- than-likely result.

Such an interpretation invites an understandable objection: Simmons does not say that submitting the assignments for credit was not also a “viable option,” so the possibility for two viable alternatives, submitting an original or submitting a plagiarized assignment, is allowed on her account. Yet despite the language of “option,” implying at least one alternative to plagiarism, the metaphor does not readily suggest much room for any such alternative, much less a “viable” one. To say it was “fertile ground for plagiarism” would at least strongly suggest it was not fertile ground for non-plagiarized submissions, certainly not in the context of the description Simmons puts forward. Some soil, as gardeners and farmers know, is good for some plants and not others. Simmons’s students, she appears to say, had no other choice. But, it may be objected, to find fault with the agricultural metaphor in this educative context would be to find fault with it in every such instance, since “growth,” an operation of biology, is a function of inviolable natural laws. I do not deny this, but I do say that there are two reasons why this does not appear to matter in this context. First, growth may be fostered or hindered by human choice

(as in the cases of horticulture or agriculture), and, second, it is the teachers who are preparing the ground. Leading as she does with the metaphor, Simmons uses this controlling image as the context in which to understand the progression from writing conditions to fraudulent plagiarism, so framing the entire process in the direction of seemingly automatic, or nearly automatic, results.

Next, I turn to Simmons’s metaphor of ownership. Simmons claims that “[c]omposition pedagogy forced students to ‘disown’ their papers by forbidding first-person pronouns and assigning topics and particular forms” (42). This claim invites several questions, but I first turn attention to the legal metaphor of ownership. The tenor seems to have two significant propositions bundled together, thus pointing to the problematic, and perhaps equivocal or at least ambiguous, way the word appears to be used: first, the papers are not written with a sense of personal pride in one’s achievements, and, second, the papers are not written in marks identifying the work as that of the student. Authorship studies and plagiarism studies have long questioned the possibility that a text can be “owned” in yet another sense, that is, just in what sense words can be personal property. Such questioning likely accounts for Simmons’s marking the metaphor in scare quotes. I think it likely Simmons attempts, but probably fails, to exclude this sense in the present instance. The vehicle, the act of signing away legal possession to another, presumably more interested party, serves for both tenors. In the present instance, one presumably “signs over” a paper when one entrusts the writing of that paper to someone else. In this way, the metaphor reinforces the idea that one comes to own a text in the act of writing, as opposed to copying, it. Put differently, one comes to own a text in its production, not its reproduction. Such a metaphor posits a markedly different relationship from that posited by the common plagiarism-as-theft metaphor: here, the plagiarist is an owner handing over what is properly his; there, the plagiarist is a thief taking what is another’s. Both metaphors describe accurately some aspects of the entire act of plagiarism and certainly fraudulent plagiarism. What is handed over here is the act of writing the paper; what is taken from another are the words, or, without stretching it too far, the act of having written.

Now I return to Simmons’ claim that pedagogy can “force” students to “‘disown’ their papers” by forbidding the use of the first-person pronoun and writing on predetermined topics, the point being that under such circumstances the student has relinquished all sense of pride in completing the assignment. To say that pedagogy “encouraged” such dis-ownership, one may grant, may qualify as an arguable position, but to say it can “force” students to disown them invites serious questions. Can a teacher indeed force a student to disown a paper if he lays down the condition that no first-person pronoun be used? If so, is this to say a first-person pronoun is a necessary and a sufficient condition or a necessary condition only for a student to find sufficient motivation to complete an assignment, a condition which must be present with others? It is difficult to infer the moral reasoning used by a student who would reason from the premise that first-person pronouns ought not to be used to the conclusion that one ought not to complete the assignment. As I read her, however, Simmons allows for the following deliberation: “I cannot use ‘I’ in a paper, so the professor must not be interested in what I have to say about the matter.

Why should I even try to say what I have to say?” Several fallacies seem at work here. First is the obvious one of equivocation (confusing the two referents for I, a personal pronoun and the pronoun of a writer’s persona), founded perhaps on another faulty assumption about writing, that is, that only writing that uses first-person pronouns demands and demonstrates original thinking.

Still another is that the professors’ lack of care, even if present, effectively abolishes the assignment. Another possible deliberation may have gone as follows: “The pronoun ‘I’ has been ruled out, but that makes it difficult for me to say what I want to say. Therefore, I won’t even try to complete it.” If one supposes most students do not reason on such faulty premises, it does not readily appear how stipulating third-person-pronoun usage in itself results in a decision to plagiarize.

As for Simmons’ claim that dictated forms gave rise to plagiarism, one may ask again whether this is a necessary or a sufficient condition for plagiarism. Still another question arises: will students feel disconnected from anything in which they must play by certain rules or within certain boundaries, or does this logic extend only to writing in general, turning writing into an activity immune to all the usual motivations? Is a writing teacher’s command over a student’s will so complete as here alleged? In Simmons’s claim, I submit, lies one of the distinguishing, and one of the most questionable, tenets of Ameliorist pedagogy: students can be effectively forced to lose the interest in an assignment necessary for its legitimate completion (for a contrary view, see Robillard, “Situating” 30).

Despite the foregoing critique, it is easy to see how the personal pronoun, assigned topics, and dictated forms can be connected for Simmons. Writing under constraints can undeniably feel confining, and by emphasizing this difficulty she introduces the premise that the felt difficulty of a task undermines its legitimacy. Presumably, students take no pride, and hence must not be expected to produce, any assignment that cannot be distinguished as work only they could do. This leads us to the next and final metaphor I will consider in this section.

Simmons uses the questionable metaphor of “voice” to support the assertion that plagiarism is likely when writing teachers disallow first-person pronouns. The vehicle, of course, is a literal voice, the unique blend of tones and accents proceeding from a person’s mouth in the act of oral communication that, when uttered, may allow one person familiar with the other to identify the speaker. I take the time to define voice here to emphasize, if it needs emphasizing, the distance between orality and literacy (see Smit 41). The tenor for the voice metaphor is about as laden as the tenor for ownership: first, that a paper can be identified as the work of an individual writer and, perhaps, only as that of the individual writer, as well as that

77 the writer writes with a sense of empowerment or authority because she is empowered

(enfranchised) to write. In the former instance, the vehicle becomes a synecdoche, identifying a part by a whole; in the latter, the vehicle becomes one metonym layered upon another, that is, speaking of one thing (voice) by another with which it is closely associated (speaking out), itself closely associated with yet another (political enfranchisement). Darsie Bowden’s book The

Mythology of Voice offers compelling criticism for the appropriateness and usefulness of the metaphor in light of poststructuralist assumptions of writing, and I will not rehearse those criticisms here. My point is to emphasize that, in the present instance, “voice” becomes one more supporting metaphor for the claim that plagiarism becomes a viable option under conditions where it may appear to the student that there is simply no room for him, and this is why I do not believe Simmons has entirely kept the sense of ownership as property out of the discussion despite her scare quotes. Where “voice,” after all, is believed to be the rhetorical equivalent of a fingerprint, it is likely texts will be spoken of as extensions of a person and so in terms of personal property. While speaking of ownership without speaking of voice is certainly possible, speaking of voice without talking about ownership seems more difficult to avoid.

The practical and moral proposition that these metaphors, in the aggregate, are furnished to support, has already been noted. From the simple description of “viable option,” we can easily extrapolate the following principle: Under X conditions, fraudulent plagiarism is a viable option. Put differently, answering an assignment by licit means is subject to practical qualifications. More specifically, we may formulate the operating moral and practical principle along these lines: when writing conditions are felt to be disengaging or otherwise onerous, fraudulent plagiarism is morally permissible. It will be further noted that the determination for this permissibility rests with the student and that, in such instances, the teachers are to be

78 regarded as having provoked their students if not unto wrath then despair or discouragement.

Due to the weight assigned the feelings of the relatively powerless student in this instance, a care ethicist might and often will view this as the failure of the teacher-student relationship for which the more powerful teacher must assume responsibility. Considering a deontological view, it might be surmised that students regard their teachers as having forfeited their right to authority when that authority impinges over much on the convenience of the student, though it is doubtful on either a Kantian or natural-law view that any such forfeiture has truly occurred or is warranted in the abstract. Since, in Simmons’s view, the student has possibly reasoned that special circumstances permit skirting the rules, an act utilitarian, who “judges the morality of an action by whether the action itself produces the most utility, or at least as much utility as any other action” (Harris 127), may countenance fraudulent plagiarism. Very likely, only an act utilitarian could find cogent justification for the action given the relevant moral premises, and a care ethicist might be willing to excuse it, whereas a deontologist, a rule utilitarian, and likely a virtue ethicist, would furnish no excuse or justification for the action. An objectivist could point to no violation of the moral side constraints and would say the difficulty of the task is simply part of the “normal risks of existence” (Rand 55).

I want to pause to consider Zwagerman further. Clearly, Zwagerman writes from the perspective that critical pedagogy furnishes the best approach and moral rationale for managing a classroom, playing down—while having to acknowledge—the hierarchical nature of the relationship between teacher and student and encouraging students to find ways to liberate themselves from oppressive social structures. Such a perspective seems to place Zwagerman within the position of a care ethics, so that, in his case, it is care ethics and not objectivism, deontological ethics, or virtue ethics that allows fraudulent plagiarism to occur seemingly with

79 moral if not official approval. Of course, a care ethicist would say that the very way the teaching of writing is done does not often make allowances for certain relationships that make rules likely to be followed. The practical syllogism thus becomes:

Major premise: Under conditions I feel to be onerous, fraudulent plagiarism is a

viable option.

Minor premise: I feel these are onerous conditions.

Conclusion: Fraudulent plagiarism is a viable option.

Alistair Pennycook, also noting the plagiarism of disengaged students, suggests the “resistance” status of plagiarism—what, I add, Ira Shor might call a “performance strike”—invites further investigation (223; cf. Randall). Investigative interest in and sympathetic response to fraudulent resistance to classroom assignments converges on issues of legitimate authority as enacted and recognized in satisfactory assignments, a question that will be further explored in Chapter 4

(“Plagiarism-Proof Assignment”). For now, it is worth recalling that, for critical pedagogy, with its goals of what Henry Giroux calls a “radically democratic classroom,” may not “signal a retreat from teacher authority as much as […] using authority reflexively to provide the conditions for students to exercise intellectual rigor, theoretical competence, and informed judgments” (Giroux n.p.; cf. George 105). A lack of student opportunity to exercise intellectual rigor working under an overly invigilating authority seems, to be sure, to be Zwagerman’s chief complaint and, according to some, may qualify as oppression (see Young 37). For more on this question, see the “Mandatory Revision” section of Chapter 5.

Plagiarism Is Collaboration with Texts

Consonant with her statement on collaborative pedagogy in her article of the same name in Tate, Rupiper, and Schick’s A Guide to Composition Pedagogies, here, at some considerable length, is Howard arguing that patchwriting be adopted as a central pedagogical concept:

Imagine a composition program that treated patchwriting not as an ethical

transgression subject to dismissal from college, but as a pedagogical issue on the

moral plane of a comma splice. Imagine a writing program that responded to

patchwriting not with punishment but with instruction in the source material.

Imagine a writing program that treated the patchwriter not as an ethical

transgressor nor even as a bumbler, but as a student laudably striving to learn.

[…] And imagine a composition teacher who freely acknowledged that she

routinely patchwrites, and who taught her students how to do it skillfully. With

how much respect would her students regard her, and how easy would she find

her case for promotion and retention? […] The possibility that a writer

collaborates with texts, appropriating and manipulating their language and ideas

as a means of understanding the texts and gaining membership in the community

that values those texts, substantially undermines the hierarchical discourse regime

that separates error-ridden students from perfected published texts. (“New” 94)

In a similar vein, here is a key statement in her case for the “fundamental” redefinition of patchwriting: “patchwriting might not be so much a sin into which writers lapse as it is a fundamental part of the writing process” (Standing 8). (I will say more about this statement in the Chapter 6 in the section “Remaining Challenges.”)

Howard’s writings contain two important metaphors I explore here. First, “collaboration with texts” has a certain salience precisely because one does not ordinarily collaborate with texts, which are inert, but with people. In contrast to another phrase, “working with texts,” in which texts is a kind of medium (working with clay, for instance), the phrase “collaboration with texts” implies a kind of partnership. The tenor—and it is especially difficult to speak out of metaphorical language even here—is that the text helps to accomplish a task without which the task would not have been performed as well, as efficiently, or as completely, as it has turned out with that text’s assistance. In the paragraphs to follow, I will show how this metaphor reconfigures the text from the passive agent’s role denoted by the very word plagiarism to playing an active agent’s role as a co-laborer.

The vehicle, most significantly, turns the text into a person—hence the metaphor is an instance of personification—a person with the requisite skills to match or rival those of the other co-laborer, i.e., the writer in compositional partnership with the text. This is no mere ornamental personification, however. As with other metaphors I examine here, this figure advances serious claims about the nature of writing with sources. Howard, in her chapter on “Collaborative

Pedagogy,” asserts that such collaboration, an activity she short-hands in several instances as

“writer/text collaboration,” “inescapably violate[s] the notion of the solitary author” (67), thereby showing that the other author here is not the real-life author of the text enlisted for collaborative assistance, but the text itself. Rhetoricians surely will recall Socrates’s remarks in the Phaedrus that writing is no substitute for a real, human interlocutor.3 Any dialectic is impossible with a piece of writing except where it may be enjoyed in a kind of fantasy, an

3 Socrates’s other objection, of course, was that writing would result in the loss of memory. For the record, I am not convinced that Socrates was wrong about that.

82 experience in this solitary respect no different from, say, shouting down the televised image of a disfavored political candidate. Writing cannot do what a person, in person, can do.4

It is an objection precisely of this order Howard has anticipated. Because, as she says,

“the writer is actually the written, it is in part the source text that does the writing.” The text, she avers, “does not have to have a consciousness and volition in order to exert some control over the outcome of the collaboration” (Standing 34). Not any “indebtedness” to another text, but its being “too obviously indebted,” Howard says, is the problem with any resulting plagiarized text

(34). In such a case, the text has effectively gone from co-laborer to foreman or supervisor, subordinating the writer to something more like (to mix my metaphors) a dutiful scribe taking dictation. Every which way, then, for Howard, the source text exercises unconscious, indeed inanimate, agency and at the very least stands equal in force to the writer. Admittedly, Howard’s characterization is compelling, and it would prove difficult to deny given an often important poststructuralist assumption about language and writing: writers do not use but are used by language. Does poststructuralism mean, then, that there is no free will in the act of writing?

What, after all, is to stop a writer from allowing or permitting too much control if the writer is inscribed by the text s/he reads? By what means, in view of this linguistic force, is a writer to exert the proper amount of control? Instruction? Whence does this come? What determines this? “Textual practices” (Standing 14)? Where, then, do these come from? “Systematic forms of activity” (Whose 141), perhaps. Are these also language at work, inscribed by still other texts? Is it, like the turtles in the famous story, texts all the way down?

4 I am, of course, not unaware of the irony here. In siding with Socrates on the point that those arguing with texts do not quite accomplish what people working face to face can do toward the same goal, I am also recommending that collaboration with people face to face is superior to working with texts alone. Socrates would doubtless reply I missed his larger point about writing.

Answers to these questions are as complicated as the questions themselves and could, traced far enough, bring us to those questions about the murky, mysterious origins of language as an operation of biological and environmental forces and the origin of semiotics as a whole— questions not within the purview of the present project.5 In the immediate context of the “too obviously indebted” (plagiarized) text, however, what has likely occurred?

Presumably, the writer feels drawn to the expression that has asserted itself too obviously into the “final” text. Howard, undoubtedly correct on the score, says there is in many instances a kind of extenuating “reverence” for the source text when patchwriting occurs (Standing 7; see also “Plagiarisms” 797). It occurs because the expropriated/appropriated prose contains qualities, aesthetic or ideational, the writer finds arresting and compelling. It may also be used, as patches are, to “strengthen or protect a weak area” (“Patch”). In Howard’s words, “The patchwriter recognizes the profundity of the source and strives to join the conversation in which the source participates” (Standing 7), so that the patchwriter is a little like the child who stands next to dad, imitating him while he shaves. So characterized, patchwriting is cute—an earnest and innocent expression of a desire to “be like” a role model when one grows up.

Anyone who has ever seriously attempted writing with sources, or just any serious writer, is on the most intimate terms with this sudden, almost irresistible impulse, to imitate. But not all such imitation arises from pure admiration: the impulse can come tinged with the slightest envy.

5 Parting from the discussion, I observe that the role of text in the act of writing here described by Howard parallels Baudrillard’s description of the “seductive” qualities of objects, in a reversal of usual descriptions of desiring subjects: “We have always lived off the splendor of the subject and the poverty of the object. […] In our philosophy of desire, the subject retains absolute privilege, since it is the subject that desires. But everything is inverted if one passes on to the thought of seduction. There, it’s no longer the subject which desires, it’s the object which seduces. Everything comes from the object and everything returns to it, just as everything started with seduction, not with desire” (qtd. in Faigley 213). How an object can “seduce” raises the same questions here posed to predicating co-laboring to text.

Harold Bloom has well noted the experience in his Anxiety of Influence, a source Howard rightly nods to (“Plagiarisms” 790). I have nothing but sympathy for one of English literature’s most accomplished stylists and confirmed aesthetes, Oscar Wilde, who, when in response to a friend’s witticism enviously remarked, “I wish I had said that.” “Don’t worry, Oscar, you will,” as

Monty Python renders the instant reply. Even more extraordinary and delightfully shameless,

Wilde has said, “Of course I plagiarise [sic]. It is the privilege of the appreciative man” (qtd. in

Saint-Amour 61). It will doubtless be noted that the wish to have said something, or to have said it in a certain way, betrays a proprietary impulse that stands in stark contradiction to Wilde’s socialistic tendencies, which have been linked to his “communistic” ideas about plagiarism

(Saint-Amour 62). Of course, for a linguistic communist, the term plagiarism would be about as applicable as the term adultery in a free-love society.6

But desire to imitate is not the only suggested cause for patchwriting. In “The Ethics of

Plagiarism,” Howard says that patchwriting happens when the writer runs up against text she cannot quite wrap her head around (82; cf. “Plagiarisms” 802; qtd. in Price 109). (If true, perhaps a lack of understanding is also largely responsible for the admiration discussed above.)

This is, she says, a form of appropriation that is not only common but “necessary” (82), a claim she urges as a defense against charges of criminality (83). In Standing in the Shadow of Giants,

Howard recounts how she, as a teacher of writing, came to conclude, after failing many students for it, that patchwriting, so common among first-year students, is ultimately evidence that students “were learning, not cheating” (xviii, italics in original).

6 I would add further that the desire to have said something well may be classified not merely as aestheticism, for which Wilde was famous, but a partial sympathy with that philosophy of composition Fulkerson called “formalist” (“Four” 431). So long, then, as people desire to see something well said, there will be room for formalism in writing.

As mentioned earlier, Howard is explicit that her landing on this questionable metaphor has a goal besides edifying explanation in mind: destroying the solitary author. The metaphor of collaboration functions as, and is intended to be, a means to grant equal status to a text and so render indefensible the claim that a writer works alone when he works with source materials. In other words, even when a writer is alone with a source text, she really is not: theory, and currently accepted pedagogy, simply does not allow for it. To assume the solitary author,

Howard says, serves only to undercut the notions of a liberatory pedagogy founded on critical theory. Autonomous authors, derided as theoretically and historically passé, cannot in Howard’s view be allowed to “colonize composition studies,” or liberatory pedagogy will be effectively replaced by liberal culture (“New” 88). Also mentioned earlier, however, Howard’s critique arguably accords to text too powerful a role in the production of new text and takes away from the writer the credit to which she is due. Darsie Bowden’s calling this dynamic a kind of discourse management or, more precisely, source-integrated writing a kind of “‘managed’ discourse” (Mythology 75) in this respect appears much more accurate while also accommodating the less negotiable tenets of critical theory: it allows the text to have its incontrovertibly important and indeed influential role, acknowledges the poststructuralist assertion “that discourses […] are intrinsically multiple, dialogic, and mutable” (74), and, at the same time, locates control where it really and properly belongs, that is, the writer. On this view, the dynamic at work in composition with source texts may be summed up by appropriation of an old aphorism: text proposes, writer disposes.

I here return to my promise to consider the way “collaboration” reconfigures text from a passive to an active agent. Plagiarism, literally kidnapping, makes text (or words, or ideas) an abducted slave, or perhaps a child, a vehicle portraying obvious and, to be sure, horrific

86 passivity. Where, on the other hand, text is a collaborator, a co-laborer, nothing close to abduction enters the picture, despite Howard’s stated concerns that students under the aegis of collaborative pedagogy would make themselves vulnerable to suspicions of plagiarism

(“Collaborative” 67; “New” 88). In both collaboration and plagiarism, the agency of the student is generally fully assumed; with writer/text collaboration, however, agency for both parties is pronounced and decidedly shared. If the proposition is true that the student labors with the text, it is equally true that the text labors with the student. Should collaboration with texts be the controlling metaphor in a discussion of plagiarism, it would likely have the effect of playing down the agency of the writer in question. “Writer/text collaboration” relieves the writer of a fair amount of responsibility.

Yet, whereas collaboration brings forward the agency of the text, patchwriting completely nullifies it and, in effect, brings us back to the assumption that writers, not texts, are in ultimate if not primary control: writers, not text, do the patching. Patchwriting, again, a key term in Howard’s work in plagiarism studies, is, in one subordinate respect, a revival of a metaphor many of us may have long ago forgotten was a metaphor: text.7 With good reason,

English studies draws one of its most basic units of analysis from the world of the woven fabric, and patchwriting as a term is a perfectly logical extension of this controlling analytical metaphor.

The tenor of the text metaphor is that writing is the product of constituent parts brought (perhaps skillfully) together to form a cohesive whole. (Such attention to skillfulness is sometimes retained, for example, in the use of the sometimes deprecatory, sometimes laudatory term

“purple patch” [Harmon and Holman 414].) Patchwriting’s tenor is that a small piece from one text has been brought together with another text to form a single, larger work. But, I want to

7 Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca call such metaphors “dormant” metaphors (405).

87 suggest, Howard’s own definition for patchwriting, which I consider below, is not entirely satisfactory and, because Howard, a much cited authority on plagiarism studies, claims that “all writing is patchwriting” (Standing 14), it is important that we understand just what this means.

First, however, I want also to suggest that the vehicle “patch” in patchwriting crucially implicates the very integrity of the act of textual composition and disposition—that is, the act of writing. Patching is not neutral. Google on the first page alone yields ten results for the phrase

“lovely patchwork quilt.” On the other hand, Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s phrase “patched-up business” in Pride and Prejudice marks her sneering comment on Lydia’s disgracefully forced marriage to Wickham, the too-lately-discovered scoundrel (Austen 246). Patches on the elbows of tweed jackets are signs of prestige and distinction and could be viewed as a sartorial mark of quasi-Veblenian excess; patches on the knees of jeans could be construed as the ignominious signs of poverty. Where do the patches of Howard’s work belong? It is difficult to say. On the one hand, they are closer to the patches on the homey if wholesome patchwork quilts and the patches on the learned elbows of academics in status but in function closer to the repairing patch on a pair of jeans. Perhaps Howard’s “patch” encompasses all of these. My contention, however, is that “patch” gets at the very heart of plagiarism both as an aesthetic tactic as well as a way to buttress otherwise (relatively) unimpressive attempts to write with authority: to repeat, the Oxford English Dictionary Online gives its first definition of a patch as “a piece of material attached to something to repair a hole or tear, or to strengthen or protect a weak area” (n.p., emphasis added). Connotative valences in “patch” could well be partly responsible for the evidently wide reception of Howard’s thesis.

As I say, patchwriting is not clearly defined. It seems perfectly clear, to repeat, that the general tenor of this metaphor is that smaller pieces of text are being combined with other, larger

88 pieces of text; any tenor more specific than that not consistent with this general idea would be a nonsensical application of the word “patch” in the textile sense. Howard has defined patchwriting as “deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for- one synonym substitutes” (qtd. in “Plagiarisms” 788; “New” 90). To repeat the dictionary definition yet once more, a patch is “a piece of material attached to something to repair a hole or tear, or to strengthen or protect a weak area” (OED Online). This definition would certainly suggest that an academic writer uses a source text as a patch to strengthen weaknesses in one’s own argument or style. Yet what remains unclear is whether the source text has yet another piece of material attached to it (call it Patch Type A) or whether the source text itself is that attached piece of material (call it Patch Type B). Take Patch Type A first. If the source text is that which receives the patch, as seems implied by Howard’s definition, the patchwriting process may be crudely diagrammed as follows, with st for “source text”:

Take st  cut a hole (change st)  sew a patch (insert new words to st)

On the other hand, in the same article in which she cites her definition, Howard mentions “the source from which he or she is patchwriting” (799, emphasis added), not on which, which seems to suggest an entirely different image, that is, Patch Type B: the source text itself is the patch sewn on to the larger text being composed. That process may be diagrammed, equally crudely, as follows, with tt for target text:

Leave hole in tt (allow room for st)  sew a patch onto tt (draw from st)

Anyone familiar with the process of composing with sources knows the word “patchwriting” may aptly be applied in both cases. It is the case that one “cuts a piece” from a source text, takes that piece, and then “sews” it to the written text to “patch” the “hole,” that is, allowing the source text to furnish the next words desired in the target text. All academic writing, to be sure, is

89 patchwriting of this kind. Equally, it is the case that one cuts holes in the source text by the methods listed in Howard’s definition and then patches those holes through one’s “own words” or, in less capable hands perhaps, those suggested by a thesaurus. In each and every instance where source texts are used in paraphrase or summary, both processes occur together, so that the result is really one patch upon another, that is, Patch Type A patches Patch Type B. Where direct quotation is the method of citation, Patch Type B is the result. Academic writing sees plenty of both, yet if it is true that all writing is patchwriting, again, what does this mean?

Howard is insistent, leaving no room for any writing that is not patchwriting: “When I believe I am not patchwriting, I am simply doing it so expertly that the seams are no longer visible—or I am doing it so unwittingly that I cannot cite my sources” (“New” 91). One way or the other, then, we are all patchwriters, and Howard is a happily admitted and skillful one. Fairly aware of her metaphor, she speaks of “seams” and their apparent absence as the sign of the

“expert” textile worker. Accepting the proposition that writing may be spoken of in terms of a fabric, as all of English studies does, it seems only logical that smaller pieces could be called, quite unproblematically, “patches” and that all writing is, as she contends, patched together.

Or does it? The vehicle leaves us with several other questions. How do we distinguish a writing thread from a writing strip, or a strip from a patch, or a patch from a ream? Is the patch the atom, the indivisible unit, of the text? Surely not. Of what is a text made? Is the patch the utterance of Bakhtinian genre? Surely not. In fabric work, how a patch is created, after all, depends either on how the cut is made from a preexisting larger piece of fabric, or else it is created out of smaller threads and is (typically) a stage on the way to completion of a larger fabric. Surely patches are not formed of smaller patches? What, in writing, are the threads?

What are the larger pieces of fabrics or continuous reams? Do they exist? Is writing a textile

90 without thread and without ream? Depending on the size and shape of the cut, could the resulting piece indeed more appropriately be styled a “strip”? In light of such questions, it begins to appear very misleading to suggest that all writing is patchwriting, if this metaphor implies at the same time, as it certainly does, that all writing is more like a patchwork quilt than like a seamless garment. Textiles may follow predetermined patterns, to be sure, but there is nothing in that to suggest that textiles are wholly constituted of patches. I would suggest the phrasing be revised to the more defensible, “All academic writing”—Howard’s real concern—

“involves patches of other writing, whether Patch Type A, Patch Type B, or both.”

Howard’s considerable success at redefining patchwriting as inevitable because natural for several scholars cannot be understood apart from her use of these two metaphors, her personification of text as a co-laborer and her fabric-based metaphor of the patch. She has, as has been shown, disallowed the writer a power that more traditional understandings of authorship allow, a refusal she issues on theoretical as well as moral grounds. Novice writers, who are attempting to get the hang of academic writing, she ways, will patchwrite, especially when overawed or mystified by the source texts with which they labor. The result is the following syllogism:

Major premise: What is natural is not immoral.

Minor premise: Patchwriting is natural.

Conclusion: Patchwriting is not immoral.

Notably, Howard, who strikes me as a confirmed care ethicist, has asserted a definition that, if generally accepted, would seem to force even the most unbending ethicists to yield sizeable ground to the Ameliorist view. As Harris explains, natural law, the most “absolutist” of moral theories, allows that the natural, with some important qualifications, and the good are often

91 practically synonymous (93; 88). If natural law would thus admit patchwriting as natural and permissible, likely other, less stringent moral theories will as well. Considering ethicists more broadly, then, patchwriting, which counts for much of student plagiarism—and as Howard proposes—is effectively removed from the harsher responses plagiarism has traditionally invited.

(For a contrasting view, however, see the final section of Chapter 6, “Conclusion.”)

But is this all? Far from it. If what theory says is true and that the student is written by the target discourse, the text is not exactly a co-laborer and is, as I said before, a foreman. Yet to call a student a co-laborer with a text is to assign to the text no more, and no less, than equal status. Somehow, the student and the text must learn to work together equally because this is precisely the kind of writing work, on Howard’s view, that students are expected to produce. As already mentioned, they do not work alone. Rather, they are enmeshed in a relationship with another text—not, to repeat, the absent writer of that text mediated by her work—and, as with all group projects, students must learn to accept, even if grudgingly, that they have an important but not too important part to play in the successful execution of that project. The kind of oppositionist thinking that does not belong in care ethics (Harris 206) now does not belong in a textual care ethics.8 To the contrary, Harris explains, “Interdependence is valued over independence and autonomy” (204). Curiously, then, the moral imperatives of this ethical view have fused with the tenets of textual Theory to deny the isolation of the student writer—and, to be sure, all writers—and to assert an inescapable interconnectivity.

Individualists may balk at the theoretical and pedagogical notion of being unable to escape from this deeply interconnected textuality. As with Hitchens’s Big Brother god, there is

8 Intriguingly, Howard worries in her “Understanding ‘Internet Plagiarism’” that the “relations of teachers, students, and texts”—note the three parties in this relationship—will be threatened by federal scrutiny enabled by Turnitin and the Patriot Act (emphasis added). See Chapter 4 in the section “The Threat of Getting Caught.”

92 no getting away from this relationship; it, too, is inescapable, and it claims you “absolutely”

(Davidson; Ondracek). Unlike the case with that scrutinizing, punishing god, however, here the premise is held to lead to far friendlier conclusions by tearing down walls erected by individualist conceptions of authorship. Indeed, one might suggest that it is because of this denial that the student writer ever truly works alone that a mitigated response must follow: if the student does not act alone in any patchwritten work, then, as mentioned above, the student cannot assume all the responsibility for the product. That syllogism looks, then, like this:

Major premise: Collaborative works merit shared praise or blame.

Minor premise: Academic writing is a project shared between writer and text.

Conclusion: Academic writing merits praise or blame shared between writer and

text.

Even if this interconnectivity is inescapable, Howard admits it must assume a certain form (“Plagiarisms” 801), and that requires some work on the students’ part. I will consider

Howard’s recommendations for preventing plagiarism in Chapter 4, as well as her suggestions for responding to plagiarism in Chapter 5.

Plagiarism Is Bad Manners/Breach of Convention

One of the more compelling arguments against focusing on citation conventions in terms of documentation style is advanced by Kurt Schick in his October 2011 piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education. He reports, with parenthetical and ironic imitation of the bewilderment of the clueless, a writing center that “stinks of fear as students struggle to decipher APA, MLA, AP, and Chicago (or is it Turabian?) documentation styles, which seem as alien and absurd to them as a typewriter” (n.p.). Student attitudes—in this instance, fear and mystification—here enter the forefront for consideration. Citing student willingness to cooperate as the litmus test of the

93 worth of a course requirement, Schick appears to have embraced the approach of the pragmatist who, finding himself unable to beat or improve ’em, can only join ’em: “We cannot control how much time and effort students invest in a particular writing assignment; we can only influence how they distribute their energies” (n.p.). Alternatively, perhaps the statement encodes an

Epictetusian Stoicism. Either way, not only are students frightened and mystified, they are also presumed to be rather poor managers of their time—no doubt, in many cases, a root cause for much of the fear and mystification experienced during visits to the writing center that are equal parts panicked and perfunctory. Derided as the “preoccupation of persnickety professors,” formal citation conventions, Schick avers, only needlessly make a difficult thing more difficult.

With a view to those skills most necessary for undergraduates, Schick dismisses the need for highly formalized citation conventions because they will be useful only to scholars, by which he means graduate students and those beyond.

Rightly so, Schick wants students to find the best sources and to make cogent and articulate arguments. He proposes that students give only the basic bibliographic information while they learn to “effectively and responsibly locate, evaluate, and integrate other writers’ words and ideas into their own writing” (n.p.). If a teacher assigns sources out of a reader held in common by the class, I would add, it may help to check whether that quotation has been entered correctly by providing information parenthetically in a page number. Schick takes for granted that learning citation conventions will take valuable, considerable time away from producing good writing. While learning citation conventions involves, to be sure, something of an opportunity cost, does learning these documentation conventions require so much time that one’s writing may suffer as a result of that learning? Are documentation styles so knotty that they ought not to be expected of undergraduates?

Though Schick says nothing about plagiarism one way or the other in this piece, he dances around the issue simply by making citation conventions his central concern. We may link

Schick to recent statements on plagiarism because they view the presentation and acknowledgement of sources as formalities really mastered, and—in Schick’s view—really only to be properly expected, from experts in the field or from those seriously embarked in the process of becoming experts (i.e., graduate students). For Schick, all that matters is that students use a good source, not a bad one, and integrate their words effectively. Failure to do so, of course, could result in plagiarism (again, a word Schick never brings up). Proper source usage is a sign of vigorous intellectual life unnecessarily restricted by formalist pedagogy.

Schick’s piece will serve as a springboard for a similar characterization of citation conventions in recent plagiarism studies. I focus in this section on two comparisons: table manners and the rules of golf. Bronwyn Williams advances the first in his short article, “Trust,

Betrayal, and Authorship”; Stanley Fish advances the second in his twin New York Times opinion pieces, “Plagiarism is Not a Big Moral Deal” and “The Ontology of Plagiarism, Part

Two.”

Williams extends Howard’s logic that patchwriting is inevitable for novice students and adduces the following analogy: “When we ask students to take ideas and words from others, but only in a certain way and not too much, we are asking them to learn a nuanced set of cultural attitudes that are not unlike knowing how and when to speak, eat, and use a napkin at a formal restaurant” (351). In other words, learning how to cite sources properly is a lot like learning finer table manners. Williams is here explicit about his own tenor: learning to write per academic conventions is “learn[ing] a complex set of cultural attitudes” and, I would add—and so would Valentine (see next section)—practices. His vehicle, table manners, gestures in the

95 direction of the club marked by its characteristically high if not exactly unique expectations for behavior but which, at the same time, is perfectly willing to allow novices a shot (and a delicious meal), provided proper behavior and, of course, the means to pay. As far as pictures of academic life go, Williams’s is hard to beat. Colleges do expect and, perhaps more often than not, have to teach the written and intellectual behaviors and writerly courtesies they expect and which sustain continued membership. For Williams, citing properly is a matter of “cultural custom” and, citing

James Paul Gee, maintains that these customs are a long time in the acquiring (351).

Fish advances the same tenor. In doing so, Fish also rejects the pervasive plagiarism metaphor of stealing because, he says, unlike proscriptions against theft, citation rules are far from “culturally universal.” As Fish explains, some sports positively thrive on stealing, deception, and “obstructing” (baseball, football, and basketball, respectively):

But in golf, if you so much as move the ball accidentally while breathing on it far

away from anyone who might have seen what you did, you must immediately

report yourself and incur the penalty. (n.p.)

A bit further down, Fish goes on:

Golf’s rules have been called arcane and it is not unusual to see play stopped

while a P.G.A. official arrives with rule book in hand and pronounces in the

manner of an I.R.S. official. Both fans and players are aware of how peculiar and

“in-house” the rules are; knowledge of them is what links the members of a small

community, and those outside the community (most people in the world) can be

excused if they just don’t see what the fuss is about.

Plagiarism is like that; it’s an insider’s obsession. (n.p.)

Having gone from describing the rules of golf and their meting out, Fish then reaches for another analogy by comparing golf officials to IRS agents. By a simple transitive property, IRS agents are likened to college professors who award penalties to students for failing to follow the rules. While perhaps not intended all that seriously, the language of “obsession,” a form of psychopathology, cannot have positive connotations. To say it is an obsession is to say a certain turn of mind, presumably cultivated by continued intellectual and textual practice, is involved in the use. Academic good manners, however, do involve acknowledgment. “I am deeply indebted to,” that phrase of many an acknowledgement page, is not an idle statement, even if looked upon by cynics as boilerplate or as a “mere formality.” Something of that “mere formality” dismissal is evident in Fish’s article.

By no means, however, does Fish reject academic convention—“if you’re in our house, you’ve got to play by our rules”—but he fully acknowledges, as other scholars do, that not everyone’s heart is in it to learn them and that those who will have no use for citation conventions beyond their college years may be “forgiven” for not caring (“Plagiarism” n.p.).

Limits on the social utility of citation practices limits, for Fish, their ethical dimension, and this limitation accounts for his tenor: it’s not a big moral deal. His “deflationary” argument, as he calls it in a follow-up article (“Ontology” n.p.), thus reduces the matter to one of numbers, both in time as well as population. Because citation conventions do not, in other words, conduce to the greatest happiness for the greatest people, the size of the moral deal evidently depends entirely on a utilitarian perspective.

Such a perspective suggests it is of little moral consequence if a matriculant really gets the hang of the manners he is likely to leave behind him forever once he’s a graduate and newly minted member of the “real world,” preparedness for which is, for so many students, both

97 ultimate goal and justification of college life and college demands. For students so purposed, learning citation conventions is at best an instrumental good but just as likely to be a necessary, if some Ameliorist arguments are to be credited, evil (see “Plagiarism is a Means to Keep the

Gates” below; see also Chapter 6). Even granting Fish’s somewhat misleading characterization of plagiarism as a narrowly academic concern, his argument potentially runs into further difficulty by invoking this utilitarian rationale: if citation does not increase pleasure for many people or decrease their pain, would it not be better simply to do away with it altogether? To be sure, if utilitarianism can furnish a justification for punishing innocent people in order to make deterrent examples of them and thereby deprive them of their basic rights (see, e.g., Ross,

“Ethics” 209; Right 56-64), perhaps, although some rule-utilitarians may demur, it can find reason to alter uniquely academic practices and prerogatives of requiring them to serve the long- term goals and needs of career-minded students and their future employers.9

If, on the other hand, teaching students to give credit where credit is due is not merely what Schick calls a “scholarly formality” but rather, inculcates habits of thought for a life well lived (as, perhaps, on a liberal-culturalist view) such teaching lends considerable moral emphasis to the course. Simply put, assigning credit for words and ideas becomes a character-building exercise, an opportunity for the operation of virtue ethics—the virtue of justice, explains

Aquinas, is according to each his due. Kantian ethical theory may find room here as well. On a

Kantian view, a student who assigns credit to a source because it is customary and not because a failure to do so may result in a lower grade is a properly moral student. Kant’s statement to the effect that no action is moral unless done for duty’s sake here has pedagogical ramifications: a

9 Fish elsewhere has been open that academia is an institution apart whose activities and practices are self-justifying (see, e.g., ForaTv). It is a bit odd, then, to see here an effective concession students who do or will not see the point of these distinctively academic practices.

98 student who baldly wishes to get a grade may well give himself permission to take advantage, shameless or not, of paper mills or fraternity files (see “Plagiarism Is a ‘Viable Option’” above); a student who believes in duty, on the other hand, will betake himself to learning the academic writing taught him and will not allow himself such an option. This of course raises the question whether teachers can reasonably expect to instill a sense of duty in any student, and the question is admittedly more than fair. But, mutatis mutandis, this is the question a care ethicist must likewise confront: will the teacher’s attempts to forge meaningful relationships with students universally result in students’ desiring to please the teacher and so to learn what the teacher has to teach?

It may be replied that virtue is aristocratic and so exclusivist or elitist and that duty, because sufficiently antiquated even as a term (see also Anscombe, “Modern”), is likely to appeal only to a few. If the goal, then, really is to educate all students, whatever their background, given the alternatives, a care ethics looks like the way to go. The first reply appears to be a simple case of the genetic fallacy, but to both it might be said that those very genes that encode the genetic fallacy are unavoidably there, as one may see when reading Williams and

Fish, in whom the same intriguing tension if not contradiction begins to surface. By likening academic citation norms to the behaviors of a highly formal setting, each all but admits that these practices are exclusive in the sense that they are not to be exhibited except by the properly cultivated and trained. Why not, then, add virtue? Why not, then, add duty? Both, after all, entail a kind of training, too. These and similar questions will be considered in the following chapters. For the moment, it is noteworthy that Williams recommends his preferred pedagogical-ethical stance in a section he calls “Solitary authors or social writers?” in which the more prestigious “author,” isolated like the noble gases on the periodic table, is happily

99 exchanged for the presumably more democratic, everyperson’s “writer.” So, then, while on the one hand Williams wishes students to acquire textual manners that admit comparison to the refined behaviors of the privileged, on the other he wants to be as inclusive about it as possible.10

The same tension appears in an open invitation to golf.

Williams and Fish permit themselves to strike the moral equivalence between plagiarism, specifically insufficient citation, and forms of bad manners in highly specialized contexts because, in their view, a form of bad manners in a highly specialized context is precisely what plagiarism often amounts to. Williams’s and Fish’s metaphors, then, further a definition: plagiarism is about written manners, and they imply something like the following practical syllogism:

Major premise: We should expect breaches of etiquette from the unknowing.

Minor premise: Plagiarism [patchwriting] is a breach of etiquette the unknowing

make.

Conclusion: We should expect patchwriting from the unknowing.

Indeed, T. Kenny Fountain and Lauren Fitzgerald would add that “citational practices and text- usages [are] instantiations of community values, conventions, and epistemologies that most academics who have already spent years negotiating their own subject position take for granted”

(119). Citational practice, in other words, involves a requisite shift in the mental life of the person learning it. This brings us, then, to a related metaphor.

10 Doug Hesse, in his Foreword to Smit’s The End of Composition Studies, makes a similar distinction between composition and writing, albeit with certain significant differences (ix-xii). Just what “writer” and “writing” denotes and connotes for members of the field and must be determined by context.

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Plagiarism Is a Literacy Practice?

Kathryn Valentine’s article “Plagiarism as Literacy Practice” raises questions about the usage of the word “practice,” important because, as I read the article, the term is not entirely unambiguous. As used, the term is a metaphor, but the vehicle is not clear. In fact, there appear to be multiple candidates, and depending on the vehicle, the tenor may be accordingly refined in different ways.

It might first be reasonably asked whether to call plagiarism a literacy practice really qualifies as a metaphor. I argue that it does because “practice” as used here clearly does the work that all metaphors characteristically do: it takes one thing or activity and places it in the light of another, usually from a strikingly different sphere of activity. Ultimately, “practice” refers to highly technical and typically prestigious professions, two to be precise: the Oxford

English Dictionary Online names both medicine and law, in that order, in its first definition, that is, “the carrying out or exercise of a profession.” Those two professions are repeated when the word is understood “as a count noun: the business or premises of a doctor or lawyer” (n.p.).

Practice, then, while not in current usage exclusive to one sphere of activity—the practice of teaching, for instance, is a fairly common expression—the term evokes the “carrying out or exercise of a profession,” or possibly a trade, and thus limits the image considerably, quite possibly to those so often named together, those of the sometimes praised, sometimes derided, physician and attorney. Whatever one’s opinions of both professions, it cannot be denied that both often mark the very picture of considerable learning and, of course, middle-class respectability.

But Valentine, for her usage, does not appear to depend on the definition above considered. She draws immediately and explicitly from the work of David Barton and Mary

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Hamilton, who introduced a new term to literacy studies. Does their usage, then, evoke respectable professions? Literacy practices, Barton and Hamilton assert, are just “something people do with reading and writing” (Valentine 89). These practices may be found, say Barton and Hamilton, “in the space between thought and text” (qtd. in Valentine 89). This simply means that literacy practices are not found on the page but in the act of writing itself, perhaps much as medical practice is not found in, say, a set of stitches but in the act of stitching or as legal practice is not found in the written brief but in the act of writing that brief. Surely, then, literacy practice “between thought and text” lies the act of writing. Valentine’s article in this light would appear to focus on the act of writing or, as she terms it, the “work” that goes into writing as well as preparing to write (103), thereby placing emphasis on process rather than product. As an artifact of that process, the written product may be an object to be considered primarily in the context of carrying out a profession.

Or yet again, and perhaps more likely, Barton and Hamilton (and hence Valentine) use(s)

“literacy practice” in the sense that sociologists and anthropologists refer to social and cultural practices, that is, the enacting of social and cultural norms and activities. I would call this the scientific use of “practice,” the usage that aims at the “purely descriptive” and as a matter of principle eschews any normative judgments, since to pronounce judgment would be to apply one’s moral and cultural standard where it does not properly belong. Given Valentine’s holding

“ethical binaries” at arm’s length in her article—and in her subtitle—this usage seems a very likely candidate for her apparently intended meaning.

Or does it? Despite her apparent grounding of her usage in Barton and Hamilton’s work,

Valentine’s role as a representative of the academy does not seem readily to permit these two usages and so makes it at least less likely that she has landed on this vehicle. Surely plagiarism

102 is not a literacy practice—a way of practicing literacy—in the sense that it is a legitimate, respectable way of carrying out a profession. In the professional sense, plagiarism can only be literacy malpractice as far as the academy and the publishing world are concerned. Moreover,

Valentine as a professor and writing center director cannot remain scientifically aloof from making evaluative claims about plagiarism considered as a social or cultural practice, either, much as a sociologist or anthropologist might be expected to do. As I will argue in the following section, professors despite their moral misgivings necessarily perform the function of gatekeepers. Surely we are not then being asked to accept that plagiarism is a perfectly legitimate expression of the student culture (see also Blum). Is plagiarism legitimate?

Yes in one sense, no in another. Valentine’s central contention seems to be this, and I quote her at some length:

Avoiding plagiarism is done not through rule following but through repeatedly

carrying out what counts as citation in a context similar to the context in which

citation will be required. In the same way that dancers repeat dance steps in

preparation for performance until they can perform without consciously thinking

about those steps, writers need to cite repeatedly and correctly (figuring out the

how, when, and why for each situation) before they can perform that citation

without thinking about it. (93)

This, it seems, is the sense in which Valentine primarily means and is most interested in practice, that is, the kind of practice that makes perfect. More precisely, she is not primarily interested in writing as the carrying out of a profession—a kind of practicing academic literacy as a profession—or as the simple living out of cultural and social norms. Rather, she is concerned with plagiarism as a kind of practicing for academic literacy as a “performance” (90). She

103 makes this clear by the above analogy of dancing. The vehicle may be aptly put in different words by C. S. Lewis, writing in another context but drawing on the same comparison: “As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance”

(Letters 4). More precisely, then, plagiarism may be evidence that one is practicing for literacy performance, much as stumbling, even to the point of falling painfully flat on one’s face, in a dance studio is evidence that one is practicing for dance recital.

Perhaps all three senses of practice are likely in some operation here, and Valentine has really loaded her article with an ambiguity that needs to be teased out. Whereas Barton and

Hamilton’s possible vehicle may ask us to look at writing as an act of exercised profession or as perhaps enactments of student culture, and thus, I suggest, to look beyond the classroom walls;

Valentine’s performance vehicle certainly directs us to look in and at the classroom as a dance studio where students go “to practice their use of sources” (93). As she puts it elsewhere, classrooms on her proposal are “spaces in the university where outsiders can more easily become insiders” (107).

Taking an Ameliorist position, Valentine argues that a plagiarized submission, rather than being evidence of a cheat, may in fact be “a failed discourse and literacy performance”—an honest mistake made by one on the road toward mastering an elegant and delicate art (96).

Valentine’s various usages of “practice” points in one direction, and that is to say that, as a literacy practice, writing academically “is an ongoing process” (97). This, it would appear, is her tenor. It will be at once evident that Valentine readily assumes the good faith of students when they fail, even miserably, in these performances; they desire to be viewed as “honest” performers in these roles, and what they require as they go to insider from outsider status is a bit of understanding and some room to practice (107).

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Perhaps not surprisingly, no word is said as to how much practice one requires.

Presumably, it takes a whole lot—ballerinas require weeks of intensive rehearsal even for a single show—but even a ballpark estimate is not afforded us. Such vagueness raises questions for writing teachers, who work in semesters and depend on deadlines. After all, if, as Valentine acknowledges, plagiarism can be evidence, even if not certain evidence, that a beginning writer is a cheat and may be treated as such, this assumes that one may be reasonably supposed to have learned the requisite citation conventions by the time one is asked to perform onstage (to submit a final draft). The dancing analogy, then, while it provides some “space to practice,” much as

Williams’s metaphor of good manners does, also fails to provide specifics about when one may be reasonably supposed to have mastered the skills. These matters, as we will see, will surface again in the following chapters.

In whatever sense one uses it, “practice” clearly has certain connotative and hence certain rhetorical values. All three senses here considered lead to certain different conclusions, and so I propose some care be exercised as to what sense is meant. In the sociological or anthropological sense, one is only going to issue invitation to the normative judgments a sociologist or anthropologist on principle refuses to but which writing teachers, by virtue of their roles, must make. “Plagiarism as literacy practice” looks much to a Traditionalist like saying “theft as economic practice” and “cheating as sexual practice.” One may be forgiven for wondering if

Valentine’s title was written deliberately to provoke an incredulous yet morbidly curious response, especially when the subtitle is “Recognizing and Rethinking Ethical Binaries.”

The only sense that will most readily make her point, of course, is the sense of practice as the kind that makes perfect—as I see it, all other senses are extraneous to this essential point.

But “practice makes perfect” does not in itself make the case for the care ethics that probably

105 animates her argument. If I may be permitted to switch metaphors, piano students will not vastly improve if the only time they practice their scales is during weekly sessions with their instructors: they must go home, sit down, and, as the expression goes, work their fingers bare. If we accept that citation conventions require as much practice as Ameliorists feel compelled to assert, then we must certainly not rely on class time alone but must send students to their dorm rooms and their libraries with the injunction that they practice, practice, practice. In making this point, I am only momentarily granting the Ameliorist premise while showing how it may be compatible with a Traditionalist conclusion more compatible with such moral theories as objectivism, virtue ethics, Kantian ethics, and natural law (each perhaps a bit more stringent in its approach than that evidently endorsed by Valentine): the student is responsible for his or her learning. Should the objection come that students’ lives outside the classroom are hectic (see

Whiteman and Gordon 28), or that students cannot be expected to dedicate themselves in this way (see Schick), and so the teacher has a moral obligation to dedicate the classroom to what the students can or will not do elsewhere, Traditionalists may reply to both arguments that one must not allow what happens outside the classroom to dictate how the classroom is to be run, and, specifically in the second case, one must not turn a student’s refusal to study into a student’s right to be accommodated where it is convenient for them.

Finally, it may be objected that I draw too sharp a line between Traditionalist and

Ameliorist views on the necessity of practicing citation conventions. To my knowledge, no one suggests that practice is inessential to getting it right. What makes the Ameliorist argument distinctive on this score is that Ameliorists assert that very much practice is needed, yet without providing further specifics about how much, and I suggest that this would have the likely intended effect of buying students more time than most Traditionalists are willing to sell. The

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Ameliorist argument absolutely depends on the mystifying, almost befuddling nature of academic writing conventions to the uninitiated, whereas the Traditionalist may tend to say that any mystification, if there, can be rather quickly, perhaps even painlessly dispelled by the simple remedy of a classroom lesson, a referral to a handbook, or some combination of these measures.

Traditionalists and Ameliorists, then, seem to be divided primarily on a matter of fact about the difficulty of acquiring these literacy skills. However, even if the Ameliorists are generally if vaguely correct about the time, a Traditionalist may draw the conclusion that an exhortation to practice may have to suffice, understanding the seriously devoted students may heed the advice, whereas the less serious have made the conscious decision to fail or something worse.

Plagiarism Is a Means to Keep the Gates

In composition studies, the gate belongs to a broader metaphor class we may identify, after the fashion of Lakoff and Johnson, with a simple clause structured subject + linking verb + predicate nominative: “REQUIREMENTS ARE BARRIERS” (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 4). I would first like to explore the vehicle before turning to the tenor. Gates, unlike walls, may be opened and closed with variable ease in accord with their purpose to allow a flow of traffic in and out of an enclosure whose security is presumed to be vital to the integrity of its holdings and activities. On a neutral view, the tenor for this metaphor means that plagiarism is a way to bar some students from entering academic life while allowing others to pass through.11 As much as any metaphor in play in this language-game, “gatekeeper” may be one of the most common as well as the most revealing about how teachers view themselves and their role in not only

11 As I see it, metaphors of the gate and gatekeepers are only a logical, and perhaps inevitable, extension of the metaphor of “passage” and “progress” that frames and controls the way we think of academic life, including other essential terms such as “curriculum.” It is a matter of personal curiosity that whereas the metaphor is included in the official recognition that one has completed a “course” (there it is again) and is thereupon authorized to attempt another, which we call “passing,” is not retained in its inseparable partner in dichotomy, “failing.”

107 academia but as social and cultural authorities. It is also revealing of how the institution is viewed and how the students are viewed.

By no stretch is the use of the gatekeeper metaphor in composition confined to the subject of plagiarism. More often than not, “gatekeeper” is a devil term whose mere deployment is advanced as a shorthand repudiation of the practices to which it refers. For instance, Sharon

Crowley, in her New Abolitionist “Composition’s Ethic of Service” in her Composition in the

University asserts “the [universal] requirement [of first-year composition] fulfills the gatekeeper function” in addition to performing the un-American or at least anti-democratic task of not allowing students to speak for themselves about what is essential to their respective curricula

(262). In her “Personal Essay,” Crowley raises the same objection, this time with a variation on the gatekeeping metaphor that comes a mite more politically charged: “The required first-year course still serves American universities as a border checkpoint, the institutional site where students either provide proper identification or retreat to wherever they came from” (231). In light of such emphatic statements, perhaps we should pause further to consider carefully the vehicle and the tenor involved in before inquiring how it might apply to plagiarism.

For gates to function properly, they must be furnished with some person or mechanism to ensure the gate opens or remains closed when appropriate. If academia may be said in any way to have requirements, and if requirements may reasonably be conceptualized as barriers, it takes only a couple steps to arrive at the necessity for some well functioning gate-keeping mechanism in academic institutions. A gate that never opens is simply a wall, and a gate that stands wide open, or may open to anyone, is simply a breach. To fulfill their end, gates must both open and close—and at the proper time. While on its face gatekeeping would appear to have all to recommend it to common sense, scholars in plagiarism studies, perfectly experienced with

108 classroom requirements themselves, nonetheless seem insistent on using, with satisfactory efficiency, this metaphor as amenable to their purpose of separating themselves from their opponents. Why? I believe the answer may lie below.

By definition gates stand at the entrance to a preserve, and academic institutions, even open-admissions institutions, make some requirements of would-be matriculants. Academic barriers, whether the criterion of a minimum SAT score, a high school diploma, or a GED certificate; swing wide open once the matriculant produces the password. Anyone in a position to admit or turn away a would-be matriculant on the basis these requirements or, rather, a failure to meet them must by any reasonable standard admit comparison to a gatekeeper. If the gatekeeping metaphor is, as I have asserted, a devil term, it surely cannot be because academic institutions have neither requirements for entrance nor staff who uphold them. While it is the case that a gate that remains closed results in what Jeffrey Zorn calls a total “denial of access”

(Dickson et. al 734), it is also the case that no gate at all is a denial of standards—both self- evidently absurd states of affairs.

Nor is the metaphor likely to be objectionable because the metaphorical path to academic success is marked by the further barriers of prerequisites before proceeding to courses within one’s major, not, that is, so long as the idea of a university is still alive. If there are gates— however ready or not ready to spring open—marking entrance to the academy, there are also gates along the way toward graduation. This state of affairs holds regardless of pedagogy. Nina

Chordas puts it nicely, making reference to gatekeepers, yet without the usual sting: “Whether students are conversing or working in collaborative peer groups, the teacher remains a gatekeeper who hands out the final grade—a role that renders all talk of ‘non-authoritarian’ and

‘non-hierarchical’ ultimately moot” (221). So, then, not only are admissions officers

109 gatekeepers: all teachers, by virtue of their position, are gatekeepers. This is an inherent, inescapable, ineluctable fact of academic life and the dynamics of academic literacy sponsorship.

Two classes of objections present themselves: pedagogical and moral. Howard, in asserting and critiquing the gatekeeping function of first-year composition as a whole, says that plagiarism as an idea, especially when such an idea contains patchwriting, is a surreptitiously effective method to admit all “sociointellectual” classes while thrusting many of them out at the very next turn (“New” 89), that is, the first writing assignment requiring the integration of sources or, as Howard would put it, writer/text collaboration. Gatekeeping and gates, say

Fountain and Fitzgerald, are the figurative but real construction of “[m]oralistic definitions of plagiarism,” and the moralism of that definition seems to lie in the fact that plagiarism is viewed as a form of deception (118-19).

If plagiarism does the work of gatekeeping, if requirements are barriers and gates in this instance, and if it is the case that academic institutions must maintain requirements, it might begin to look as though the ground for objection is not that gatekeeping occurs, but, perhaps, that gatekeeping occurs in the composition classroom, a stance amenable to the New Abolitionist position that composition courses ought to be removed as a core requirement. Since New

Abolitionists are not, however, the only ones decrying plagiarism’s quality-control uses, the real source of objection begins to emerge: the sentiment that a student ought not to be barred from further progress toward academic success for something as seemingly insignificant as a few absent quotation marks, missing parentheses, and other marks of attribution. On this view, the question may not be whether to erect barriers to further progress, but whether these citation conventions, unimportant to anyone outside academic institutions or to those not habituated to academic ways of thinking (cf. Fish, “Plagiarism”), should be those barriers. To insist, an

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Ameliorist might argue, on being shown that all i’s be dotted and all t’s crossed before bothering to pick up the stamp of approval is the vicious mark of bureaucrats and functionaries. What has recently been defined, as we have seen, by Kurt Schick his Chronicle piece as a “citation obsession”—a neurosis—stands in the way between students and the better lives they seek, a scenario, if true, at once self-evidently ridiculous and appalling.

This view assumes, of course, that the essence of plagiarism lies in the absence of citation conventions—it does—and that this is all it lies in—it does not. A more nuanced criticism, advanced by Fountain and Fitzgerald, maintains simply that using plagiarism to hold the line against the pursuit of academic accreditation is wrong because learning to cite properly, a mark of community membership, takes, as we have already seen asserted, a long time to learn. They write that “any pedagogy that seeks to discourage plagiarism primarily through moral arguments ignores the complexity inherent in text-usage” (105). Further, the “subject position” evidenced by the apparently breezy use of citation conventions is a result “years” in the acquiring. Again, it is unrealistic to expect students in first-year writing courses to learn citation conventions in a few weeks (119; cf. Howard, “Ethics” 83-87; Valentine 97). Expecting a first-year student, presumed either to have no background in MLA or perhaps little aptitude for academic writing, to produce a properly cited text would be a little like expecting a five-month-old to walk or, to draw from Valentine’s example, like expecting a dancer to perform masterfully without the necessary practice (93). This argument hinges on a simple matter of fact, as it must be admitted that if, say, learning MLA format and proper citation etiquette is not indeed an overly strenuous requirement to meet in the course of a single semester, it may be justifiably laid upon students if learning some kind of “academic writing” is a goal of the course. For those using the gatekeeping metaphor, the practical syllogism thus becomes this:

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Major premise: We ought not to expect someone to learn in a few weeks a skill

that requires years to learn.

Minor premise: Academic source usage requires years to learn

Conclusion: We ought not to expect someone to learn academic source usage

in a few weeks.

The gatekeeping metaphor is thus an instance to support A. J. Ayer’s assertion that those who come to figurative blows on moral questions often do so not because they cannot forge mutual commitments on basic moral assumptions—no one disagrees with the above major premise—but because they cannot come to a consensus on the relevant facts of the case (110-111). No one,

Ameliorist or Traditionalist, contends that applying citation conventions, a fairly technical undertaking, ranks among the more pleasurable aspects of learning to write for academic contexts, but does the fact that many students do not successfully learn to apply those conventions in a semester the fault of the pedagogy, as Fountain and Fitzgerald argue, or does culpability rest in student hands?

Widely used in the field, the gatekeeping metaphor remains a formidable challenge to those who do not agree that plagiarism is a construct in the efficient service of oppression. The gatekeeping metaphor, I predict, however, will remain tenable or, to use William James’s language, “live” so long—and only so long—as defenders can plausibly maintain that citation conventions are too great a burden to place on the already laden backs of beginning students.

Should ever the proposition achieve disciplinary consensus that, as many a frustrated writing teacher has said, “this [source usage] isn’t hard,” the gate slams shut in the face of a culpably negligent student. If writing teachers are gatekeepers—and, despite some moral misgivings, all instructors in some sense, as I have demonstrated, must be—their discomfort with the vehicle

112 must ultimately come down to recoiling at being enforcers (see Anson, “We”), so much so that writing center directors may at times have to reassure self-doubting colleagues—or just themselves—that, sometimes, it really is permissible, even necessary, to fail a student (Nicolas).

Such self-doubt has been fostered by the literature and, I would argue, by current academic discourse: instances in composition scholarship denouncing the boundaries between

“us” and “them” are so numerous as to preclude the need for exemplification; however, consider

Andrea Lunsford, who sympathizes with Howard’s position on plagiarism, calls plagiarism (like

Schick) a “near obsession,” and explicitly identifies with care ethics in her article, “Refiguring

Classroom Authority” (68; 76; see also Lunsford and West 398). For Lunsford, hierarchy in the academic institution seems an almost unmixed evil, though, as she testified at the time, not one she could easily relinquish. She proposes looking for new ways to share authority with students on the ethical imperatives of a care ethics, even though her observations allow that such attempts are bound to be executed as noticeable failures (76). Some in composition have perhaps concluded that they, in a way perhaps unique among higher educators, are in a position to negatively affect students whom they teach. Perhaps they are correct. As “gatekeepers,” teachers of writing often meet students just as they have entered college and are in a position to award the grades that, working together with grades earned elsewhere, may determine their future progress. Yet, it may be noted, a single failed grade in a composition course is insufficient to bar all academic progress.

In light of the above evidence, it seems to me that the real reason for this discomfort with gatekeeping is that it asks teachers to become or to act like certain types of people. Many would rather not fail students for failing to master the conventions of academic “text-usage,” as

Fountain and Fitzgerald call it. Instead, they modestly propose to reframe the issue: “Perhaps the

113 goal of plagiarism pedagogy should not be simply to usher our students through the intellectual, discursive, and textual gates of our community but instead to forge with them a sense of community, a sense of shared values and epistemologies” (121). Such a statement, I repeat, amounts to compelling evidence that the objections cannot be to the idea of gatekeeping as such in the academy: it is, to the contrary, an unmistakable if grudging concession that such gates are there and inevitable. Gate and gatekeeping metaphors, then, remain intact, readily serving two purposes, the descriptive purpose of showing the way academic life is as well as the derisive purpose of critiquing a teaching that does little more than serve a gatekeeping function. For

Howard, who concedes Elbow’s sensible claim that gatekeeping and facilitating are alive and must be alive within every teacher, the problem is entirely one of identification with and emphasis on one role (gatekeeping) to the regrettable expense of the other (facilitating):

“Because the discursive formation of student plagiarism allows only for gatekeeping, it thwarts the egalitarian pedagogy in which many teachers believe themselves engaged” (Standing 31).

The consequence?

It privileges the well-prepared student writers whose education and family

background have made them comfortable with academic discourse. And it deters

the awkward student, the one who feels uncomfortable with the texts he or she

reads and who feels unable to find a voice in which to respond to them, from

entering the inner circle of academic discourse. (Standing 31)

Howard here makes two significant, and challengeable, claims. To the first, that students whose families have prepared them for academic discourse are unfairly privileged by gatekeeping, one may ask what kind of education and family background make students comfortable with academic discourse, especially when it is maintained by likeminded scholars that mastering

114 academic writing conventions requires the patient guidance of facilitating professors and perhaps years-long immersive practice? By that logic, just about any student, from just about any background, comes to first-year composition unequal to its citational tasks. (At the same time, this would suggest that instruction in citation conventions is, on any view, a pedagogical necessity.) Perhaps I misread Howard on this point, and what she really means is that some students come better prepared with attitudes, cultivated at home, appropriately reverent toward the idea of higher education and so more open to agreeing with (or, on a Foucauldian analysis, docilely submitting to) and learning its requirements. To this it might be asked by what standard writing teachers are to be held responsible for students’ attitudes formed, ex hypothesi, completely outside of the institution in which they are, presumably by their own choice, now enrolled?

The second claim, that gatekeeping is going to shut out the awkward and uncomfortable, proceeds from the same logic as the first and so raises precisely the same question. The answer in both instances is quite clearly that the standard is one that requires “we evaluate our action, at least partly, on the basis of others’ response to it. The response of others includes both their feeling and their action” (Harris 205). In other words, Howard’s statement derives its moral orientation from care ethics. When Fountain and Fitzgerald point to community-forging as the overarching goal of writing instruction (121), it becomes once again clear that care ethics underwrites the moral thinking.

If this overview and discussion of the gatekeeping metaphor has shown anything, then, it is that it is often used by care ethicists, plagiarism being the immediate application or no. Yet the charge of “gatekeeping” can be potentially misleading, since gatekeeping is one of the basic functions of any academic faculty post. As I close this section, I would propose that, in the

115 interests of precision, those deploying this metaphor in criticism add “mere” as a salutary qualification, in acknowledgment of the nature of our professional duties while also fully explaining their moral objections to identifying primarily with the standards of disciplinary excellence rather than with the emotional and intellectual difficulties of their students.

I close this section with a perhaps eccentric suggestion. According to MacIntyre, “The idioms of therapy have invaded all too successfully such spheres as those of education and religion” (After 31). In the same book, he locates the tragic squarely in the Sophoclean struggle between “rival allegiances to incompatible goods” (After 142), in contrast to Aristotle’s definition of tragedy as the operation of a tragic flaw. If this being “torn between duties equally sacred,” as Tolkien called it (103), is a suitable definition of the tragic, then every teacher’s failure of a student, on a care ethicist’s view, approaches cutting something of a tragic figure of the teacher, just as Antigone, claimed equally by family and state, cuts a tragic figure (After 142).

The trajectory of tragedy, “from happiness to misery” (Aristotle, Poetics 58), is, in a way, the basic trajectory of any teacher caught between a duty to the institution and a duty to the student when she fairly awards a failing grade. Should this be any strike against the care ethicist view, it may also be reason to recommend any moral view of teaching that does not accord such weighty consideration to the feelings of students as opposed to acknowledging the simple justice of the student’s right to instruction and the respect for the student’s choices. To be sure, the alternative suggestion that the system be remade can also be offered. For a consideration of a more developed view of care ethics, however, see the “Mandatory Revision” section of Chapter 5.

Finally, I propose further that we not confuse the felt competition between the duty to maintain standards and the impulse to acknowledge student difficulties, understandable and laudatory though the impulse may be, with “our field’s desire to empower students and its

116 curricular positioning as gatekeeper and certifier” (Lunsford and Ede 817). Lunsford’s and

Ede’s dichotomy is false: the empowerment we desire for our students cannot come without that certification. At worst, gatekeeping, like the Poverty of Piers Plowman, becomes “odibile bonum—good, yet hateful” (162). It may be that because teachers of writing are in service to this hateful good that they must despite their political leanings become, as Lakoff claims they often do, Strict Fathers (296-99). On this point, I will say more in Chapter 5, “Punishment and

Response.”

Plagiarism Is a Sin

Positing plagiarism as a breach of trust in a relationship between a teacher and a student is by no means without precedent, but to say plagiarism is a sin removes the teacher and, from one perspective at least, the institution at once from any primary role in defining plagiarism in terms of that relationship. Cropping up quite a bit, the label nonetheless varies in intensity: Lynn

Z. Bloom, for example, names plagiarism superlatively as a “cardinal sin” (“Freshman 659).

Cardinal or venial, a sin in any degree is an offense against the will or law of God, making him the primary injured party and so according to him primary consideration in redress, restitution, and—lest we forget—repentance. Additionally, positing God as the primary injured party explains why the famous statement from the penitential psalm, “Against thee, and thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight” (51.4, Authorized Version), can be sensible while the disgraced monarch and putative speaker, David, is supposed to be imploring forgiveness for the twin crimes of adultery and conspiracy to commit murder. For the religiously devout, of course, this interpretation has cogency not only because God forbids both adultery and murder, but also because God is believed to have invented marriage and human life in the first place and is held to care whether both are honored and nourished out of respect for him: it was Augustine

117 who famously said, for example, “A man loves you so much the less if, besides you, he also loves something else which he does not love for your sake” (Confessions X.29).

Sin surely is one of the most loaded definitions of plagiarism there is. But this holds only when plagiarism is truly, that is to say literally, asserted to be a sin. Figuratively, to say that plagiarism is a sin is to assert that plagiarism is an offense against a high and mighty authority whose law is an expression of his or her will and so against whom any transgression is a personal affront (“Against thee, and thee only, have I sinned”). The implications should be clear. Like David, who sinned arguably just as much (if not more) against the powerless

Bathsheba and the fiercely loyal, unwitting Uriah (do they both not stand to lose far more in this case than does God?), in academia a plagiarist could be said to sin just as much against the person whose words he has expropriated as against the institution (god). Yet here some candor is in order: even if words are undoubtedly property, the proposition that plagiarism is an act of theft against another person may or may not hold in the given instance (in the case of fraternity files, say, the material may have been offered quite willingly as helpful assistance), and it may be extraordinarily difficult to demonstrate that any real damage has been done in cases when the original author was unaware or unwilling. So defined, plagiarism may be a sin, but there may be no way to get others to see the reasonableness of the relevant injunction, and there may be no practical way to make restitution to an author whose words have been expropriated. However, in an academic setting, it can always be said that plagiarism is a violation of the Haustafeln and so an affront to the institution, and that there are mechanisms to address that violation. Fish, as he makes clear in an incidental remark, “if you’re in our house, you’ve got to play by our rules,” sees this “learned sin” as circumscribed by time, place, and the nature of the enterprise

(“Plagiarism,” n.p.).

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On that circumscription, I want to suggest two further points about the extension of this metaphor. First, despite prevailing opinion, this metaphor may leave considerable room for a plurality of situated literacy practices, and it also points to the blessings offered by academia offered nowhere else. Further, and also despite prevailing opinion, should the metaphor be deemed desirable, the word “abomination” may yield more effectiveness than “sin.” Before proceeding with this theological explanation, note that Howard invokes “covenant” as a metaphor for an approach toward plagiarism she criticizes: “The combination of suppressing ambiguity and calling upon ethical principles results in a sort of covenant theology for composition” (Standing 9). But does a covenant seem to warrant this rejection?

The torah, as conceived in Deuteronomy, is for certain people, within a certain place.

Additionally, there is a hint of practical religious pluralism to that biblical covenant. The covenant is an agreement to terms drawn up by Yahweh and handed out to the people of Israel, which is to say the Israelites were not making covenant with other gods, who by terms were to be forcefully excluded from the arrangement. The people had, we are told, not been rescued by another god—in the words of the Tanakh, they “knew not” any other god (Deut. 29.26,

Authorized Version). A chestnut of biblical scholarship has it that belief during this moment of the Tanakh’s development was probably henotheistic rather than strictly monotheistic, which is to say the people were enjoined to worship only one god even while they fully acknowledged the existence of others. The covenant-obligation the Israelites feel is prompted by Yahweh’s—not another god’s—electing to liberate them from oppression. Moreover, as Yahweh reminds his people, he can always send them back to where they came from. Finally, the covenant is drawn up in terms of what is right “in the sight of Yahweh.” This phrase can be quickly skimmed over, but the covenant as expressed in Deuteronomy has numerous occurrences of practices proscribed

119 as “abhorrent” (e.g., Deut. 22.5, Tanakh), as though the terms are based on Yahweh’s likes and dislikes—in a word, his sensibilities.

The foregoing interpretation may invite the criticism that Yahweh’s proscriptions seem to have no rational basis. As this is not a theological dissertation, I happily leave that matter aside.

My point, however, is that even if there is no rational basis for citation conventions, this would not come as a surprise to everyone. MacIntyre, for instance, points to the foundation of

“systematic forms of activity within which goods are unambiguously ordered” that makes a practically rational existence possible (Whose 141). More to the point of the present subject,

Fish maintains that “[e]veryday disciplinary practices [such as citation conventions] do not rest on a foundation of philosophy or theory; they rest on a foundation of themselves; no theory or philosophy can either prop them up or topple them” (“Plagiarism” n.p.). If Fish is correct, then whether citation conventions stand or fall rests on whether the institution does not merely claim but possesses the right to make its own rules and sustain its own practices, and hence whether students have an obligation to abide by them based on the agreement between the institution

(god) and the students (the people). In such an instance, the decision not to plagiarize becomes at least about basic respect for the institution that offers, through education, a better life

(salvation), regardless of whether the people can devise a logical justification for the injunctions by which they are to abide. On this view, Howard is incorrect, or only partially correct, to locate the authority in the “source text” in her covenantal metaphor (Standing 10). Properly, the authority rests with the academic institution whose rules and conventions dictate certain canons of source “text-usage” just as the final authority rests not with the sacred text, but with the deity

(Fountain and Fitzgerald 104). Despite Howard’s rejection of the metaphor, then, some commendable reasons for its currency may be found.

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Still, whether this sin metaphor is at all appropriate remains an open question, as the answer depends as much on one’s religious stance as on one’s stance on plagiarism. For both

Traditionalists and Ameliorists, the metaphor has potential uses. For Traditionalists, to use the word “sin” underscores the authority of the institution and the justifiable severity of the institution’s response. For Ameliorists, as I have suggested above, if understood in a henotheistic or religiously pluralist frame, the word could connote the circumscribed nature of the offense and so allow for variations of citation norms both within and without the academy.

On the other hand, Ameliorists could attack the metaphor on the grounds that an institution using it in earnest takes itself far too seriously, and even for decided non-believers who may not care whether a god is blasphemed by the flippant use of a metaphor, equating plagiarism with sin may appear nonetheless the very picture of hubris. As it is more likely that “sin” in our culture connotes authoritarianism and swift, merciless judgment, “sin” might not be a helpful word if

Fish is indeed trying to advance a “deflationary” case against a moral and practical definition of plagiarism in a secular academy. By the same token, Ameliorists generally, whose goal is to take the wrath out of responses to plagiarism, may have an interest, if not a duty, to repudiate any instance in which plagiarism is defined as a sin even metaphorically.12

Defined as a literal sin, plagiarism invites matters of eternal significance into a fifteen- week classroom, while, to repeat, defined metaphorically it elevates the institution to the status of deity. Neither of these is favorable to the Ameliorist position. For the devout, of course, there can be no argument that plagiarism, at least when done fraudulently, is a sin even if so defining it may, as Fountain and Fitzgerald point out, “do nothing to teach students how to use texts in

12 Curiously, even though the three great monotheistic religions make it a point to offer forgiveness of sins on certain conditions—repentance and sincere intent to reform—this understanding seems almost completely absent from scholarly discussions of plagiarism. Sin, it would seem, invokes only punishment.

121 sophisticated and authoritative ways that academic discipline requires of them” (102). If true to her standards, however, a devout person might take such a definition as an added and perhaps effective inducement to apply oneself more diligently to mastering citation conventions and submit original work.

As I close this section, I would like to entertain the idea that plagiarism may justifiably be labeled an academic sin. What would that mean for practical deliberation and for moral theory?

Quite simply, one practical syllogism might look something like this:

Major premise: Sin must be reproached (see Proverbs 14.34b).

Minor premise: Plagiarism is sin.

Conclusion: Plagiarism must be reproached.

Taking, not exactly at random, this biblical text as my warrant, defining plagiarism as a sin turns it into a matter for praise or blame, for honor and for shame. Naturally, concern with honor and shame invites the virtue ethicist to come aboard, as well as for the additional reason that Aquinas views justice as the disposition to render unto each his due, and, in this way, failing to render unto God his due signals a shortcoming in virtue. And when there are dues, etymology reminds us, there are duties, and so to define plagiarism as a sin is to view it deontologically, that is, with respect to a matter of duty. Even where no voluntary injustice or failure of duty obtains, “other evidences of haste and sloppiness (read error and sin)” (Bloom 665), such as forgetting to include documentary markers, may mean there is sin in the compositional camp. The academy’s walking about metaphorically in the garb of deity, though not beyond controversy, has one final and obvious benefit: many people seem easily to grasp an idea of sin. Whether that idea has been sufficiently nuanced, however, does not seem apparent. For more on this question, see

Chapter 6.

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Plagiarism Is an Offense to Education

Edward M. White worries that discourse about plagiarism shortchanges virtue: “The lore of plagiarism is rich […], reflecting a society that values competitive ownership more highly than integrity or scholarship” (205). In dealing with scholarship as an expression of virtue,

White expressly puts himself on pretty safe ground. In contrast with those who deflect morally charged criticism against students for patchwritten essays—such deflection being an Ameliorist preoccupation—White is “concerned about blatant plagiarism, the dishonest use of others’ work pretending to be one’s own, writing that is well on the immoral side of the fine line between the romanticized author, the radical self, and the inevitably collaborating self we have come to see in almost all writing” (204). Because White offers this and other ready acknowledgments to theoretically accepted cross-pollination of texts as well as the need for instruction in proper citation, he has cleared the way for asserting where a pronounced moral response to plagiarism is warranted. For White, plagiarism offends education “because it subverts the very nature of education” (206) and because it “offends the basic principles of learning” (210; cf. White qtd. in

Howard, “Plagiarisms” 794). If this is absolutist, and it is, it squares quite nicely with any morality that places a premium on teleology, as a virtue ethics or natural law ethics.

In the previous section I discussed the definition of plagiarism as a kind of sin against the institution, and I mentioned that this definition would hold regardless of any willing, conscious help the student may have had from an accomplice. White makes a similar claim but with one significant difference, in that he makes plagiarism an offense against the institution that transcends not the student-accomplice but the student-teacher relationship: “Plagiarism is important because it violates the moral code of learning, not because it offends (or does not offend) a particular professor” (209). At once White has placed considerable limits on, even

123 hamstrings, the care ethicist view, in which teachers alert to the emotional states of their students may be fully prepared to offer humanely motivated clemency, especially when desperation is perceived to be the motive alerting the student to their earlier discussed viable option of submitting plagiarized papers. (See also Chapter 5 in the section “Mandatory Revision.”) And, because a breach of trust has effectively been shut out from defining the act of plagiarism, at least primarily, it would logically be shut out from determining any response to plagiarism, making care ethics relevant to plagiarism only insofar as plagiarism remains a pedagogical, rather than an institutional, matter—supposing the distinction is practical or even sensible.

Despite stated concessions to theory and his de-emphasis on ownership, White continues to use the metaphors of property and theft to further his argument, and, as usual, with the author of the expropriated text as the assumed victim. For the sake of thoroughness, I want to consider briefly the tenor and vehicle of both. White says,

We get to own others’ ideas by understanding and thinking about them, by

making them our own through reflection and integration into our own thinking

processes. But blatant plagiarism remains an outsider to the ideas that are copied

[…]. Like altering the title to someone else’s house, plagiarism seeks to claim

ownership of intellectual property never visited or lived in. This is theft, not

community property, and for this reason requires a moral stand by an outraged

community. (207, italics in original)

Clearly, reflection (the tenor) is a kind of residence (the vehicle), and prolonged residence somehow translates into legitimate ownership. White skips over how this ownership is legitimately transferred or extended from one party to another, perhaps because here is where the metaphor breaks down. How, it might be asked, does an idea from one source become “owned”

124 by someone else? Surely it is not the mere act of drawing a conclusion from the premise provided by another that awards ownership of the premise. How many articles or chapters must one publish with acknowledgments of indebtedness before leaving it off with rightful impunity?

Or, perhaps, how many years does one idea have to sit in one’s mind before these premises fade away from acknowledged intellectual creditors to permissibly uncredited influences? (See also

Chapter 6.) What is clear, however, is that White does not neglect to identify the victim of theft: it is the writer of the source text of the plagiarized submission.

Given his emphasis on blatant (or fraudulent) plagiarism as an affront to education and to educational institutions, White may well have changed the victim of that act of theft, even without his saying so, and it is instructive and potentially salutary to consider that alternative.

While it often holds that plagiarism has occurred by taking the words of one person without his or her knowledge or consent, as we have seen in the previous section, plagiarism remains wrong even if the plagiarist had willing assistance. Once this is admitted, the question turns to the institution. On White’s own view, the matter of ownership takes a back seat to “integrity” and

“scholarship” (205), one being a necessary virtue of the other. The understood purpose of a writing assignment, i.e., that a student practice academic writing as a way of knowing, whether that knowledge is discovered or constructed, and make an argument reflecting his or her carefully considered thinking on a subject; is implicit in White’s claim that one comes to own an idea via reflection. Presumably, all students enrolled in a class desire academic credit in that course. If, as many a professor loves to intone, grades are not given but earned, then a student who seeks to gain credit by blatant plagiarism has, in effect, attempted to steal the grade from the institution. In different language, if a student “pays for” a grade in a writing course by his writing, then a plagiarized paper becomes a sort of counterfeit bill, and the knowing attempt to

125 purchase the grade with this illegitimate currency amounts to a consciously attempted act of theft. For this reason, even if the metaphor raises questions of appropriateness with regard to the source text whether on consensual or theoretical grounds (see Leight 222-23; Senders), plagiarism is still theft, with real thieves and real, identifiable, and immediate victims.

To this it might be replied that while it is undoubtedly true that blatant plagiarism is an attempt to gain what one has not earned and that such attempts are morally wrong, the vehicle of the metaphor remains objectionable because it reinforces the view that education is, ultimately, an economic rather than an intellectual good (see, e.g., Lunsford and West 398-99). I have three brief responses to this criticism. First, there is no denying that education is an economic good, nor is there any denying that grades—or educational certifications of any kind—have therefore, in potentia, some, even considerable, economic value. I do not say that education is above all else an economic good, but it is at least that. Second, morality as such has huge metaphorical resources in economic exchange (Nietzsche, Genealogy 44; Lakoff 55-56), and any objection to plagiarism as theft on the ground that it reinforces economic ideas may equally and on that account be leveled at the idea of being intellectually “indebted” to someone else. I hope I do not here beg the question: I merely assume debt and credit as basic, legitimate educational concepts on the basis of customary usage in academic writing (see, e.g., Adler-Kasner et al. 238, and

Lunsford and West 397, where a collaborative basis for citation conventions is entertained). I remain open, however, to any better overarching metaphor for the basic idea of morality and its obligations. Third, while it does underscore the economic nature of higher education, the metaphor would also help render abundantly plain the ideas that the institution has a right to award and withhold credit, that this right is absolute, and that blatant plagiarism, despite the plagiarist’s various and sundry rationalizations, is not a victimless (if it may be said) crime. On

126 this view, the expectations of students accustomed to the blurred or absent lines of intellectual property in the realm of digital media fade in relevance: the institution desires and requires original work in exchange for academic credit.

Practically, to define plagiarism as stealing from institutions whether instead of or in addition to stealing from writers thus poses two benefits of allowing for all the theoretical conclusions about intertextuality and heteroglossia to remain intact (a matter more germane to patchwritten essays than to fraudulent submissions, anyway), while also acknowledging and doing justice to the fact that plagiarism is an attempt to undermine an institution whose very nature entails awarding certification (see Howard, “Sexuality” 488). Whether that certification translates into economic value or into the more intangible but nonetheless coveted rewards of prestige, the offense is in both cases, to use White’s term, subversive: it attacks, in Michael

Sandel’s words, “the essential nature of the activity in question” (Sandel). In an attempt to select judiciously among all the available means of persuasion, teachers who wish to impress by exhortation the fact that plagiarism is wrong may elect to use the real, immediate presence of the institution rather than the source-text author, whose presence may likely be only, in Perelman’s terms, a rhetorical presence. If successful, such an appeal poses the added benefit of preserving the credit due to the source-text author without hazarding the unnecessary risk of venturing an appeal that may or may not matter to students who do not care about a person from whose work they may be seeking illegitimate advantage or about the kinds of people they may become in seeking it. We have returned, just perhaps, to the practical syllogisms attached to the

Traditionalist position considered in the first section of this chapter.

Additionally, the exhortation to honor the credit-awarding institution may be an inducement to at least some virtue. Doubtless it will be said that morality cannot be legislated or

127 required on a syllabus. But if scholarship requires necessary virtues of industry, then, to will the ends is to will the means, and it follows that morality can indeed be legislated, just as morality, though contrary to common expression, is always legislated (cf. Aquinas 44; Aristotle, NE II.1).

Conclusion

As we have seen in this far from exhaustive but certainly suggestive survey, defining plagiarism extends beyond, as we have noted, what appears, or fails to appear, on the page

(Robillard, “Situating” 36). The means by which writers interested in the subject have extended this definition is in large part due to salient metaphors which, as Iris Murdoch once put it, “often carry a moral charge” (76). Because that moral charge is very much there, they can be analyzed in terms of practical syllogisms, with the definitions implied by those metaphors operating as the minor premise. If thinking very clearly about these definitions is a goal for the field, then this kind of analysis has something to recommend it. Now, as I turn to the next chapter, I will consider how some of these definitions, implied and buttressed by metaphor, imply means of preventing and deterring plagiarism.

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Chapter 4

PREVENTION

As we saw in the previous chapter, even where considered more or less definable as a textual phenomenon, plagiarism sparks considerable, even voluminous disagreement as a moral phenomenon. To define plagiarism morally, teachers and scholars select metaphors to do the rhetorical work of impressing upon students, other teachers and scholars, and even the broader public what is at stake in such moral definitions. In those cases considered, we saw that most metaphors seem more readily suited to some moral theories than others and, accordingly, more readily suited to some pedagogical approaches than to others. This chapter will consider discussions of the practical approaches teachers take to prevent plagiarism.

In the literature, it is not uncommon to encounter the prevention/punishment dichotomy to describe the options available for handling plagiarism or, as Karen Ellery terms them,

“pedagogic responses” and “post facto disciplinary responses of exposure and punishment” respectively (507). Majority opinion seems to be that preventative measures are to be preferred

(e.g., Bloom; Insley; Eodice; Johnson), and yet, interestingly, prevention itself has been challenged by Fountain and Fitzgerald as a concept with troubling implications: “The idea of

‘plagiarism prevention’ makes many of us (Fountain and Fitzgerald included) uneasy, in that the term implies plagiarism to be a unified, coherent entity, like a virus, that we must avoid, perhaps by carefully washing our intellectual hands after touching each other’s words and before returning to our own” (120, italics in original). Unmistakably, Fountain and Fitzgerald discern a pathological metaphor in the use of “prevention,” as though prevention were solely or primarily used with reference to preventing diseases, and just as unmistakably as though a metaphor entailing prevention were, in this context, objectionable. Prevention, directed at warding off

129 something that may upset an ordered, stable operation, has many possible objects. A list of other preventable ills could be made, including, among other things, fires and riots, the latter featured in an example of usage in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary (“Prevention”). Why, in that case, do Fountain and Fitzgerald identify “virus” as the implied vehicle without any evident deliberation or justification? The answer, I suggest, may lie in a consideration of the common alternatives. Fires must be prevented because they pose a destructive threat to life and property.

Riots must be prevented for precisely the same reasons—and some riots irrupt in fires. Diseases must be prevented because they pose an obvious destructive threat to health and life. All of these evils may upset entire communities. Fires, diseases, and riots can all “break out” and “spread.”

For purposes of illustration, I will consider these alternatives of fires and riots as foils and alternatives to the vehicle of the pathogen.

One might reasonably expect Fountain and Fitzgerald, as Ameliorists, to seize upon this alarmist metaphor of the pathogen to advance an alternative, softer definition of plagiarism, as indeed they do. If plagiarism is to be prevented at all, and if it is being compared to some vehicle, I would furthermore suggest that preventing plagiarism understood as a fire would be just as appropriate to Ameliorist purposes as would a pathogen because fires, as noted above, pose threats to property, suggesting disconcerting images of looming dangers. A plagiarism

“riot” would likewise pose a convenient target for an Ameliorist because it paints an easily disposed of picture of students as a rabble of malcontents and opportunists ready to seize property not their own. Ameliorists of the poststructuralist camp in fact wish to problematize the idea that words can be private property (see, e.g., Grossberg 164-65), to be sure, and cite this as one of the reasons for a supposedly disproportionate abhorrence of plagiarism among

Traditionalists, who do not heed this problematizing. Calling plagiarism a “fire” or a “riot” may,

130 for the same reasons, aggravate association with property, and so it would be in Ameliorist interests to deny the comparison and so challenge the need to “prevent” a plagiarism fire or riot.

As for Raphael Hythloday in More’s Utopia, so for Ameliorists the very idea of private property leads to other problems, including theft and woefully disproportionate punishment. Explaining

Fountain and Fitzgerald’s choice of vehicle, then, may be the simple fact that there is no precedent well established for speaking of plagiarism either as a fire or as a riot, whereas the instances of plagiarism metaphorized as an “epidemic”—a widespread disease—are legion (e.g.,

Thomas).

To further explore their choice, how might Fountain and Fitzgerald’s pejorative vehicle be understood differently from the way they employ it? On their account of the metaphor, plagiarism occurs when one, as it were, comes into contact with the words of another text and brings the foreign disease agent to one’s own text without taking prior sanitation measures of intellectual hand washing. It might just as easily follow, however, that citation conventions, rather than the measures of sanitation they seem to be in Fountain and Fitzgerald’s treatment, could be methods of containment. If left to spill over freely into the text, words from the source text may contaminate the whole, resulting in an intellectual hazard known as plagiarism. Simply left to itself, the virus vehicle could evoke such an unpleasant view of source texts.

Surely thinking of source texts as disease agents, implied by Fountain and Fitzgerald, is not how writing instructors would wish to see them, and even among the most strident

Traditionalists, this is not how source texts appear to be viewed. If plagiarism, on a

Traditionalist view, is a virulent epidemic, it is by no means because a kind of virulence obtains in the text by virtue of its being a source for another text, as Fountain and Fitzgerald appear to understand it, but simply because an alarming number of cases of plagiarism exist, as well as—

131 possibly—because plagiarism is “contagious” when it involves one student “coming into contact” with the willing assistance of another student or with the idea that the writing of assignments may be outsourced. In my analysis, the health implied by the “epidemic” vehicle is not so much that of the individual student who must take sanitation measures—though it may be involved—but that of the population of the larger academic institution, or academia understood as an even larger population. And, if it is the case that there are numerous “cases” of plagiarism

(where “case” invokes disease and not crime), and that such cases are bad for academia as well as for the individual student, then one may question whether there is sufficient reason to abandon the term or any of its implied vehicles on the critical account that Fountain and Fitzgerald have put forward. Additionally, as we will see below, another common metaphor involving source usage would lend considerable further support to the currency of the prevention metaphor (see

“Instruction in Source Usage” below). For my purposes, then, I assume the reasonableness of speaking of plagiarism prevention and use it as a controlling term for this chapter.

For the remainder of this chapter, I will consider four main methods of preventing plagiarism: the plagiarism-proof/-resistant assignment, deep instruction in source reading and usage, exhortation, and, finally, threat, especially when using detection as a method of deterrence. It may be seen at once that each method has been arranged in descending order according to the amount of instructor effort each method demands. And while it may be inferred almost intuitively that those methods which demand the most of instructors are the most morally commendable, the analysis below will consider whether such a conclusion is warranted according to different moral theories. As in the previous chapter, metaphor plays an important role in suggesting some conclusions over others.

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The Plagiarism-Proof Assignment: “More Ethically Satisfying”?

If it is reasonable to hold that “the very first condition to examine is the assignment itself” when plagiarism has occurred in an educational setting (Whiteman and Gordon 27), though I am not entirely convinced of this claim, then it is also reasonable to start with the instructor’s crafting of the assignment as a potentially effective method of plagiarism prevention.

Acknowledging considerable opinion on the matter, I accord the statement its disciplinary weight and take it as my starting point for analysis in this section.

Recommending plagiarism-proof and plagiarism-resistant assignments, Lynn Z. Bloom states that “[i]t is far easier, more intellectually interesting, and more ethically satisfying to prevent plagiarism than to track it down” (209). Let it be granted, for the moment, plagiarism prevention’s greater ease and intellectual interest, and let us turn instead to the more germane issue of its alleged greater ethical satisfaction. One might rejoin in the borrowed and inverted structure of one of MacIntyre’s titles, which ethics? whose satisfaction? Bloom obliges with an answer which may be suggestive: assignments she calls “insider writing,” assignments adjustable for “every student in every class,” will “encourage student writers to be original, thoughtful, and engaged.” She contrasts this engagement with the “passive consum[ption] of ancillary sources” commonly associated with more traditional assignments such as literary analyses (209, 211).

The justification boils down to not only to getting students genuinely interested in (that is, intrinsically motivated to) showing original thinking, but in making more of such students. So, ethically satisfying in this context is that which is more likely to yield intellectual interest for more students and, as a result, more teachers: in other words, the greatest happiness for the greatest number appears to be the ethical principle at work. For Bloom, it would appear at first blush, plagiarism-proof assignments are more ethically satisfying if you are a utilitarian.

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It is quite clear from Bloom’s discussion that she is keen to have a more exciting classroom experience than those she reports to experience under and because of other writing conditions, i.e., with different assignments. Several times she observes that students writing to her plagiarism-proof assignments work harder and with more enjoyment than they did when the assignment was the critical analysis. A common narrative, that religion is the instrument of oppression and that when the people band together and free themselves of its authorities, they will thrive, emerges in a very telling quotation she has approvingly selected from Robert

Scholes, wherein he explains that students faced with canonical texts must “bow in reverence” and show proper deference toward their teachers, the “priests and priestesses in the service of a secular scripture” (qtd. in Bloom, “Insider” 209), a state of affairs which Bloom asserts tends to hold in all disciplines whenever the work of “experts” is required as supporting material (210).

Bloom then adds another metaphor, calling students “ventriloquists of published scholars,” by which I take her to mean that it is the published scholars who are ventriloquists, and the student the mere puppet, as would be consistent with the tenor implied by the “obsequiousness” of the properly chastened devotee (209) as well as, elsewhere, with the “deadness” of the student who does not enjoy the conventional assignment (214). That tenor here, that students will be disengaged when asked to produce conventional assignments, is a cause-effect statement here advanced simultaneously as a moral one. For Bloom, there appear to be two objections against assignments which do not fall under her “insider writing” rubric: (1) the students are not working hard and (2) the students are not having fun. Because the desired results are alleged to occur when the insider-writing or plagiarism-proof assignment is put in place, and because those desired results do not occur under alternative conditions, the ethical thing to do is to implement the insider writing she describes.

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Publishing her recommendations in a book on plagiarism (Originality, Imitation, and

Plagiarism), Bloom says, perhaps surprisingly, that plagiarism really is not the point: relegating the lack of plagiarism to a nice side effect, she says the real point of the plagiarism-proof assignment is not so much to be proof against plagiarism but rather that students will enjoy and work hard at their writing. But, it might be asked, working hard at what and enjoying what? To illustrate the principle, one may drag one’s feet in going outside to bag leaves but may get a lot of enjoyment from jumping in the piles. If the point is to have fun, simply jump in the piles and allow someone else to rake the leaves. Whenever fun is offered as a justification for an assignment, one may always reasonably ask whether the kind of writing that students find enjoyable accomplishes the basic purposes of the course and what “goods internal” to the assignment teachers attempt to draw out of their students (MacIntyre, After 188), a worry not exclusive to those inimical to change as such.

To raise still another and equally pertinent question, even assuming that the undesirable outcome of plagiarism has been ruled out by the assignment parameters Bloom recommends, is it not possible, a bit as we saw in the previous chapter with Sue Simmons’ proposals, that the students have in this instance been morally accorded privilege to dictate what they would and would rather not do? One may worry whether, on Bloom’s account, students, Bartleby-like, would prefer not to write critical analyses, and teachers, a bit like Melville’s lawyer narrator, have been “strangely disarmed” into concessions which effectively alter the expectations of those under his charge and thereby change what business may be accomplished in the day (148). One may infer the operation of the assumption that it does not matter what genre(s) a student learns to write so much as whether a student has fun while learning to write. By no means am I saying that Bloom has allowed writing that veers from the subject matter of the course—her assignment

135 samples included in her article clearly reinforce the course reading—nor am I arguing that the students have in fact mutinied or even assembled peacefully to demand a redress of grievances resulting in the insider writing assignments. No, instead, the point is that it would appear the teacher has determined that the engagement level of the students in an assignment is a decisive factor in the ethical merit of that assignment.

Now, to close this section, what about the ethical status of the plagiarism-proof assignment as such, apart from any specific recommendations one may make about how to design one? Assuming plagiarism-proof assignments are highly effective, what about those assignments makes them so? Is it because students are placed in conditions which make their misappropriating outside sources or assistance impossible or highly unlikely? Or, perhaps, is it that students are encouraged to write about subjects on which they are or will become, in the course of the semester, themselves authorities and that they will want to produce original work because they are intrinsically motivated to do so? We may call the first kind the assignment which makes plagiarism practically impossible or unlikely (PPApra); the second, that which makes plagiarism psychologically unlikely (PPApsy). Neither necessarily entails the other, as shown by the fact that one may produce a submission practically impossible to plagiarize, as when assigned a ready-writing prompt, but which the student may not enjoy at all; and a student may submit a paper which he enjoyed writing but which contains insufficiently cited material.

Consider the PPApra first. When it is practically impossible to plagiarize a submission, one way of failing the assignment has been removed from the student’s range of options, thereby limiting freedom of choice. If the moral worth of any assignment, or indeed of any task, derives in some way from its being possible to fail through willful choice, the moral worth of a PPApra is necessarily diminished. For brevity’s sake, I here consider two possible moral approaches to this

136 state of affairs, virtue ethics and Kantian ethics. A virtue ethicist may account for this diminishment by pointing to the fact that the student has been relieved of certain opportunities to exercise, perhaps, justice (as when there are no sources to which to assign due credit), prudence, or even fortitude (as when assuming the inevitably onerous task of doing something one is disinclined to do, e.g., a critical analysis).13 Similarly, a Kantian may say that a student who simply cannot fail in a duty14 in this way15 but must, to cite Bloom again, “perforce” play the part of the engaged expert in the act of writing (“Insider” 210), has been limited in one’s “free conduct,” the exercise of which is the essence of morality for Kant (27). The modified version of the PPApra, under which plagiarism is not impossible but highly unlikely, is sometimes spoken of as creating conditions under which it is “not worth the bother” to make the attempt (Foss 12).

In this way, a student’s choice not to plagiarize when it has been made difficult to do so is acting not out of duty but out of prudence, which for Kant has no moral worth (27).

One may object that a student always has the option to refuse to complete the assignment, so that if he does not fail by plagiarizing, he may fail in another way, and do so freely.

Agreement on this point is, of course, unavoidable. It may be further objected that, while there can be no argument that the student’s freedom has been limited by making it impossible to plagiarize, such an action may be justified as a form of “weak paternalism” assuming that the students involved may not be intellectually mature enough to handle the demands of, say, a

13 I maintain only that a student under the conditions of a PPApra would be unable to exercise virtues in some respects; I do not maintain that such an assignment would rule out exercising the virtues altogether. 14 I am aware of possible conceptual and ethical problems of calling an academic assignment a “duty,” one difficulty being that duty has more grounding in an instance of law rather than of contract (see Anscombe, “Modern”), the contract being a more common way to speak of the course syllabus. Duty may, however, be perfectly applicable in instances in which a student attends school because her parents have ordered her to attend. 15 Barring simple refusal to complete the assignment at all or to complete the course, that is.

137 critical analysis, or in the face of certain “social pressures” (Harris 166), including, perhaps, the pressure to write a peer’s assignment for fear of shunning.

Consider now the PPApsy. Here the criticism is different. A virtue ethicist’s objections may appear fairly readily: one operating under PPApsy conditions is not only not being asked to exercise the virtues to the extent ruled out above, but also not being asked in a certain way to exercise the virtue of temperance, that is, the denial of pleasures. It is noteworthy that PPApra and PPApsy limit the exercise of certain virtues slightly differently, and this illustrates the explanatory power of a virtue ethics vocabulary (see Murdoch 56; Hursthouse), as well as underscores the difference between the two types of assignments as hinging on a matter of pleasure. A Kantian’s objection to this assignment, on the other hand, would have to be directed both at the teacher and the student, at the student because he is doing the assignment because it is fun and not because it is the assignment before him, that is, under these conditions the student does not fulfill the assignment “for the pure thought of duty and in general of the moral law,” but rather “mixed with […] foreign addition of empirical inducements” (Kant 22). Specifically, the teacher has provided the added inducement of a fun assignment and has done nothing to encourage a student’s doing an assignment out of duty, that is, “the necessity of an action from respect of law” (13, italics in original). To repeat, the legitimacy of the assignment in such a pedagogy does not come from its being given as a kind of directive (or, as Kant would say, a

“command”) from a teacher to a student; such hierarchicalism has been largely repudiated by scholars in the literature (e.g., Howard, “Ethics”; Price; Williams; Zwagerman). Rather, the legitimacy derives from its tendency not merely to correspond with but to cause active student engagement; indeed, engagement is often viewed by practitioners as a consequence and not a correlative of the nature of the assignment (see, e.g., Simmons in the previous chapter). A

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Kantian analysis also has certain explanatory power here, in that it particularly throws into rather sharp relief the nature of the teacher’s authority, considered practically or theoretically. With her concentration on maximizing pleasure of a certain kind, a utilitarian may be willing to award authority to the students. I hasten to add that it would be both cynical and straw-man bashing to assert that this pedagogy is always arrived at by either a sour-grapes or by a “if you can’t beat

’em, join ’em” reasoning: rather, it seems to be assumed here that, in theory, no pedagogy ought to continue which does not maximize pleasure.

Such are some of the issues likely raised by the plagiarism-proof or plagiarism-resistant assignment, whether PPApra or PPApsy, recommended as a moral solution, and especially as one more “satisfying” than the alternative of detecting plagiarism after the fact. A few further remarks should suffice for the present on the matter of pleasure. Pleasure, and the use of pleasure, to cite one of Foucault’s titular phrases, is a central matter for ethics, and, for utilitarianism, in which category we may place Bloom’s claims for the PPA, remains the ethical concern.

It is worth recalling John Stuart Mill’s famous point that not just any kind of pleasure will do for the proper utilitarian. Mill emphasizes that “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied” (242; Harris 122). Intellectual pursuits, for Mill, are a greater kind of happiness than mere sensory gratification, so it need not be the case that a utilitarian teacher in a writing class by assigning a plagiarism-proof assignment, or by using any other method of prevention, is simply attempting to increase retention rates for the sake of funding or for other purely economic reasons. Indeed, Mill is quite clear in On Liberty that human greatness, by which he means “mental expansion and elevation,” are subordinate to economic and technical expertise (118). Because a Kantian can permit a weakly paternalistic approach to assigning

139 writing, both the utilitarian and the Kantian can be agreed on this pedagogical or preventative approach in realizing lofty intellectual goals. As Harris notes, however, the definition of the kind of pleasure with which utilitarians in general are concerned is not a matter of universal agreement (122-23); Elisabeth Anscombe, for example, who is rather critical of the moral theory, seems to take utilitarianism’s emphasis on “pleasure” as a “superficial” justification for action

(Intention 77), so either she views “mental expansion and elevation” as superficial, or, more likely, she has an understanding of pleasure differing from that Socratic kind which Mill emphasizes as superior to the fool’s.

A stronger objection to utilitarianism is voiced by Anscombe when she observes that utility as a deciding factor for moral justification is almost unusable on the grounds that “it is not at all clear how an action can fall under just one principle of utility” (“Modern” 9, italics in original), and Bloom’s “Insider Writing” chapter could furnish a suitable illustration of

Anscombe’s point, in that both fun and hard work appear to be more or less equally considered as justifications for adopting her recommendations. To be sure, the presence of more than one justification may be evidence of Bloom’s attempting to have broader appeal, and yet it could be evidence that the kind of pleasure which Bloom has in mind is precisely that in which hard work and pleasure are mutually generative properties of the activity. If so, the intellectual pleasures

Bloom seeks to maximize by means of the plagiarism-proof assignment may explain why the method has such appeal for many practitioners and why some recommend its implementation so enthusiastically.

Instruction in Source Reading: From Dancing to Digestion

Susan Blum, as many do, urges instruction to prevent plagiarism: “students need to be taught the proper skills in a subtle and ongoing fashion” (171), and within the context of what

140 she calls “the long apprenticeship of higher education” (170). As we saw in the previous chapter, here the emphasis is on the considerable time it takes to learn to write well in an academic context. As we also saw in the same chapter, Kathryn Valentine’s defining plagiarism as literacy practice effectively reframes the classroom as a studio in which students, much as dance students, come to rehearse complicated moves which take time to learn (93). Valentine’s definition by logical extension turns the writing instructor into a kind of dance instructor who patiently demonstrates techniques to the students who, in turn, attempt the moves without penalty for inevitable initial failures. Not only is Valentine’s recommendation and metaphor perfectly consistent with recommendations in other scholarship, but it is also in line with the

WPA’s 2003 statement Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: “Teaching students the conventions for citing documents and acknowledging sources in their field, and allowing students to practice these skills” is listed as one of eight “responsibilities” teachers have to prevent plagiarism before it happens. Further down, the statement urges teachers to “design activities” to facilitate this practice (WPA).

These recommendations reveal, of course, that many students are not providing their teachers with demonstrable evidence that they can cite sources correctly, that is, that they have mastered a certain literacy skill. Moreover, as the WPA statement and others note, students may also be demonstrating a deeper problem: they do not show evidence of being confident enough to press their sources into any meaningful service (WPA; Howard qtd. in Price 108). Howard and the Citation Project have consistently affirmed that students who simply quote have likely failed to grasp their source’s meaning (e.g., “Ethics” 86); if they did grasp it, summarizing and paraphrasing, which the Citation Project recommends over direct quotation, a common student strategy, would be the normal part of a competent writer’s handling of sources (Berrett n.p.).

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The remedy, then, is that students not only be taught how to handle sources, but that they learn how, in Sandra Jamieson’s words, to “digest the ideas in the material cited” (qtd. in Berrett n.p.), a recommendation also put forward, if not precisely in those terms, by the WPA (WPA).

So that the barely noticeable, commonplace metaphor of digestion does not get missed, I turn to it now. The vehicle of digestion implies another, larger metaphor and, according to

Lakoff and Johnson, is one of the metaphors we—metaphorically—live by: “IDEAS ARE

FOOD” (46-47). Digestion, of course, is that process by which a body absorbs food, separating nutrients to be assimilated from waste to be expelled. By using this metaphor, Sandra Jamieson and the Citation Project suggest a more distal cause of plagiarism: a failure to assimilate ideas.

Such failure, in terms of the metaphor, can lead in only one direction, namely, that a writer simply “regurgitates” or “spits”—or vomits—the source back out, having never turned the nutritional elements into another form or properly disposed of the waste.

In this way, a writer’s inferior product may be regurgitated mush; the alternative, the properly digested source, shows where this analogy breaks down or, more precisely in its own terms, fails to: in common usage, a properly digested source becomes nutrition for a writer’s mind, as shown, for example, by David Hume’s “digested by reflection” (Enquiry 65). The growth implied cannot, however, be shown in a mind as it can in a body; one must look for evidence of that same growth external to that mind. In a certain respect, a written product becomes more like the tick marks on a doorpost than like more immediate signs of physical growth. The internality of the source in this metaphor may be even more markedly shown by contrast to Edward White who, as we saw in the previous chapter, says that the ideas of a source in some way become a writer’s own when he or she “lives in” that source (207); the present metaphor would suggest that a source becomes the writer’s own because it has, so to speak, lived

142 in the writer. White’s claims to property here then give way to simple biology.16 For the best written products, the source as it appears will be free of any waste, as only the nutritional bits have been used while it has been separated for expulsion at some point during the writing process, being left, to mix my metaphors, on the cutting-room floor.

In the language of the immediately preceding sentence, however, there may be some slippage in the metaphor, which may raise the following question: for whom does the student digest a source? One might reply that the answer is obvious and already answered in the paragraph above: the student digests the source, as he digests food, for himself. The nutrients he takes in are for his own healthful thinking later evidenced by the maturely written submission.

As one measures a growing child’s head against the door frame but cannot see the digestion process and cell division making the change in height possible, so here one can see that a writer is starting to “measure up” even if the writing process, including thoughtful reading, remains hidden from view. On the other hand, failure to grow, i.e., to write well, may be evidence of a failure to process food or of a failure to eat a healthy diet. Anyone wishing to explore the implications of the vehicle further may raise the question of what agents may aid digestion, as well as questions about projected growth rates and the like. In sum, the metaphor is concerned solely with the student as a writer.

What if, on the other hand, the student digests the information for others? That is, what if the student is the stomach whose job is to provide nutrients to other members of the body whereof he is a part? In this way, not the proper functioning of the stomach but the proper functioning of the body as a whole is the goal. Such a conception would alter the position of the writer in a manner consistent with communitarian values. It would also encourage an emphasis

16 Both metaphors, having more or less the same tenor, allow for the considerable requisite passage of time—both are promising for teaching writing as a process.

143 on reader-based prose and on pedagogies that lend themselves toward encouraging such writing, e.g., writing for an interactive audience of classmates. By the same conception, summary, paraphrase, and quotation all become the nutritive element of a source passed on to other members of the body—a writer who summarizes, paraphrases, and quotes at some level communicates that reading an entire work is neither necessary nor especially desirable for the purposes of following the argument or exposition under consideration; in a way, such reading would prove “wasteful.”

While “digesting information” may not necessarily evoke beneficiaries beyond the one doing the digesting, and while it is almost certainly the case that Jamieson’s usage implies individual rather than collective benefit consistent with common usage, metaphor’s often elastic applicability may outstretch intention. Indeed, if exponents of the view that readers writing for audiences have more incentive to write and to write well than those for whom writing is little more than an academic exercise and a honing of skills—though, I would argue, such exercise is not devoid of merit—the digestion metaphor offers a way of underscoring the vital importance that writers have for processing information and sending that information on to others who may, in the words of the epistle using the same underlying metaphor, grow thereby.

So, the digestion metaphor has implications for both the individual writer, individually considered, as well as for the writer realizing her function ultimately in her writing for others. In both cases, the vehicle communicates the following tenor: each written product is, in one respect or, to use Elisabeth Anscombe’s phrase, “under a certain description” (Intention, passim), an element conducive to intellectual growth and, in another respect or under another description, an element which is better thrown away.

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The foregoing is not a mere digression from the point of the digestion metaphor’s place in a discussion of plagiarism prevention. To the contrary, Howard’s and the Citation Project’s recommendation that teachers simply start talking about how to read and, in a word, process sources as the best way to prevent plagiarism is a recommendation that deserves to be taken seriously (see also Howard, “Forget”); digestion highlights this necessary process toward the desired goal. If, as the Writer’s Guide and Index to English asserts, plagiarism is the “most complete failure possible” when the purpose is to “increase [one’s] skill in communicating their information, ideas, and fictions to others” (651), then being taught how to increase skill in communicating ideas (as by way of digestion) is a decent step toward avoiding this failure because it means a step in the opposite direction of that failure.17 Moreover, a goal of communicating ideas to others successfully becomes a strong reason for seeing digestion as a function performed for others rather than for oneself, so that the writer-as-stomach interpretation of the metaphor starts to appear more useful than the alternative. Assuming a writer wishes to communicate ideas to others successfully in the immediate future, or that a writer wishes to hone the skills needed to accomplish that goal even in absence of an audience which might be called

“real” but whose absence does not effectively preclude preparation for those genres which have application beyond the walls of the academy (see Smit 190-91), this metaphor has potential for framing the role of the publicly minded writer in a striking way. I go so far as to say that the metaphor of digestion, when it has only the individual writer in mind, falls considerably short of its potential for explication of the writer’s function in the world and for promoting the

17 Berrett’s article cites The Writer’s Guide and Index to English as written by Perrin and Dykema in the 1959 edition. The 1959 edition, however, was written by Perrin solely. Dykema was, however, listed as co-author in a 1968 edition. The phrasing “morality of writing” is found in the 1942 edition, which I here consult.

145 intellectual and, of course, moral health of the body politic. In this light, a writer’s digesting a source individually may be inspired by a sense of public mission and civic virtue.

Understood as a process, writing mirrors the digestion and growth process and, because that process is a necessary one, this metaphor has ready implications for all moral theories. They may be surveyed in brief. An objectivist would take in and digest the proper sources because he or she has determined that becoming a writer is a rationally determined value and that such digestion is necessary to that end (see Rand, Philosophy 7). A natural law theorist might assert it is a duty to pursue knowledge and that “stifling of intellectual curiosity” (Harris 92) is impermissible, thereby making a failure to digest a source a failure against the order of the universe. So characterized, the failure to digest a source may excite criticism for overdramatizing the failure, but such “moral absolutism” is a reflection of the earnestness with which natural law views intellectual development (Harris 92-93). A utilitarian and, specifically, a rule utilitarian might say a failure to digest a source would in principle lead to academics and students, the proper “audience” for the action (see Harris 121), who do not emerge from their classes with any more knowledge than what they came in with, and the grades on the transcripts may be an ignominious reflection of this failure. A Kantian would say one fails to render to the author of the source due consideration marks a failure “that person as a goal-creating, goal- pursuing agent” or as an end in themselves (Harris 172); by “skimming the surface,” as Berrett’s title calls it, one is simply using the source as a means to an end (a completed assignment or other writing task), not appreciating the author as an intellectual being to be appreciated as such, so that here especially the intrinsic worth of the scholar as a person in the kingdom of ends is accorded little respect. Virtue ethicists may assert that such failure would be a failure to act in a just way toward the source and point, perhaps, to Aristotle’s prescription of the right foods for

146 human flourishing, with relevant differences allowed for the metaphorical nature of that food

(see Anscombe, Intention 57-62). A care ethicist may emphasize the community of scholars as a

“network of care,” and that in treating oneself as part of that network, one should see to one’s intellectual development, both for oneself and as a caring agent responsible to others. Only by providing full care for oneself can one exercise care properly toward others (Gilligan 173; 94).

The morality of writing in the Writer’s Guide seems to suggest a couple of possible moral views. Jamieson quotes the text in the article again when she questions its “morality of writing” in light of Internet source-usage practices, a common issue in contemporary plagiarism scholarship (Berrett n.p.): that morality, as described by the Writer’s Guide, consists in a

“twofold responsibility: first, of [the writer’s] absorbing the ideas into his own thought, and second of giving credit to important sources.” Neither of these responsibilities in itself appears to recommend one moral theory over another. Further down, however, Perrin points to an author’s “right” to proper attribution (651), apparently the warrant for these responsibilities, and could suggest the kind of externalized authority coming in the form of duty in a Kantian view, including the recognition of the source author as an end in him- or herself, or it could suggest the absolutism of natural law (see Harris 93). What it does not likely suggest is an ethics of care, in which the language of rights takes a back seat to those of responsibilities and relationships, such an absence of “rights” language being characteristic of care ethics (Harris 206; Gilligan 173).

Notably, the first responsibility is another instance of the ideas-as-food metaphor, as revealed by the phrase, “absorbing the ideas.” If my analysis is correct, the metaphor of digestion thus remains a constant in discussing information and its understanding and ultimate reformation (as by, say, summary), but the moral theories in the scholarship justifying the necessity show signs of shift away from that articulated by The Writer’s Guide and Index to English.

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But the continued applicability, or in Humean terms, the belief status, of the morality described decades ago in The Writer’s Guide and Index to English, after all, in essence does not differ materially from the recommendations of the WPA on teaching students to understand their sources, and it is entirely in line with the field’s pedagogical axiom that writing be emphasized as much as a process as product. The logic of the digestion metaphor amply contains in itself a proposition basic to the activity of academic writing, namely, that academic writing requires separation of useful from useless elements and the alteration of useful elements into material for development or continued activity as an academic writer. So long as academic writing requires such separation and alteration, the digestion metaphor will almost certainly maintain a nearly unassailable currency, whatever one’s ethical leanings. It could be argued, then, that if academic writing and necessary preparation for producing it warrants this continued comparison to food, then it does not readily appear that summary, which requires more separation and alteration of elements than paraphrase and direct quotation, is in a state of obsolescence with respect to academic writing on account of practices found in other genres or writing contexts. Jamieson’s own use of “junk” in reference to abundant, substandard Internet sources may be further strong indication that her writing morality does take its cues from the ideas-as-food metaphor, though if not it will readily fit and reinforce that metaphor (Berrett n.p.).

In closing this section, I would point out that, with the metaphor of digestion and the health it implies, which do not appear to be going away any time soon, one finds still further support for speaking of plagiarism “prevention,” despite the criticisms considered in the first part of this chapter. Assuming the reasonableness of the analogy, it is imperative that measures be taken to forestall writer’s hasty taking in and “regurgitation” of sources, in which case both useful and non-useful elements are often unclearly mixed together, an event which may result in

148 substandard prose if not outright plagiarism. Whether one defends the position that citation conventions require a lot of time to master, it seems far less divisive to say that leisured reflection on sources will prove essential to preventing the kind of writing that provides no appreciable evidence of intellectual growth, namely, the fraudulent submission.

Exhortation: Of Preaching and Teaching

Kathleen Foss’s brief article, “The Myth of the Plagiarism-Proof Paper,” recommends a blended approach to prevention that includes emphasizing requiring evidence of process as well as positive exhortation: “Keep a positive focus on honesty and integrity. Emphasize to students the importance of their learning to conduct competent research and to write well” (12). Here, then, we have some support for not relying merely on plagiarism-proof assignments—which

Foss considers a kind of pedagogical illusion—but for engaging with students in earnest discourse about the nature and purpose of writing and of research and its moral dimensions.

Under the heading of exhortation I here include the honor code, which, in the words of

Susan Blum, “appeal to students’ desire to do the right thing, and assume that with appropriate social pressure to uphold this value, students will do so” (149-50). Suggesting that students may be exhorted at an institutional, as opposed to classroom, level to enact something they are assumed by institutional authorities to know in sufficient detail but which they themselves may have only relatively “vague” notions about, few of Blum’s student interviewees were able to furnish a concrete definition of academic integrity, just as several honor codes Blum considers did not provide such a definition. Blum seems to imply that the institutions should do more to explain this ideal to which they demand their students to aspire; she explicitly states that the vagueness of the institution’s policies may have undergone insufficient review by faculty (153-

55). Later in the same chapter, Blum has praise for John Swales and Christine Feak, who go into

149 the rationale for citation conventions, that is; they provide instruction in source usage (166). For

Blum, then, exhortation, by itself—even in the form of an honor code known campus wide—is not enough.

Perhaps rather predictably, Blum, who professes at a religious school, metaphorizes teachers who exhort their students to academic integrity as preachers. We have already seen a fair amount of religious comparisons in the foregoing pages, and yet the teacher as preacher—by no means a novel comparison—bears at least one more examination. Familiarity breeds not only contempt but with it the questionable assumption that what is known is known in full (indeed the very license for contempt), and so I here turn to consider the tenor. In Blum’s context, a preacher is opposed to someone who “listens” (171), so that, for her, a preacher is decidedly a monologist rather than a dialogist: preaching, after all, is proclamation, neither argument nor dialogue. This monologism is born from a moral certainty and from the assumption that the unwavering utterance of moral certainty may instill in those listening a similar conviction and appropriate response realized through disciplined word and deed. Finally, and equally important, a preacher says what s/he says as one commissioned by a higher authority. Religious parlance that speaks of, for example, a “call to preach” implies that there may be such a thing as speaking out of place even when proclaiming the good news. In sum, then, the tenor for a teacher who preaches is that s/he is a commissioned, authorized proclaimer of moral certainties assumed to be binding on those to whom s/he addresses her proclamations.

Such moral certainty may raise concerns for those who fear its “dangers” (Fountain and

Fitzgerald 118), yet Blum’s statement appears very much to allow for it. When she says, “[w]e must listen, not only preach,” she has clearly stated that “we must […] preach” (171). Blum’s

“must” could be taken in at least one of two morally significant senses. Nel Noddings, in her

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Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, says that “must” may originate from “our best picture of ourselves caring and being cared for. It may,” she continues, “even be colored by acquaintance with one superior to us in caring” (Noddings 426 cf. Harris 205). In this way, an idealized self is the source of the “must,” thus squarely placing her within the realm of virtue ethics, which both Noddings and Harris locate in personal relationships (Noddings 427;

Harris 202-3), and for which Harris stresses the importance of role models or “virtue portraits”

(197-200). As Noddings rightly observes, an “I must” often shares equal moral and psychological territory with “I want” and “arises directly and prior to consideration of what it is I might do.” In other words, the strongly felt desire to act precedes the deliberation of whether and how one is to act (Noddings 428-29). To be sure, Noddings distinguishes “want” from “the moral and ethical ‘ought,’” which she associates with abstract principle, unequal, in her view, to the task of determining ethical action in real, concrete situations (431).

Which of these two, then, is Blum’s “must”? If the former, then a teacher preaches, on

Blum’s view, to maintain a relationship with students, a strong possibility suggested by her statement that teachers “must” listen, that is, that they must maintain a dialogue with their students (171). If the second “must,” that is, “ought,” is intended, then the “must” proceeds from a source outside that of a teacher’s best internalized version of herself both giving and receiving care. Put differently, the teacher’s personal caring and virtue, in Noddings’s relational understanding of virtue18, would have nothing whatsoever to do with the urgency to act, and, in that case, would have nothing to do with listening to the students’ articulations of their

18 Noddings: “When we discuss the ethical ideal, we shall be talking about ‘virtue,’ but we shall not let ‘virtue’ dissipate into ‘the virtues,’ described in abstract categories. The holy man living abstemiously on top of the mountain, praying thrice daily, and denying himself human intercourse may display ‘virtues,’ but they are not the virtues of one-caring. The virtue described by the ethical ideal of one-caring is built up in relation. It reaches out to the other and grows in response to the other” (427).

151 perceptions and understandings assuming a logically consistent ethical approach. If, say, the reason for listening to students is that by being heard they will feel better connected to the school and so increase retention and graduation rates, then presumably the “must” that makes the preacher preach would come from a teacher’s need to appear effective to an administration conscious of numbers and would be an “I must” along the lines of “I must please my employer” or, just as likely, along the lines of “I must keep my job.”

If a teacher must preach—and by the definition in the tenor here considered a preacher is both authorized and under obligation to preach—the question turns to what authority utters commands behind the “must” of this commissioning. Is the teacher, on a care ethics or virtue ethics view, self-commissioned by an ideal self? Or does the teacher act from some sense of duty to an employer, to God, to Society, to Education, or to some combination of these authorities? Because “must” is ambiguous, Blum’s statement may be judged morally true or false for a variety of reasons. And, because it is an authority that proclaims—not reasons— through the teacher, the teacher may be expected to utter at least some moral certainties in keeping with the vehicle which has been here predicated of it.

To be sure, Blum in her book has raised several questions about the definability of plagiarism, the purpose of the various rules surrounding it, and even about the justification of those rules’ existence in the eyes of students who see no long-term applicability for citing sources as they are required in their courses;19 so doing, then, Blum, like other scholars, denies to plagiarism rules the status of an “eternal value” but not the status of authority: “we still have to abide by the values of our time and place” (178). If these rules have been and can be changed,

19 The objection that one is not going to use, say, MLA citations in writing beyond the classroom might be compared to an adolescent’s refusing to play by the rules of a touch football game in which he is involved because tackling will be used when he plays in high school.

152 questions still remain: under what conditions shall the rules be changed, to what shall the rules be changed, how quickly and by what processes shall they be changed, and who has the authority to change them? Perhaps unfortunately, and perhaps due to the possible intellectual attractiveness the complexity poses for scholars in the field, Blum provides no solid answers to these questions, thereby leaving the matter to others.

Because Blum allows and yet does not allow the teacher to be a preacher, that is, because she insists on a dialogical as well as a monological professor, she may align herself partially with ideas such as those put forward by Margaret Price, who dismisses “a sort of banking concept of plagiarism” and recommends dialogue with students of various levels of competence with citation norms (105). In this way, we see how the metaphor of the preacher as well as the

Freirean (condemnatory) metaphor of the banking model may go well together as mutually elaborating illustrations, in that both may trade on similar ideas of the transmission and absorption of information. Interestingly, Price goes on to affirm that “novices [in academic writing] are not empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge” (105): empty or not, the conception of the person is the same—a vessel has only what is put inside it by an outside agent—as one may find in the biblical metaphor of the earthenware vessel appearing in both testaments (e.g., Jer. 18.1-10; Rom. 9.19-24; 2 Cor. 4.9; 1 Thess. 4.4).

At least two scholars have (together) seriously considered what happens when one in the official capacity of a “preacher” speaks to students on the subject of plagiarism. In their chapter,

“‘Thou Shalt Not Plagiarize’?: Appeals to Textual Authority and Community at Religiously

Affiliated and Secular Colleges,” Fountain and Fitzgerald give the example of a Yeshiva College rabbi, Jeremy Weider, who in an address to students rehearses the commonplace that plagiarism marks an attempt to receive credit for what one has not earned and, as the rabbi explains, that one

153 does so by attempting to “steal” from the evaluator the ability to judge the paper’s merit correctly. As Fountain and Fitzgerald comment,

this form of “stealing” emphasizes the effect the plagiarist has on those who are

deceived, not on the actual act of deception. More important, gneivas da’as

[deception] should at all costs be avoided, Rabbi Weider pointed out, because it

can involve much more than a simple act of deceiving one person or group; it can

have a negative effect on the larger community, in this case, of Orthodox Jewry.

(108)

Fountain and Fitzgerald identify an obviously consequentialist rationale here, in that Rabbi

Weider is appealing to the effect regarding the happiness of many; in a real way, Rabbi Weider is saying that plagiarism is wrong because it hurts the good name—which, in the Tanakh, is

“preferable to great wealth” (Proverbs 22.1, Tanakh)—of God’s people, even, as Fountain and

Fitzgerald finally note, of God himself (108). And yet, one may also be reminded of Kant’s kingdom of ends, that is, that all people possess dignity, which has no price,20 and which must be honored as an end in itself (41-42). Tim C. Mazur’s explanation for the wrongness of deception on a Kantian analysis is that “lying corrupts […] my ability to make free, rational choices” as rational being possessed of that very dignity (Mazur n.p.). When Rabbi Weider claims, in the authors’ summary, that the real place of theft here lies in “the mind of the person who has been deceived” (Fountain and Fitzgerald 108, emphasis added), it becomes clear that the plagiarist seeks to “corrupt” a teacher’s ability to make a fair evaluation, thereby showing that the plagiarist dishonors the dignity of the professor by further seeking “to make use of another

20 Kant: “In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity. What has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; what one the other hand is raised above all price and therefore admits of no equivalent has a dignity” (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals 42).

154 human being merely as a means, without the other at the same time containing in himself the end” (Kant 38, italics in original). It would appear that Rabbi Weider has made a case against plagiarism using a blended rationale.

Making due allowances for the fact that such an address is made at a religious institution, we have already seen in the previous chapter that Fountain and Fitzgerald’s objections seem to be that Rabbi Weider’s speech contains “empty moral or religious imperatives” (109), and that emptiness seems to lie in that those imperatives do not teach students to integrate sources well and that “[s]uch moral citations to avoid plagiarism […] function solely as a means of policing behavior” (102). That the emptiness does not consist in the fact that moral or religious imperatives are empty by definition so that “empty moral or religious imperatives” stands as a kind of redundancy (cf. “prior history”), Fountain and Fitzgerald make clear in a later statement when they concede that “[s]hame and fear”—which often come with moral and religious territory—“might teach students which practices to avoid” (118). That is, Fountain and

Fitzgerald allow moral and religious imperatives to have meaningful content which may also result in a desired change of affairs. In the previous chapter, we saw that Fountain and

Fitzgerald’s metaphor of “gates” and “gatekeeping” were the focus of analysis; in this case, their metaphor is that of the policeman (see also Anson, “We”; Bowden, “Coming” 83; Zwagerman

677). A look at the tenor will at once reveal their objection more clearly. The metaphor’s tenor is that a teacher who polices is a person whose job is to enforce the codes of law and whose primary duties therefore lie in observing, assessing, and either permitting legal actions or stopping, by use of power, actions which lie outside the law.

Fountain and Fitzgerald’s claim that moral and religious imperatives “function solely as a means of policing behavior” (emphasis added) is at the same time a claim that one who utters

155 such imperatives is acting only in the role of a policeman. In one (limited) sense, however, precisely the reverse is the case: one making such statements does so with a view to sparing another from the trouble of having his or her actions disciplined by some enforcement, and in this way the teacher may avoid “acting the part of policeman” in the way with which many commonly associate it, i.e., as enforcer. In another sense, of course, Fountain and Fitzgerald are undeniably correct: discipline is the name of the game. They cite one student writer who, in their words, bemoans the “unfortunate” quality of “this regulating force” (112), yet why such regulation is unfortunate, or whether only this regulation as opposed to all or other forms of regulation is unfortunate, is not stated. Given the authors’ optimism about using the community concept as a way to energize academic writing as well as their worry that using that same concept functions to police academic writing, it would appear their real concerns are that simple policing is all a teacher’s actions may amount to, as we saw in the previous chapter that many teachers abominate playing the part of the “mere gatekeeper,” even though gatekeeping itself seems perfectly necessary under normal academic conditions. The objection, then, is likely not an objection to the act of policing as such but rather to becoming a certain kind of teacher.

Blum as well as Fountain and Fitzgerald conclude that if one wishes to have a word with students over the subject of academic integrity, then, as Mercutio urged Tybalt, those faculty should couple it with something: make it a word and some instruction. We see how, even for

Fountain and Fitzgerald, who, as we saw above, are critical of the very idea of “preventing” plagiarism, nonetheless allow that exhorting students to avoid it and to pursue a moral ideal as a student may have some desired effect, even if the means are, for them, undesirable. To be sure, shame and fear are often seen as the tools of the trade for the preacher, and certainly of its caricatures, which are always easily sketched. Further, we have seen how teachers are spoken of

156 in terms of preachers, how preachers are spoken of in terms of policemen, and how teachers are spoken of in terms of both. Both figures of the preacher and the policemen stand for moral uprightness and order, one from divine and the other from civil authority. Because metaphors— speaking of X in terms of Y—are evidence that X may not clearly or fully understood its own terms, we have here evidence that teachers, despite abundant experience with them up close, may not be clearly or fully appreciated in their own terms by students and other teachers,21 as numerous scholars would likely attest, and especially when it comes to plagiarism. Finally, we have seen how preaching represents a monological authority whose presence in the classroom seems to be taken as effective and even necessary, if at the same time not allowed by those scholars herein considered to define the activity of the classroom solely on its own terms.

Exhortation, preaching, may be part of teaching writing—and part of preventing plagiarism—but only a part.

The Threat of Getting Caught: Poison, Panopticon, and Pacts with the Devil

The January 2003 WPA statement on plagiarism makes slender allowance for the use of plagiarism-detection software, advising “caution” and labeling the solution as a “tempting” one

(WPA n.p.). Remarkably, where Howard has recommended teachers’ avoiding the use of

“covenant rhetoric” with students about their citation practices (Standing 10-12), here the WPA takes an authoritative, if indulgent, tone with writing faculty, urging them in what can only be labeled religious terms22 to approach plagiarism-detection software with a heavily curbed enthusiasm. The WPA includes two objections to this software: first, that it is “not always

21 In this instance, Fountain and Fitzgerald, scholar-practitioners in composition, imply that other practitioners may not fully understand themselves. 22 I am convinced that, no matter what one’s stance on religious claims, one familiar with religion will likely draw on its language to express one’s deepest convictions and reserve it especially for epideictic as well as deliberative purposes.

157 reliable,” and, second, that the software’s promise of catching plagiarism, sometimes fruitless, may encourage writing instructors to believe the mere use of plagiarism-detection software is ample measure for prevention and so may be used to “justify the avoidance of responsible teaching methods such as those described in this document” (n.p., emphasis added). Quite possibly with a view to having the widest appeal, the document in this way gives no voice to more controversial objections, such as the “presumption of guilt” such software may be inferred by students to communicate and so forth (Williams 353). In labeling it explicitly as a temptation, however, the WPA has wandered, though not as far, into the same moralizing territory into which others have ventured, as I will explore in this section. According to the language of the

WPA statement, then, plagiarism-detection software lies outside the category of responsible teaching methods, a kind of “last resort” in the words of Jay L. Gordon (Whiteman and Gordon

28)—if it is to be anything at all. It seems fair to say that the view of WPA on plagiarism- detection software is begrudgingly permissive; that of certain scholars, as we will see in this section, is condemnatory.

First, though, perhaps some justification for discussing plagiarism-detection software

(PDS) under the heading of prevention is in order. After all, the basic function of such software is to detect plagiarism, a function it can perform, by definition, only after it has occurred, in which case preventative measures have not been taken or, if taken, have failed. Put simply, PDS is inherently not a preventative measure. Of course, instructors put PDS to preventative uses, as when they announce to students that they will be using PDS as a kind of threat or warning to would-be plagiarists in their midst. Notably, Turnitin.com, the largest provider of PDS (JISC-

PAS qtd. in Heather 648), has marketed itself to instructors precisely as a prevention tool in the past, which some have viewed as disingenuous (Eodice; Fountain and Fitzgerald; Williams)

158 though as of this writing it features videos of teachers who emphasize it as a “teaching tool” and thus softened the tone a bit (turnitin.com), doubtless as a marketing and public-relations move.

In his “Trust, Betrayal, and Authorship,” an article considered somewhat in the previous chapter, Bronwyn Williams names two objections to Turnitin as a preventative measure I consider here. First, he claims, the relationship between teachers and students turns to one of suspicion (352-53). He twice mentions in his short article that the presence of PDS is a “poison” to this relationship and one that, in his words, creates a “prison culture” (352). Second, he argues that it simply gets in the way of doing some good writing teaching, so that Williams clearly prefers the method discussed in the previous section. For now, I will consider Williams’s metaphors of poison and prison.

If poison is the vehicle, what is the tenor? Poison is a non-essential, foreign substance that, when introduced to an environment, whether through malice, ignorance, or natural agency; in sufficient amounts compromises the healthy operations of the organisms that take it in.

Assuming teachers’ best intentions, we may say that, on Williams’s view, teachers who use PDS, probably without knowing it, needlessly introduce a foreign agent whose effects, in sufficient amounts, compromise the healthy operation of the body politic that is the classroom or the emotional and mental functioning of the individual students who now believe their teachers suspect them of dishonesty before ever having had the opportunity to justify this suspicion. In

Williams’s words, this is to proceed from “the presumption of guilt,” placing the burden of proof on the student rather than the teacher. The noxious effects of this poison, Williams seems to suggest, will be that students’ healthy functioning, that is, their full “engagement with ideas” through writing, will tend to cease while giving rise to a “desire to cheat and beat the system”

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(353). It should be noted here that to claim that PDS is a poison is not to make one but multiple assertions, each open to further examination.

For one thing, if PDS is a poison, may it be said that some students and classrooms appear be more immune to its effects than others? Students may accept without objection, and indeed with approval, that teachers are using technology to ensure that the papers submitted for credit are indeed contributions that properly acknowledge sources, and may continue to write unperturbed, perhaps even encouraged, by this realization. Some teachers who use Turnitin, such as this writer, may say they handle the technology responsibly and further assert that some students who feel they are looked on suspiciously are mistaken and that they may benefit from encouragement to see the measurement differently.

Notably, when Williams approvingly cites Nick Carbone—“Much of what Turnitin.com proposes to detect can be avoided by careful assignment planning and teaching” (qtd. in 352)— the statement is an admission that not all plagiarism can be prevented by other methods or, at least, by the method of designing the plagiarism-proof or -resistant assignment. And when it is the case that Turnitin.com does appear to work fairly effectively, and if students know it to be so effective, this may be considerable recommendation to make PDS one more measure to buttress the still fallible methods of more recommended pedagogical approaches.

I now turn to the second metaphor. If prison is the vehicle, what is the tenor? At the hazard of belaboring the obvious, a prison is a place, usually slim in comfort, where people are detained to pay for crimes (of which they have presumably but not necessarily been rightfully convicted) and supervised to ensure proper behavior while there. Doubtless, the loss of dignity, privacy, and autonomy for prisoners can be acute. Explicating his own metaphor, Williams mixes in another, placing the guard-teachers and guarded-students in a “cat-and-mouse game of

160 detection and mistrust in which the fear of being caught can also breed a desire to get around the rules” (352). The guards in this instance, then, presumably relish playing with the guarded, recalling Iago’s terms, monstrously mocking the meat they feed on. Thus, far from the collaborative relationship of trust Williams recommends, this decidedly hierarchical relationship involves cruelty, mockery, violence, and predation. Students, if they cheat, are doing only what they must to survive. Why would they not, the idea goes, when they can only resent those who preside over their charge? For Williams and his hypothetical students, then, there can be no such thing as a legitimately pedagogical use of PDS, and any justifications for its use are smokescreens that, he says, are not fooling anyone (353). Using PDS for the purposes of

“detection and punishment,” then, is not justifiable. “Surveillance is surveillance no matter what spin gets put on it” (353).

Two claims here merit careful consideration: (1) surveillance brings with it no pedagogical warrant, and (2) PDS qualifies as surveillance, especially one of an Orwellian kind.

First, is surveillance decidedly beyond the pale of justification? Provided surveillance does poison the atmosphere, and provided a relationship of trusting collaboration between teachers and students is the goal, it seems reasonable, on all moral theories, to answer yes. As Williams provides no compelling evidence that such poisoning exists—or that, supposing it does, is likely to occur in all classrooms guarded by PDS—and as the teacher-student relationship need not be collaborative, however, this first provision seems lacking in support.

Second, does PDS qualify as Orwellian surveillance? It would not readily appear that it does. When comparisons are made to Bentham’s Panopticon (Zwagerman 691) or, as here, to

Orwell’s Big Brother (Carbone qtd. in Williams 352)—the tenor is, mutatis mutandis, the same—the comparison, at the very least, appears overwrought. With Bentham’s Panopticon, the

161 person surveilled never knows for sure whether he or she is, at that moment, under the selectively all-seeing eye; with PDS, one knows precisely what is being viewed—one’s paper, not one’s person—and when. Under Big Brother, under whom one is presumably always being watched, one can be sentenced on charges for even thinking outside the party line based on the unfounded suspicions and reports of one’s neighbors and even children, whereas PDS absolutely depends on the voluntary submission of one piece of evidence.

It can be readily admitted, of course, that a student’s submitting a paper to a PDS may not constitute a choice in any absolute sense (submitting papers through PDS is a common course requirement), but it is, in the final analysis, no more a choice of the student than is having to write the assignment in the first place. Zwagerman, in claiming disapprovingly that that PDS’s

“true power lies in its ability to command obedience, as much as by the fear of as by the actual presence or deployment of vigilance” (691), may be accurate in one respect: it may indeed have the power to command obedience by fear, and in precisely this way PDS qualifies as a measure of prevention. In principle, however, a student’s fear of being caught plagiarizing by PDS or by a professor whose eye for prose style and ability to search the Internet is the same, so the element of fear may be a working principle of the student-teacher relationship even in a principled absence of PDS. On this analysis, then, Williams’s and Zwagerman’s claim that using PDS amounts to Orwellian surveillance seems false or exaggerated.23

One sympathetic to Williams’s view may however here be moved to suggest an arguably better candidate for condemnatory comparison. There describing the program rSchool Detective,

Thomas Mallon in his Stolen Words speaks of “put[ing] student essays through a kind of body- cavity search,” a powerfully invasive metaphor (246). Surprisingly—though perhaps on account

23 Zwagerman concedes such “prison” language can be “overstated” (692); he nonetheless proceeds to use “panoptic” language following that concession.

162 of its shocking nature, perhaps because Mallon himself is no Ameliorist (Howard, Standing 8)— this metaphor seems not to have received much attention from Ameliorists themselves. On the surface, Mallon’s comparison seems a darkly humorous exaggeration; nonetheless, the vehicle is worth placing alongside the tenor. To commend it, the metaphor takes into account that both plagiarism detection and body-cavity searches are temporally and locally limited activities.

Unlike the general, incessant, wide-sweeping surveillance of Bentham or Big Brother, body- cavity searches, to take place, must stop a person in his or her tracks, seize control of the body, and then proceed to carry out the invasive search. For that moment, the body is entirely the property of the State and is subject, pending the discovery of additional cause, to further, indefinite detention.

Objection to Mallon’s metaphor turns not on the locality and temporality—this may be readily conceded—but on the intensity of the search and the potentially disturbing quality of the image. In order to even speak here of a body-cavity search in any serious way, either a certain personification must first be posited—not necessarily objectionable, and in which case the comparison ends there—or a connection of a certain, deeply personal nature admitted between a student and his or her paper: a paper may be a psychological (if not precisely rhetorical) metonymy for speaking of a student, for example. Lakoff and Johnson include the following as two examples of metonymy in a rhetorical sense: “He likes to read the Marquis de Sade ( = the writings of the marquis)” (35) and “He’s got a Picasso in his den” (38). On the latter example,

Lakoff and Johnson state, “We act with reverence toward a Picasso, even a sketch made as a teenager, because of its relation to the artist. This is a way PRODUCER FOR PRODUCT metonymy affects both our thought and our action” (39). For my purposes here, it is not relevant that we have no precedent for speaking of, say, “the A paper” for “the student who submitted the

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A paper”; my point is that an invasion of student’s privacy on the order of a body-cavity search has occurred if and only if one posits a personal connection between producer and product on some deeply psychological level.

Leaving aside such personifications, then, a more appropriate metaphor than Mallon’s might be, I suggest, that papers are sent through a metal detector. Like a body-cavity search, sending baggage through a metal detector is an event which is temporally and locally limited, thereby satisfying two of three relevant bases for comparison (the third being the identification of paper with person). Unlike a body-cavity search, however, in going through a metal detector one’s baggage, but not one’s person, is subject to searching. While a personal connection between producer and product might more readily obtain for a writer subscribing, consciously or unconsciously, to Romantic notions of authorship, a student learning under the explicit and consistent tutelage of a poststructuralist and Ameliorist would be discouraged from making any such connection: a text, once made public, is subject to revision, reinscription, reappropriation, and indeed it is the heteroglossic nature of text which makes one’s “own” writings possible.

The difference between the metal detector and the PDS is apparent. In the event of setting off a metal detector, one carrying the baggage may be subject to seizure, but this is not the case with a student, unless, of course, requiring a conference following a plagiarized submission is considered a kind of seizing. The only further action taken will be failure on the paper, required revision, failure in the course, or possible move to expel the student from school

(these responses will be discussed in the following chapter). Once admitted there are actions taken by students that may warrant disciplinary action up to expulsion, the argument becomes more a matter of what to do (policy) than what to call the practice (definition) (see also Bolin).

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More than speaking of prison, Zwagerman asserts that to use Turnitin amounts to a

“Faustian bargain” (694). Of all the metaphors against PDS, this surely is the most loaded.

Consider first the vehicle in its full scope. Mentioning Faustus recalls not only a man who signed away his soul to the Devil in exchange for illegitimate power and illegitimate knowledge, but, relevant to secondary and post-secondary instructors, a highly learned man. In Marlowe’s version, Faustus had already, by his own, unaided efforts, earned extraordinary distinction in logic, medicine, law, and theology, all perfectly legitimate pursuits and spheres of knowledge.

With magic, however, Faustus seeks what knowledge can never be his by unaided effort and what is—most importantly—forbidden by God. To get it, he turns to the Devil, who is perfectly happy to supply what God will always withhold from him. Lucifer, to be sure, is the very worst of Brandt’s literacy sponsors—the “advantage” Lucifer seeks is the immortal soul, which he seeks to spite God, in whose image every soul is lovingly made.24

I consider the vehicle in some detail to amplify and clarify the tenor: Turnitin offers an illegitimate means of gaining knowledge, and hence power, over students, and the price of this is the moral integrity of those professors and institutions using it. I submit that the key to the premise is “illegitimate,” without which the matter of moral integrity simply does not come into play. There can be no question whether an institution or a professor has the right to know where the information in a paper submission comes from if it is to be evaluated; the question of how such knowledge is acquired is the real point of contention. Zwagerman’s implication is partly accurate in that institutions and professors do turn to a third party without whose efforts they would not or at least likely might not have this extensive knowledge, and it is undeniably true

24 Deborah Brandt’s definition of a literacy sponsor in her 1998 “Sponsors of Literacy” is as follows: “Sponsors, as I have come to think of them, are any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy—and gain advantage by it in some way” (166).

165 that iParadigms, the creator of Turnitin.com, does “gain advantage” from sponsoring academic literacy. But is this knowledge a sin to have, and is the party supplying it a broker of educational sin? While a kind of opprobrium has been attached to the name of Turnitin among other scholars, Zwagerman’s statement marks a point in the literature in which one sees how a writer attempts to turn the PDS into, quite literally, a devil term.

In the same discussion, Zwagerman denies any moral legitimacy to using Turnitin due to the fact that a paper submitted to it first goes through a scan for originality, which he reads as a clear message to students that teachers simply do not trust them, a point Williams also makes with some emphasis (352). No argument, says Zwagerman, is likely to reorder such a state of affairs into something “acceptable” (694). This claim is perhaps as strong as his metaphor.

What if, however, an analogy with morally relevant similarities could be found? To use an analogy suggested by Bolin, it is common institutional practice to require students to put aside all potentially helpful outside sources of information—and to show a professor or proctor that they are doing so—before they are permitted to take an examination (Bolin 20). That such procedure is common shows that professors want to be satisfied that certain conditions have been met before deeming some work worthy of evaluation. Zwagerman further objects that “most” students submitting a paper have provided “no reason” to justify suspicion. Surely he is correct, and surely this remains true of most students who take exams. Defenders of such measures may answer that the simple explanation for treating one and all as though they were potentially dishonest is that not all students can be trusted to act honorably, and that the alternative, i.e., identifying students as suspicious and isolating them for separate treatment during exams, is far worse.

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To be sure, the effectiveness of PDS and, specifically, Turnitin, has come under considerable challenge (Batane; Heather), though, for what it is worth, Zwagerman despite such challenges is satisfied that Turnitin does what it is supposed to do (691), and Williams is willing to grant for the sake of argument that Turnitin is effective while still attacking it on the grounds that it introduces an undesirable element into the student-teacher relationship. For the present discussion, then, it may be allowed that Turnitin and other PDS providers supply the information they claim to supply: the issue is moral, not technical. Williams’s assertion that the relationship between teachers and students should be defined as one of collaboration based on a trust that

PDS necessarily erodes would at least suggest the underlying philosophy of an ethics of care, where responsibilities trump rights and where preserving relationships outweighs other considerations. In this case, the rights in question would be that of the academic institution to use PDS as a legal service, the student’s acceptance of which is a stipulation in the contractual agreement, represented by the syllabus, of the literacy sponsor and the sponsored. Those upon whom it falls to initiate “the restorative activity of care,” however, will instead “see the actors in the dilemma arrayed not as opponents in a contest of rights”—or, more accurately in the present instance, as parties in a contract with a delineation of rights—“but as members of a network of relationships on whose continuation they all depend” (Gilligan 30). Gilligan’s binary, that of opponents in a contest versus members of a network, mirrors exactly Williams’s binary of adversaries and collaborators. His apparent moral principle, then, that relationships trump rights, appears to be the reason and source for adducing not one but several metaphors all used to frame and condemn the classroom arrangement in which PDS plays a role. To a considerable extent, of

Zwagerman the same may be said.25 Because care ethics is “an ethics of relationships” (Harris

25 Zwagerman adds another element when he seriously entertains the possibility that Turnitin’s

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204), it abhors the erection of “barriers between ourselves and others” (206), hence Ameliorists’ insistence on the collaborative nature of the relationship between teachers and students, and hence the apparent absence of any ethically sound hierarchy in Williams’s and Zwagerman’s articles. Zwagerman especially deplores hierarchy for its destructive potential to a mutual regard

(691).

When used as a deterrent and, hence, as a method of prevention, it seems to me the real moral difficulty posed by PDS for Ameliorists is that, in many instances, it functions as a threat.

The very presence of a threat itself in any case demonstrates that there is a failure of trust on at least one side of a relationship, specifically, that one is not trusted to do as one ought.26 Such a message in a writing class may be both insulting (if the student firmly believes herself to be honest) and fear-inducing (if the student is not confident she can produce a successful submission as well as if she is intent on fraud or is afraid of being suspected wrongly), either case resulting in variously painful experiences. Being on the receiving end of a threat, many would say, is not in their best vision of receiving care (see Noddings 426). To be sure, Nel

Noddings entertains serious doubts that threats are very useful when explaining to someone why a given action is wrong. For her, the simple statement, “It is wrong to do X,” is sensible only when one intends to punish and “reeducate” someone else who, seeing the harmful effects of her actions inflicted on a feeling creature, is not capable of sensing that harm and so of knowing instantly that what one is doing is wrong, as when a child behaves too roughly with a small cat.

For Noddings, “at the foundation of moral behavior […] is feeling and sentiment,” and one capable of empathy knows intuitively that “causing pain is wrong” (Noddings 436-37). PDS, in

database of papers may fall under government surveillance and result in great personal difficulty for young people identified as potential threats to national security (694-96). 26 Recall that Williams’s article title is “Trust, Betrayal, and Authorship: Plagiarism and How We Perceive Students.”

168 both Williams and Zwagerman, seems to emerge as an instrument that causes pain to students, and, in their view, teachers need simply to be informed that they are hurting students by insisting on this requirement that communicates a suspicion of guilt, insulting students as well as, perhaps, making them painfully and unnecessarily afraid. Empathetic teachers, once presented with this information, may be trusted to cease inflicting harm in this way and to emphasize more positive methods of encouraging vigorous writing. And, if Noddings is correct, teachers who do not feel the pain they are causing once it is pointed out to them rightly inspire concern and show themselves in need of “reeducation” (437).

In closing this section, I should emphasize a point about rights in a contractual arrangement, which of course are drawn up for mutual advantage but which may entitle one to exact penalties of the other when the other is in violation. As we have seen, care ethicists are not overly interested in rights and insist they are an insufficient way of framing ethical relationships.

When another does wrong, “the focus [is] on healing” (Harris 204), not on punishing. As one may defend the compulsory use of PDS by an appeal to rights spelled out in the relationship between literacy sponsor and sponsored, and in light of Zwagerman’s rather charged comparison, it is worth noting that, in Marlowe’s play, it was Mephistophilis who “arrested” Faustus once he dared to name God and who threatened horrendous punishments for violating the terms of the contract (V.i.69). When he fears to call on God to find forgiveness lest the devil tear him to shreds, Faustus hears reassurances from the Good Angel that the devil would not touch him:

“Repent, and they shall never raze thy skin” (II.i.80). Though some commentators have seen the contract between Faustus and Lucifer as illegitimate and so not really binding, the important point is that God is willing to nullify a contract made with a devil so as to restore the relationship between Faustus and God. God, who by all rights could damn Faustus—for drawing up a

169 contract with Lucifer as well as for numerous other things—offers reconciliation; it is the devil who insists on the terms of the contract. In this way, Zwagerman shows how God-talk may function to support rather than to oppose the moral conclusions of care ethicists, as well as to support the conclusions of the WPA who regard PDS as a “temptation” not to be classed among effective ways of preventing plagiarism. Religious metaphors, as we see again, are stored for ready use on both sides of the aisle.

Finally, it is always true that, as Nel Noddings observes, “we cannot care for everyone.”

In fact, Noddings maintains no obligation exists where “there is no possibility of completion in the other” (432). For practitioners concerned about class size, such a statement has fairly obvious implications but which nonetheless will bear the stating: large class sizes make certain pedagogies not only practically impossible, but also morally undesirable. On Noddings’s account, a class large enough removes the obligation of a teacher to care for a student’s needs. A student on the back row in a writing class with thirty-five students may begin to seem as distant to a teacher with a full load as would a suffering child in another country (see Noddings 433; see, however, Gelfand 595). It may prove correct that, as a class grows in size, it lends itself so much the more to a moral environment based in rights rather than in one based in relationships. Care ethicists practicing composition would be well advised to continue strong advocacy for smaller class sizes for moral as well as practical reasons, and indeed one may likely find that it is precisely such an ethics that is often behind the push for more personal, manageable class sizes.

Conclusion

We have already considered whether it would be morally desirable to remove the element of choice from students by making certain kinds of failure impossible or at least very difficult. I would now like to press this matter further and so close this chapter, not with a summary, but

170 with an intriguing possibility: what if the morally best alternative is not to attempt to prevent plagiarism? That is, what if we could say that, in some sense, we want plagiarism to happen?

On this point, I recall a statement from Anselm’s Why God Became Man (Cur Deus Homo): “It is […] our custom to say of someone who is capable of preventing something, but does not prevent it, that he ‘wishes’ for the thing which he does not prevent” (281). Anselm’s aim was to describe God’s not preventing the Crucifixion, and one need not look far to find disapproval of the idea that God would want an evil, moral or natural, to occur. Perfectly representative on this point, not surprisingly, is Christopher Hitchens, who asks with pointed emphasis: “By letting [a natural disaster] happen, God must in some way wish it to. Why would he do that?”

(LeCaNANDian). I draw here on Anselm and Hitchens because both are concerned with the matters of causation and responsibility on the highest levels. By no means do I wish to deify teachers by this comparison, but to point out that if we can clarify the issues through these analogous arguments, then we may more clearly see them where the same logics impinge on less significant, though still important, questions.27 The garden-variety response of the theodicies concerning moral evil is that God allows evil actions to happen because he has determined that human beings must have the free exercise of their wills (the “free-will defense”). The undesirable alternative is put in the form of a rhetorical question by Milton’s God: “Not free, what proof could they have giv’n sincere | Of true allegiance, constant Faith or Love, | Where only what they needs must do, appear’d, | Not what they would?” (Milton 60-61). It might be argued, then, that a teacher who does not take the highly recommended step of designing a plagiarism-proof assignment, say, rather than taking something away from the student, gives to a

27 Here is philosopher Galen Strawson making a similar point: “The story of heaven and hell is useful simply because it illustrates, in a peculiarly vivid way, the kind of absolute or ultimate accountability or responsibility that many have supposed themselves to have, and that many do still suppose themselves to have. It very clearly expresses its scope and force” (216).

171 student the opportunity to do something and to realize his or her possibilities with the written word. By “wishing” that plagiarism may happen, the teacher wishes simultaneously to give the student the opportunity to discover and cultivate talent through refining struggle, especially if that struggle involves fighting the disinclination to read and to write the assignment, as with

Bloom’s critical analyses.

No doubt it will be objected—by some—that free will is an illusion, and while there are compelling arguments against free will, including the (ironically) moral argument that free will is merely a pretext for punishment (Nietzsche, Twilight 64)28, debating that complex question at any length stands beyond the scope of the current project. Rather, in entertaining the possibility that not preventing plagiarism is morally most commendable, it may be assumed that human beings do have some free exercise of their wills and that the evident presence of praise or blame in the arguments concerning plagiarism prevention would run such arguments into the nonsensical in free will’s absence, praise or blame being thereby reduced to merely one of many environmental stimuli emptied of moral content.29 The arguments of the scholars here considered and others, it would seem, allow for choice, and their metaphors perform clearly epideictic functions. In that light, and in light of majority opinion in favor of prevention, some consideration of a minority position seems in order. What Anselm called “preserving rectitude of will for the sake of rectitude itself” (131), or what Kant described as acting “from duty” (10)— a kind of being good for goodness’ sake—lies at the heart of the very definition of moral for some theories. A lack of prevention would argue that the person concerned relies on the necessity and the sufficiency of the student’s will, not on any action of the professor deemed

28 Nietzsche’s argument is intriguing in that he clearly blames priests for seeking control over those for whom they would punish, and yet, ex hypothesi, there is a sense in which the priests’ will must not be free. 29 See also Aristotle, NE III.1.

172 sufficient, to arbitrate the outcome of a submission. In such a case, any methods to prevent plagiarism may be classified either as supererogatory, in which case a proper response would be gratitude; or impermissible, in which case such methods would be censurable. By contrasting the motive of preserving rectitude of will for its own sake with preserving it “for some other reason, for example for money, or just naturally” (Anselm 131), Anselm regards no will as properly free which would act for the sake of anything other than a sense of right. Not plagiarizing a paper because it was simply impossible to do so, or because it was not worth the effort, or because it would result in a failing grade: none of these things, while often effective motives, deserve, on this view, moral commendation. Arguably, no moral position so sharply underscores just what instructors really expect—and what the public desires—from their students than this one does.

Disregarding the above, consequentialists may object that the price of not preventing plagiarism is simply too high in light of economic and social realities that attend disparities in educational achievement and that taking away certain elements of choice more than answers the limit on liberties to fail or on the qualities of the motives for completing an assignment by legitimate means. Even here, consequentialists may be answered. Harris explains that when calculating utility, one must take into account the amount of utility produced from a given action as well as the number of people affected, what he calls the “audience.” It is possible that one action, which may result in high levels of utility, may affect only a small audience and still yield more utility than a different action promising fewer “units of utility,” which may affect a larger audience. Taking one action, to be sure, depends entirely on a reliable standard of measurement for units of utility (124), and it is here that Elisabeth Anscombe has such a cogent point.

Assuming submitting a literary analysis yields considerably more academic benefit (utility) than

173 does a creative-writing assignment in the same college course because of the former’s familiarizing the student with scholarship, though, it would be better for only a handful of students to write a solid literary analysis than for an entire class to write a creative-writing assignment well. Justifying the necessary assumption may prove very difficult, but Harris shows that just such a justification is theoretically possible so long as it is not further stipulated that academic success, like some commodities, be distributed equally across the class or that some state of affairs resembling equal distribution be so stipulated (124).

While it is not my aim to advocate for taking no measures to prevent plagiarism, it is my aim in this concluding section to show that such a position is a rational one. A chapter such as this one might be expected to close by considering the relative merits of the different measures or to make recommendations that a combination of these measures be taken, but such recommendations seem far less intriguing than the fact that the scholarly literature has so little to say in favor of the choice not to take measures against plagiarism. If some shop-talk may be trusted, some measures to prevent academic failure in general are taken not because the teacher believes that such measures will be completely effective or even because it may lessen the chance of failure in a given student’s case, but because the instructor will have plausible evidence of her good will and competence ready to hand should failure result in a grade appeal.

If that supposition is correct, it shows all the more how the sufficiency of the student’s will is not believed to be much of a factor in educational outcomes. This, I think, provides ample food for thought.

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Chapter 5

PUNISHMENT AND RESPONSE

“Is not correction sometimes necessary?” Of course it is; but with discretion, not with anger; for it does not injure, but heals under the guise of injury. We char crooked spearshafts to straighten them, and force them by driving in wedges, not in order to break them, but to take the bends out of them; and, in like manner, by applying pain to the body or mind we correct dispositions which have been rendered crooked by vice.

—Seneca, On Anger

We may legally punish one who has stolen, but we may not pass moral judgment on him until we know why he stole.

—Nel Noddings, Caring

At the close of Tartuffe, the temperamental Orgon, having felt the reeling blow of

Tartuffe’s attempt to defraud him of hearth and home and having narrowly escaped by the outside assistance of the prince, prepares to unleash a torrential speech on his treacherous bosom friend. Cool-headed Cléante restrains his brother-in-law, desiring Orgon to remember the

Christian hope of the offender’s reform and to remain above the “indignity” of venting his rage.

Cléante’s temper may well be a family trait, as his sister and Orgon’s wife, Elmire, earlier refused to add vehement reproofs to her rebuff of Tartuffe’s adulterous advances. She explains to her husband that “I just laugh away such nonsense; I’ve no desire to make a loud to-do. Our virtue should, I think, be gentle natured, nor can I quite approve those savage prudes whose honour arms itself with teeth and claws to tear men’s eyes out at the slightest word. Heaven preserve me from that kind of honour” (Molière 169; 152). Molière’s play ends with the important lesson in Orgon’s moral education: one ought to avoid extremes, whether in trust—he

175 too readily, as Polonius puts it, dulls his palm with entertainment of a new-hatched, unfledged comrade—or in punishment. Having been once bitten by the wolf in sheep’s clothing, Orgon rashly forswears all further fellowship with the genuine flock. At close, however, one hopes that

Orgon will refine his view of justice, tempering it by charity and reason. Because his story is comedy, we may well expect this to be the case.

Avoiding extremes, important both in defining and preventing plagiarism, is obviously of the essence in responding to and punishing plagiarism as well. It is in responding to and punishing plagiarism that students will be met with their actions’ consequences, determined by institutional officials, and where they will be asked, by one way or another, to “grow” as students, citizens, and human beings. When Bolin candidly and rightly observes that “many of us who assign research-based writing […] can probably admit that we investigate suspected plagiarism not so much to help those students grow but to remind them just whom they are dealing with” (13), he identifies the common Orgon-like—or, perhaps, Javert-like (Anson, “We”

141)—response in which the professor represents Higher Learning and wishes to impress upon the student that fact by making the fact, in a word, impressive.

In this chapter, I turn to a fairly wide range of responses to plagiarism, from expulsion to mandatory revision. In organizing this chapter according to response, ranging from most to least severe, I am not at the same time organizing the chapter according to the type of plagiarism that may or may not result in the response. And yet, it remains the case that responses to plagiarism, if logically consistent, remain true to the practical definitions that have been stipulated of it. For that reason, the following survey of responses, including differing moral rationales, will accord due observation to those practical definitions. As in previous chapters, some attention will be paid, though to a lesser extent, to some metaphors which have occurred in the literature.

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Concluding this chapter, I devote considerable space to the importance of intention and how practitioners may refine their understanding of this important, indeed essential, moral component of action.

It should be noted that, whereas scholars such as Price want to remind us that plagiarism resists “stabiliz[ing]” definition (90; cf. Scollon), my treatment of the issues here assumes that plagiarism has been fairly and reasonably well-defined as a textual phenomenon, thereby removing the variable of a lack of clarity. The real difficulties occur, I submit, when one seeks to define plagiarism practically. I moreover assert that Ameliorists’ concerns in the literature seem more pronounced, or ultimately motivated, by redefining plagiarism practically rather than theoretically (as with, for example, problematizing notions of authorship) because it is in defining plagiarism as say, practice with certain forms of academic literacy, as Valentine does, that one preserves the integrity of the student’s motivation to learn even if the student’s product is sub-standard. For my purposes, then, plagiarism’s definition is a practical and moral, but not theoretical, problem.30 As we will see in this chapter, even practical definitions shared by morally divergent practitioners may be responded to in different ways. In this chapter, then, I devote most space to exploring and explicating the moral assumptions that lie behind responses.

Expulsion: “Death Penalty”?

Discussing plagiarism at this length obliges one to include Howard’s meme-level contribution to the profession, and that is to connect expulsion, the “academic death penalty,” with plagiarism, and, specifically, with patchwriting. As her watershed article has already been discussed in Chapter 2 and her related critiques Chapter 3, I may set the substance of that article largely aside and devote primary attention to the metaphor itself. Less important to my present

30 See also Fish, who on the ground of academic practice denies the need to define plagiarism according to contemporary theory (“Plagiarism is Not a Big Moral Deal”).

177 purposes is what Howard has to say in that article and more how, on the whole, what Howard’s favorably received metaphor suggests about the moral climate in plagiarism scholarship and whether it is indeed an “apt phrase” (Blum 147).

Observing expulsion in “Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Academic Death Penalty” as

“the extreme end of potential punishment” (789), Howard seems to gloss her tenor, supplying us with what she appears to mean by it: expulsion is the highest sanction any academic institution, acting as an academic institution, can impose. So far, so reasonable. Yet the finality of “death” in this context would, as Hamlet says, be scanned. Just as a state may deprive a citizen of life—a fact which communicates that life, or at least continued life, is the gift and prerogative of the state—so, we are given to understand, an academic institution may deprive a student of her status as a student; this comparison presupposes yet one of two possible others. It may, on the one hand, presuppose that group membership (here, studentship at a university or college) is life. Or, it may presuppose that student status itself is life. Either interpretation has, in turn, two possible variations; I consider each in ascending order of plausibility.

We may, perhaps, categorize group membership is life as a metonymic relationship

(Lakoff and Johnson 35-40), specifically, one in which means is substituted for ends. Spelled out fully, the underlying comparison would be notated as follows, showing a tight network of associations: group membership = livelihood = survival. If either of the two connections in this chain is shown to be false or unnecessary, the metonym suffers in cogency. The connection between livelihood and survival seems unassailable,31 but that between group membership and livelihood is far from necessary: one may subsist independently of community, or, even if membership is necessary for survival, one may find sustaining community membership in more

31 See discussion of Aristotle’s idea of the polis and full realized humanity in the section in this chapter, “Mandatory Revision.”

178 than one place. In the case of the college student expulsion from college, on this analysis, does not amount to a death sentence: any resulting “death” is plainly hyperbolic. Slightly more plausible, perhaps, the “life” assumed by the comparison “death penalty” is not metonymic in the terms above considered—in which case the comparison fails—but in terms of a substitution of

“life” for “quality of life,” i.e., a given desired socio-economic status. Here, too, however, the comparison fails because, again, being deprived group membership from one college does not preclude similar membership elsewhere, as well as because there is no necessary causal relationship between academic credentials and quality of life.

Should, more plausible still, the “life” assumed by the “death penalty” comparison refer solely to student status, it implies, as above, one of two possibilities. First, it may again be metonymic, in this case, referring to a student’s academic career. If so, the comparison fails for the same reason considered in the possibility above: no college can bar a student’s entrance to all other colleges. If, on the other hand, the “life” refers to the set of a student’s experiences at a given college or university—the most plausible interpretation—this is a heavily circumscribed kind of life and, consequently, a heavily circumscribed kind of death, one more so than those considered in the above three interpretations. This brief analysis is enough to show the polyvalence of the comparison. While the last two interpretations seem more reasonable than the first two, in all four cases the “death” in the “death penalty” seems to be, to borrow Stefan

Senders’s term for plagiarism, a “scare word” (195).32

To be sure, however, a real concern for students lies behind the frequent and approving use of the comparison. In her article, Howard echoes others’ concerns that “it is students who suffer and pay for intractable policies” (797). The suffering a student certainly undergoes,

32 In context, Senders references Howard’s own criticism of plagiarism in her paper, “Plagiarism: What Should a Teacher Do?”

179 though, amounts to a revocation of studentship at the institution, not literal death, certainly, and not necessarily the end of one’s experience in academia as a whole. Surely, for that reason, expulsion is better compared to exile than to execution. “Exile” acknowledges the fact that students, though expelled from one institution for good, may find membership at another institution—and possibly thrive.33 Additionally, it acknowledges the deep pain one may experience from being removed from familiar surroundings. Recommending “exile” as a substitute for “death penalty” preserves the idea, which “death penalty” also serves to communicate, that the student may lose a great deal upon being expelled. Though not final in the way death is, nor loaded with the same “moral charge” (Murdoch 76),34 exile is very difficult and may well serve the rhetorical purposes of anyone who opposes it on those grounds.

Still one more reason for preferring “exile” to “death penalty” suggests itself. “Exile” has strong associations with ancient, medieval and Renaissance civilizations but not readily with modern ones (famous examples include Diogenes’s exile from Sinope, Cicero’s from Rome,

Dante’s and Machiavelli’s from Florence, and even—for a fictitious example—Romeo’s from

Verona). Connotatively, “exile” may well suggest to Ameliorists that an academic institution that practices expulsion, especially for patchwriting—Howard’s primary concern—stands as a

33 Diogenes the Cynic, for example, famously exiled from his hometown of Sinope where he, or perhaps in concert with his father, was found guilty of “defacing the currency” (Dobbin xxiv), did well enough for himself in Athens to merit the serious if annoyed attention of Plato. Diogenes considered himself a “cosmopolitan,” that is, a citizen of the world, one whose belonging transcends the narrow boundaries of any single polis (xxv). 34 I suspect continued use of the overwrought “death penalty” metaphor may be accounted for by its ability to assign rhetorical presence to the alleged disproportionate suffering students experience for academic infractions. Professors, many of whom abhor the death penalty in keeping with their progressive identities, will be encouraged in this way to abhor expulsion for plagiarism for similar reasons. If Lakoff is correct that academics, despite their largely progressive leanings, act as Strict Fathers when they fulfill their academic roles, Howard’s metaphor may encourage progressives to more closely align their professional with their political philosophies.

180 kind of anachronism or as a bastion of cultural atavism. It is noteworthy, too, that Howard’s proposed policy in her article nowhere mentions expulsion as the ultimate sanction for fraudulent plagiarism, recommending suspension instead (799-800). Even here, Howard allows the possibility of a student to return to the university he has attempted to cheat of credit, doubtless consonant with her statement that “[i]nstitutional policies must be centrist” (802): suspension, in this context, appears to be an Ameliorist concession to Traditionalist responses to plagiarism, while also—the supposed goal of such a concession—blunting the edge of the most severe of

Traditionalist responses.

Assuming, then, that expulsion is a kind of exile, and having noted Ameliorist objections to it by any name, by what standards might this punishment justified? I will consider two moral theories, natural law and egoism. Emphasizing its principle of forfeiture, natural law can furnish a ready rationale. “The principle of forfeiture,” Harris explains, “can be used to justify not only acts of individual self-defense but also […] capital punishment” (96). Even if Howard’s analogy of the “death penalty,” despite the foregoing criticisms, is allowed to stand, one may urge this principle as justification for a metaphorical capital punishment. Moreover, the principle of double effect as explained by Harris (96) may be pleaded as justification. If one worries that expelled students will face, for example, economic hardship as a result of their expulsion,35 a natural law ethicist may assert the following: (1) it is morally permissible to remove dishonest

35 I assume that in all cases of clear violation of academic honesty, the only reason to withhold or mitigate punishment amounts ultimately to some extenuation of economic cost—loss of scholarship or some other financial aid, for instance, or the realization that the student will out of pocket incur the cost of taking the course again. This is significant when considering, for example, that teachers likely do not consider the possibility of a student’s being shamed in front of peer or family groups for their dishonesty (see, however, Sutherland-Smith 171). Thus, the only two reasons which might motivate compassion are the pain of cost or the pain of shame. It bears the asking just which pain a teacher hopes to spare a student in each case of offered clemency.

181 students (on the principle of forfeiture), (2) removing dishonest students may result unavoidably in economic hardship, (3) economic hardship, if incurred, is neither intended nor is it the means by which the offending student is removed, and (4) society’s interest in maintaining academic standards is more or less equal to its interest in protecting its members from economic hardship.

The argument may be challenged, to be sure, at premises (1) and (4). Premise (4), because it posits rough equality between two clearly different things—academic standards and economic well-being—will likely raise serious questions about the nature of “academic standards” and what it means to “maintain” them. Premise (1) may be challenged if one does not accept the principle of forfeiture: even accepting premise (4), one may ask whether removing dishonest students is necessary to maintain academic standards or whether it is merely sufficient, in which case, perhaps other, equally sufficient measures—reform, for example—should be sought. Clearly, such a challenge proceeds along consequentialist as opposed to deontological lines.

Ethical egoism, or objectivism, may also supply a rationale for this approach. For the ethical egoist, one serious question to ask oneself is the following: “What kinds of friendships should I cultivate?” (Harris 72). Should an institution determine that it desires to have students who absolutely will not cheat or who, as far as the institution can tell, have never cheated, it may wish to draw up a no-tolerance policy to deter would-be cheats from the institution or remove them immediately once discovered. To be sure, such a policy raises old and vexed questions about when plagiarism is cheating, a question of intention: as far as I know, no one recommends expulsion for any student who plagiarizes unintentionally.

Rand explains in her chapter, “The Nature of Government,” from The Virtue of

Selfishness, that fraud “involves an indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values

182 without the owner’s consent, under false pretenses or false promises” (130). Having earlier explained that the only two “agents” who will use force in a free society are criminals or government agents, Rand rules out revenge (as well as vigilantism) because it is left to an individual’s “whim” and so is not amenable to governance by “objective code of rules” (127, italics in original). In principle, her remarks apply to any academic institution when taking action against those who violate its rules. In one important respect, the analogy holds up fairly well: professors may not, on their own authority, expel a student from the school, even for a clearly fraudulent submission. So understood, the sanction of academic exile is not administered

“at the discretion of individual citizens” (127), a safeguard against a professor’s anger that may, at times, furiously erupt (see “Mandatory Revision” below).

This “check and balance” on anger (Rand, Virtue 127) is what Gilligan would call “a restraint on aggression,” but, for her care ethics, to restrain aggression amounts to an approach that falls far short of the ideal of care (38). For those reasoning with care in mind, “avoiding isolation and preventing aggression rather than […] seeking rules to limit its extent” is the way to create a “safe” environment (43). She explains further,

In this light, aggression appears no longer as an unruly impulse that must be

contained but rather as a signal of a fracture of connection, the sign of a failure of

relationship. (43)

Because relationships and interconnection are “primary” in care ethics, as well as because one’s responsibility to others through acts of care are more important than rights—which, on this view, are predicated on the unwarrantable assumption of the separation of individuals (57; for contrasting view on the separation of individuals, see Rand, Virtue 108-17)—it seems unlikely that a committed care ethicist would be supportive of a policy that both treats students as

183 individuals rather than as members of an interconnected network as well as so decisively determines the irreparable fracturing of the student-teacher relationship. To be sure, it is hard not to hear echoes of this assumption in the Ameliorist understanding that we “take plagiarism as a signal that pedagogy needs to be reevaluated” (Howard qtd. in Eodice qtd. in Zwagerman 682), with pedagogy understood to be a deeply relational term denoting a form of care which the teacher has insufficiently given to the student. Particularly if plagiarism does mean the teacher has failed to provide adequate care,36 punishing a student with ultimate sanctions, even assuming the worst kind of plagiarism, invokes Hytholday’s famous rebuke: “what else, I ask, do you do but first create thieves and then become the very agents of their punishment?” (727).

True to her self-distancing from the penalty and its metaphor, as mentioned above,

Howard proposes suspension, not expulsion, as the most severe penalty. Even in the event of a purchased term paper, temporarily removing the student from the institution is all she recommends. Quite likely this allowance for the possibility of return arises from “the restorative activity of care” and the supreme reluctance to do anything hurtful characteristic of care ethics

(Gilligan 30; 95). Under what circumstances Howard might accept expulsion for academic infractions is not stated.

Howard’s effect on the literature is considerable, extending even beyond composition. As already noted, Blum, a cultural anthropologist, praises Howard’s “apt phrase” while explaining that expelling a student for plagiarism is something she might have done in a former life. Her current opinion is that a plagiarizing student is more “lost soul […] than a hardened criminal”

(147). The assumption is significant. According to Blum, the academic death penalty is

36 This would lend further weight to Howard’s suggestion in “The Ethics of Plagiarism” that “the ethics of plagiarism are”—in some cases—“a matter of the teacher’s ethics, not the student’s” (80, italics in original).

184 inappropriate not because awarding that death penalty is, in itself, disproportionate—as

Howard’s article suggests—it is inappropriate, rather, because students do not possess the character of those to whom the death penalty rightly applies. Once again, we see how a scholar may share conclusions but not, what is most important for moral reasoning, relevant premises.

Failure for the Course: “Dramatic Device”

Supposing a plagiarized paper justly brings the penalty of expulsion, it must at least justly bring the penalty of failure for the course. Again, to cite her famous article, Howard lists cheating (buying a term paper), non-attribution, and patchwriting as grounds for failure in a course provided the presence of “the intent to deceive” (799-800). Why this element merits a minimum penalty in all three cases will be considered in due course below. On the way to exploring this, however, I analyze the more rigorous stipulation of failure for the course in the event of only a small portion of plagiarized text. Describing one such instance of this policy,

Chris Anson dismisses it as a “dramatic device” (145); to be sure, the policy draws attention to itself.

Let us pause to consider, however briefly, the vehicle and implied tenor. A common enough adjective for the self-promoting and overly emotional, “dramatic” would seem more or less straightforward in meaning; yet, one may scrutinize further the “commonest metaphors […] till some bitter truth ha[s] been forced from its hiding place” (Lewis, Surprised by Joy 77).

Merely to classify a pedagogical action as a dramatic device invokes the teaching-as- performance metaphor, so that the teacher, while remaining pedagogue, is also thespian. Since the goal of the dramatic device here is to issue stern warnings to the audience, associations of

Greek tragedy or medieval morality plays seem warranted even if authorially unintended. If this syllabus policy is a drama, it is seriously purposed, but, to Anson, comically—or perhaps

185 tragically—overwrought. Anson does not inhabit the “plausibility structure” (Berger and

Luckmann passim) necessary to make him the intended audience. It is not clear whether Anson rejects the teacher-as-performer metaphor that enables the “dramatic device” metaphor in the first place, though it is clear he rejects this performance. Why teaching is seen as performance probably comes from a cultural premium on amusement and entertainment (see Lakoff and

Johnson 67). If so, part of the reason for rejecting this performance may lie in its not coming in a more entertaining genre: staged didacticism is not a popular form of drama. To be sure, Greek dramas and morality plays served religious ends, and we have already seen in previous chapters how religious comparisons serve often as pejoratives and, in postmodern terminology, a way of self-definition by reference to the abject Other. In one case, using a religious comparison may be a sign that one takes oneself too seriously, a moral failing by any standard. Additionally, despite some teachers’ best efforts, Greek tragedies and morality plays are perhaps often read more as historical curiosities than as moral instruction or entertainment. It could be said, then, that this performance is outmoded and doomed to be unappreciated on its own terms. So, then, we may derive the following tenor: threatening students with failure for a single plagiarized sentence is to take oneself far too seriously for contemporary students, whose desire for entertainment outweighs the performers’ desire to instruct. I do not wish to interrogate the viability of the teacher-as-performer metaphor further; the more important point lies in the claim that how the teacher “performs” here is an instance of taking oneself too seriously. To examine this, I consider Anson’s discussion in more detail.

Relying on John Biggs’s theory of learning, Anson explains that some teaching approaches assume three different “levels” of learning and that, consequently, responses are appropriate only insofar as they follow from correct theories of learning. Level 1, the worst of

186 the three, Anson explains, focuses on separation of “good” from “bad” students. According to

Anson, this approach works by two problematic assumptions: (1) students are responsible for their learning and (2) the teacher labors under no obligation to adjust teaching to accommodate students’ varying abilities. Correspondingly, Level 1 assumes a transmission model, resulting in classroom lectures. As might be expected, Anson faults the approach for effectively “rewarding the good students for what they have and punishing the bad ones for what they lack” (143).

Here is Anson explaining the role of Level 1 teachers as he understands it:

Plagiarism comes from student failures; our job is to reward those who don’t

cheat and punish those who do—much as we might reward those students who

enter our classes already well prepared and punish (through failure) those who are

deficient. Although cheating and academic performances might seem like apples

and oranges, at Level 1 the practice of prejudgment applies to both: Teachers are

often quick to point out that students who perform poorly do so by choice; it is

who they are (lazy, uninspired, unprepared) that makes them poor learners, just as

it is who they are (shiftless, sneaky, unscrupulous) that makes them plagiarists.

(144)

Despite his answer to the rightly anticipated objection about comparing apples and oranges,

Anson’s argument remains somewhat dependent on a flawed, or at least highly questionable, assumption. Whereas Level 3, the best level, posits “learning as the confluence of what the teacher does, who the students are, and, most importantly, what the students do to learn” (144),

Level 1, on the other hand, holds students responsible for their learning while relying on a transmission model. Anson paints an incomplete picture of what Level 1 teachers, who hold that students are responsible for their learning, really believe: students are responsible for their

187 learning in that they must attend class, take notes during lectures, study material outside of regular class meetings, and, if necessary, visit the professor and perhaps consult tutors or assemble study groups. Taking responsibility for learning, then, comprehends an array of activities outside the classroom and assumes the student has enough leisure and discipline to devote himself to the coursework; further, it practically assumes that teacher involvement is part of the learning process. Level 3 thinking, on the other hand, differs in that it simply places many of the necessary activities inside the classroom: as I read it, location and scheduling seem the only real difference between these levels.37

As an example of the Level 1 approach, Anson adduces the following statement from a political science, not (what is likely Anson’s point in observing it) a composition syllabus38: “if you plagiarize even a single sentence from another person, you will fail this course.” Such

“tactics,” Anson judges, “often border on desperation” (145, italics in original). Anson clearly, and quite possibly rightly, assumes failing a student for the course in response to the presence of a single insufficiently cited sentence is wildly disproportionate to the offense, offering that it is

“desperation”—or something like desperation—that most likely accounts for that response.

Taking that suggestion seriously, I would like to speculate about just what it is professors despair of when drawing up such seemingly draconian policies as well as what Anson’s statement suggests about reasonable ones.

If it is true that the threat of failure for one plagiarized sentence signals a professor’s desperation, then searching earlier incarnations of the same professor’s syllabi should, sooner or

37 For my purposes here, Level 2 is not important. 38 Stereotypical differences between compositionists’ and non-compositionists’ understanding of what writing courses do have been well noted; see also, of course, Robillard’s opening light- hearted anecdote to her “We Won’t Get Fooled Again” (discussed in this chapter under “Mandatory Revision”).

188 later, uncover at least the absence of this policy. Perhaps an interview would further reveal one or two stories of being overwhelmed with plagiarized submissions one bleak and dreary semester, resulting in the desperate, reactionary resolve to pile on the threat to the next semester’s syllabus and thus hopefully rid oneself forever of undesirables. Likely, moreover, similar policies from other professors would reveal similar geneses. Such research may show the narratives of mild-mannered, well-intentioned professors driven to the edge by students who painfully belie the young idealists’ hopes of educating young charges eager to learn and better themselves. Shattered idealism births the policy, completing the tragic character arc of the talented-but-now-twisted professor who, like the super villain of the comic book, fears chaos and desires order at all costs. Equally well, perhaps, such a story might be interpreted as professors’ wising up through experience, one more salutary illustration of the right-wing maxim, “If you’re not a liberal by twenty, you’ve got no heart; if you’re not a conservative by thirty, you’ve got no head.”39 Anson, seeing no wisdom in the approach, almost certainly would prefer something closer to the former to the latter account, caricatured though it is, of the policy.

Having considered Anson’s concerns, can the approach of failing a student for the course be justified? If it can, then surely failing a student for one entirely plagiarized paper can be justified, too. One may justify this approach, supposing—at the very least—that (1) the purpose of education is to encourage moral as well as intellectual growth and (2) plagiarized assignments may be taken as a sign of moral failure. With certain reservations, perhaps, most can be brought to accept the first premise40, and it is admitted even by some Ameliorists, explicitly or implicitly,

39 Recall, once again, Lakoff’s observation that academics, many of whom identify as progressives, adopt nonetheless “Strict Father” (conservative) approaches to demanding excellence from their students (296-99). 40 Even students who enter college for better career prospects may reasonably be brought to see their writing classes as training ground in those virtues necessary to succeed in middle-class life

189 that fraudulent submissions warrant righteous indignation (e.g., Price 103; Scollon 26; Robillard,

“We” 18), so that some, in given cases, may accept the second premise.

Aristotle asserts that punishment is reserved for those who, by argument or habit, cannot be brought to “enjoying and hating in a noble way,” (NE X.9). Put differently, a word to the wise should be sufficient. For those less virtuous, however, punishment (force) is the expedient.

If the city exists, as Aristotle maintains, to ensure “a good quality of life,” by which he means a life of virtue (Politics III.9), then surely any civic institution, such as a college or university, derives its legitimacy from its continued ability to contribute to this end. In this way, an

Aristotelian view reminds us that the common good, not the individual aspirations of the student, are the most relevant factors in determining institutional response to a violation of its norms.

Should it be asserted that while, in principle, applying pain to combat a vicious pleasure is warranted (see Aristotle, NE II.3), it has yet to be established that an “F” justly answers the offense of insufficiently citing a single sentence. Howard, however, seems to allow for just this when she states that patchwriting, which, as scholars note, much of her work in the late nineties sought to “decriminalize” (“New” 94), warrants an “minimum penalty” of “F” if that patchwriting was “the result of a student’s intent to deceive” (“Plagiarisms” 799-800). Price observes that Howard’s policy leaves some questions open (92), and this would be another: whether intentional patchwriting for a single sentence demands failure in the course. If it does,

Howard’s policy concedes sizable ground to more absolutist views of morality. Thomas

Aquinas, for example, maintains that “[a] lie is evil in itself.” Nothing, not even dire necessity— whether another’s or one’s own—excuses it. Moreover, he asserts, “the moral character of an

(see, of course, Lynn Z. Bloom’s “First-Year Composition as a Middle-Class Enterprise”). For more on first-year writing courses as sites for encouraging civic responsibility, see John Duffy, “Virtuous Arguments.”

190 action depends not on what happens by accident and unintentionally but on what is intended in itself” (76-77). Equally forceful in this instance, perhaps, is Kant. Kant, it will be recalled, holds that a good will “would shine by itself” even if it never accomplished a single practical end

(8). Consequently, it seems to follow that an evil will (malice) is, in itself, evil, even if it accomplishes some good end (such as academic credit). To answer a student with regard to will and to intention is to assign significant, and maybe incalculable, importance to the will,41 and hence the character, of the student. On a natural-law as well as a Kantian view, specifically, any evil intent on the student’s part warrants failing the course, if not expulsion, simply because such a will, regardless of what it achieves or does not achieve to alter states of affairs in the world, is evil. Academic credit, a subsidiary good, cannot balance equally in the scales in comparison to the moral will, so that, it could even be argued, responding with anything less than the highest punishment possible could amount to a moral failure for the academic institution. On that hypothesis, failure for the course becomes a kindness.

Should it be objected that words such as “evil” add unnecessary moral baggage to the discussion—perhaps because such words invoke a moral universe no longer prominent in contemporary society (see, for a similar analysis with respect to duty, Anscombe, “Modern”)— nonetheless, Howard’s theory-informed policy seems very much to suggest that it is not in spite of but because composition theorists recognize patchwriting as neither tolerable nor intolerable in itself that they do recognize the presence of intention, and that alone, as the morally relevant difference. When so much turns on the matter of the will, one may reasonably wonder why the word “evil” ought not to be used.

41 Cf. Hegel, who notes that “in crime, as that which is characterized at bottom by the infinite aspect of the deed, the purely external, specific character vanishes” (qtd. in Brudner 351, emphasis added). See also Brudner’s discussion of Hegel’s metaphysical justification for mercy against Kant, who regarded mercy as an unjust alleviation of the standards of law.

191

Or, perhaps a better question: “What is the moral worth of the intention behind an academic paper?” What, in other words, does this widespread concern about intention suggest about the academy’s moral assumptions? Would, it may be asked, a well written, properly cited paper be worth punishing if it espoused positions the student did not sincerely hold but which, to curry favor with the professor, were espoused anyway? Suppose a few may say that is indeed wrong and consequently would not accept work from a student whom she knew or strongly suspected to hold views contrary to the professor’s own. Say, in such an instance, a professor truly desires to see the student justify her own views, despite the professor’s firm conviction that such views are in error—the professor loves argument both for its own sake and as an activity of the academy as such, perhaps, and/or believes it is virtuous when people remain true to their convictions. If, however, the question may be batted away as absurd—no one punishes a paper simply for being insincerely written, may come the reply—then we have the emergence of a basic academic principle: Properly written papers, however motivated, are in themselves desirable provided they are the product of the student. Improperly written papers, while not in themselves desirable, are tolerable provided their writing is the product of good faith. If bad faith produces an improperly cited paper, that paper is censurable. Put even more plainly, intention is irrelevant until academic law is broken. This principle reveals that proper citation is greater than good faith absolutely, so that good faith is not necessary if the essay is done correctly—here is where strong Kantian and Thomistic moral emphasis departs from academic policy—but good faith must be present if proper citation is not observed. In this way, the academy values its own conventions even above good intentions, but it prizes good intentions above certain, more spectacular shows of its authority (in this case, failure for the course).42 Not

42 See, of course, Foucault in Discipline and Punish for a discussion of spectacular punishment.

192 only does this principle seem generally intuitive; it also acknowledges that law, while framed for the common good and the cultivation of virtue, “is framed for the mass of men [sic], the majority of whom are not perfectly virtuous” (Aquinas 55).43 Obviously, society functions not necessarily through actions performed with the best intentions. Intention’s place, then, is circumscribed by obedience to law, and only that will is good which is in obedience to it.

The foregoing justification of the political science professor’s “desperate” move to frighten students into compliance may appear rational provided the plagiarism is intentional, as, again, Howard seems to warrant. Clearly, if this justification applies to failing a student for the course, it must similarly apply in the case of failing a paper for relatively small amounts of text—provided that, also, is intentional. Unintentional plagiarism, on the other hand, may not so readily license the same response, even on those moral theories that seem more severe. Both

Aristotle and Aquinas may raise questions about the constitution of such a classroom; on the surface, critics may argue, the syllabus, the written constitution of a classroom, looks tyrannical and, as such, a “perversion” of what a good constitution ought to be (Aquinas 48; cf. Aristotle,

Politics, IV.2). What can be said in the tyrannical syllabus’s favor? “It only has the character of a law because it is a dictate of a superior over his subjects and is aimed at their obeying law— which is a good that is not absolute but only relative to a specific regime” (48). On a care ethics view, the professor’s approach appears undeniably impermissible, given that rightly directed moral choice “remains contextual and admixed with feelings of care” (Gilligan 95), and, though a mature care ethicist will do her best to avoid hurting another while maintaining self-respect

(94-95), it does not readily appear that a professor who finds a single plagiarized sentence in a paper has been largely inconvenienced—the professor, for the most part, has been asked to read

43 Aquinas thereby does allow, for civic purposes, the presence of less than admirable intentions from citizens.

193 the work of her student and not that of another writer. To entertain a hypothetical example, suppose a student has performed adequately for several weeks into a semester and, due to a moment of simple carelessness, fails to document a sentence. The student, suppose further, has earned Bs on in-class exams without the aid of notes. Should this capable student be failed for this infraction? Suppose further the professor has come particularly to enjoy the student’s informed contributions to classroom discussion and overall demeanor. Will a professor who admixes care with this context apply this penalty? The answer is obvious.

Considering, then, that both the more severe natural law theory and the more compassionate care ethics do not appear to find justification for this approach when plagiarism is unintentional, practitioners across the moral theoretical spectrum may indeed safely reject the political science professor’s policy as immoral. Even the egoist or objectivist theory, commonly rejected on the grounds of its self-regarding orientation, might not readily recommend this approach. Harris explains that the public-policy branch of egoism, rule egoism, must satisfy the following conditions: a rule must “(1) in general benefit the individual proposing them; (2) secure agreement from other egoists; and (3) conform to the moral side constraints” (69).

Because it is here reasonable not to count on the general agreement of egoists, including and perhaps especially students attending school primarily to further their self-interest (e.g., they seek better job prospects and not, say, to better serve the common good), this policy arguably fails on an egoist view. Condition (1) arguably goes unmet, too, in that it is hard to imagine how a professor upholding this policy would not strike many of her students as unreasonable and so undercut her own authority. If there is application for Price’s recommendation that “we remove the threatening tone of absolutism that surrounds statements about unintentional plagiarism”

(104), it appears to be here. So, the analysis confirms Anson’s contention that the political

194 science professor’s policy is unbecoming of the profession; however, for reasons already explained, the policy does not necessarily stem from Level 1 thinking about teaching. The error of the policy seems to lie in moral misalignment and perfectionism, not in presuppositions about the preconditions for learning as such.

Finally, Anson’s implied tenor for his metaphor holds up in its essential point: the teacher appears guilty of taking him- or herself too seriously. I hasten to add, however, that taking oneself too seriously relative to the audience (both theatrical and moral), while a failure according to all theories, matters most especially for the moral theories of egoism and utilitarianism (Harris 70; 122). Care ethicists’ emphasis on the relational may also be reasonably included. Natural law, virtue ethics, and Kantian ethics assign less weight to the effect on the audience and more on the nature of the action, will, and predisposition of the agent. Aristotle, specifically, would likely underscore the tyrannical and hence hubristic quality of failing a well- meaning student for one sentence out of, say, 150.44 Anson provides no indication that the political science professor makes any discrimination between intentional and unintentional plagiarism. And while, especially in the latter case, this invites justifiable criticism, in the next section I consider an approach in which intention also does not feature at all, but with some more promising ethical justification.

Grade Reduction, Including Zero: Plugging in Formulas

In general, it is safe to say practitioner understanding of plagiarism presupposes a certain relationship, both causative and correlative, between the amount of text plagiarized and the intent to plagiarize. It may be granted that a completely copied-and-pasted paper is certainly an

44 Assuming roughly fifteen sentences per page in a ten-page research paper, one sentence becomes ≈1/150 of the effort for the paper. Any essay exams or smaller report, of course, increases the proportionate weight of the single sentence, but probably not by much for moral purposes.

195 intentional act of plagiarism, and it may be further granted that portions approaching high percentages of the paper are almost certainly intentional, though ascertaining this may require investigation. In perhaps most cases, it is likely that unintentional plagiarism will occur in small amounts relative to the whole, so practitioners may safely assume single sentences or even several phrases left unattributed are unlikely though not impossibly to be evidence of malice.

Yet, even here, because Howard’s proposed policy considered above severely sanctions small portions if left unattributed intentionally, even single sentences or several phrases may temporarily set ordinary business aside for conducting an investigation. If, as my own experience shows, this kind of plagiarism occurs fairly often, a professor would find herself faced with several investigations—even if proceeding no further than informal student interviews—each semester. Practically minded practitioners may, under those circumstances, wonder if there is not some simpler response that will not require these measures.

Some policies, disregarding matters of intention entirely, endeavor to measure plagiarism and penalty in purely “quantitative” terms (Sutherland-Smith 66), so that plagiarism, in

Howard’s words, becomes a purely textual phenomenon in that it assumes that plagiarism is a

“feature of text” (“Plagiarisms” 797) whose presence and categorization are clear to all involved.

(To repeat, any response to plagiarism as a response to plagiarism assumes plagiarism as a textual feature.) Sutherland-Smith’s example of policy from Birmingham University classifies plagiarism into three categories: “serious,” “moderate,” and “slight,” each with respective percentages (66). Sutherland-Smith provides no details on what penalty is attached to each, and as of this writing the University of Birmingham’s now revised policy (“slight” plagiarism is now termed “poor academic practice”) does not stipulate merely one response for each level of plagiarism, yet one speaks of the “downwardly adjusted” evaluation “reflecting the actual

196 contribution of the student” (8.1.b) . Limiting remarks to this approach in this section, I observe that the salient terms in Sutherland-Smith’s brief treatment of the policy she considers seem to be

“calculate” and “formula” (66). While quantifying anything to allow for calculating formulas for arbitrarily assigned numerical value does not seem obviously metaphorical, the use of the mathematical terms nonetheless invokes certain images for comparison and, hence, vehicles: as, for example, accountants working on calculators or students working away at what C. S. Lewis called “doing your sums” (Lewis, Mere 30). To be sure, the language suggests a certain tenor, namely, that the procedure is simplicity itself, in the sense that, once carried out correctly, it will admit of no disputes.

For example, a submission whose content includes ten percent unattributed outside material would warrant a ten-percent reduction on the grade for that paper. A paper with fifty- percent plagiarized content would warrant a fifty-percent deduction. Assuming otherwise perfect prose, a paper with seventy-five percent plagiarized material, even if directly copied and pasted from an Internet source, would rightfully earn twenty-five percent of the credit for the assignment.45 This is significant when some teachers would, with little reflection and arguably much justice, simply award a zero to what must be taken as an infallible sign of no good-faith effort and, consequently, as a “waste of time” even to read. Again, whether the student intended to plagiarize—as he almost certainly did—is immaterial: all that matters is that plagiarism is there, and plagiarism is, in itself, a deficiency worth penalizing.

Whether one may categorize this approach as a penalty for the presence of plagiarism or as simply the non-awarding of credit for work not done may invite some discussion, but I wonder if it makes little more than a semantic difference. Take, for example, a small paper with

45 Or twenty-five percent of what credit is awarded to the substance (content) of the paper, as opposed to, say, the formatting or mechanics.

197 ten-percent plagiarized material whose only deficiency was the failure to cite three verbatim sentences. If this means the difference between ten percent of credit and the lack of ten percent of credit, it must mean that the simple markings of a speaker tag, quotation marks, and a parenthetical citation are worth ten percent, and that, under certain conditions, marking others’ words by such conventions effectively turns them into the work of the student for which she must be awarded credit. This fact of academic writing underscores how mastery of academic citation conventions is, in itself, highly rewarded. It also underscores a certain irony or paradox: quotation marks, marks of an explicit disclaiming of ownership, confer a kind of ownership to the one who cites words by means of that disclaiming. Any paradoxical mystery vanishes, however, once understood that academic writing is a kind of writing that both expects and rewards scrupulous research assuming audiences interested enough potentially to seek out any references cited and to contextualize the argument in front of them by considering explicit acknowledgement of intellectual indebtedness. To fail to include this part of reference is to fail to grasp fully the rhetorical situation, thereby placing emphasis on the “socio” part of Stefan

Senders’ characterization of plagiarism’s sometimes alleged origins in “socioliterary transition”

(196). In light of these considerations, not to grasp this essential academic procedure warrants

“punishment.”

Again, to assume that one may punish, or not reward, for the lack of citation conventions is to assume citation conventions may reasonably be mastered by the time of submission. It is, as we have seen, precisely this thesis which is often challenged by Ameliorists when discussing undergraduate students and even international graduate students, both of whom may require more effort in their literacy acculturation (see Senders 196). To be just, the response must also correctly assume any difficulty in mastering these conventions is no more demanding than, say,

198 mastering a quadratic formula in algebra or balancing chemical equations in chemistry, i.e., it requires some application to learn by novices held responsible for that mastery.

To commend it, precisely because this approach never has to consider—indeed, to be consistent, must not consider—the intentions of the student, it avoids, as already observed, putting the oft-noted considerable burden on the one having to prove them (see, e.g., Howard,

“Plagiarisms” 797; Sutherland-Smith 64). Supposing plagiarism is a fairly obvious “feature of texts”—another thesis challenged by Ameliorists (797)—all that remains to do, as Sutherland-

Smith notes, is to sift the plagiarized from the non-plagiarized material and reward only the latter

(66). The allure of the potential objectivity, then, quite readily appears. Because this approach seeks to remove the subjective, even an English teacher can provide fairly quantifiable reasons for the deduction. Grades, should they result in appeals, will be fairly transparent even to committees not overly experienced in evaluating writing.

Additionally, comments on the character of a student, always potentially inflammatory or discouraging, may be kept to a minimum or, perhaps more likely, may be absent altogether because teachers will not likely feel the need to call in a student to ask, “Why did you do that?”—the question that gets at the heart of intention (Anscombe, Intention 9). If challenged by students or administrators about the penalty and whether a student’s situation ought to count as mitigation, professors may reply by citing Michael Sandel’s recommendation of two Aristotelian considerations: “the essential nature of the activity in question and the qualities that are worth honoring […] and recognizing” (Sandel).46 By its nature, the academic paper demands the

46 Sandel’s formulation as I understand it mirrors that of the more circumlocuitous form of Alasdair MacIntyre, who uses “practice” where Sandel uses “activity”: “By a ‘practice’ I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity,

199 proper use of sources, and a paper is worth recognition that shows original thought as well as accords due respect to the sources informing and provoking it. Insofar, then, that a paper fails to show proper documentation of sources, insofar it fails to fulfill the purpose of the assignment.

No other considerations matter.

Requiring so few factors in response, including adjudication, thereby results in a fairly efficient approach, lending it fairly wide appeal. Recall what Harris calls the “audience” for an action, an important consideration in utilitarian ethics. The audience for this approach includes, as all plagiarism cases include, the student, the teacher, the administrators, and the wider public.

Especially when education experts and legislators desire to see increasingly quantifiable data, a response that answers the call of the quantifiable may be the easiest sell, “being as broad and inclusive as possible” (Harris 134).47 It avoids, its proponents may argue, the “high moral tone” of those approaches that place heavy emphasis on the student as being fully morally grown by the time they submit their work and on continuing to grow morally as they continue to work.48

Should one urge that intention is a “morally relevant feature” that has been impermissibly omitted (134), one might answer that math teachers need not consult the intentions of their students when they, for example, get an answer wrong due to laziness, a commonly though not exclusively cited reason for plagiarism—however, no one maintains that erring on math problems and erring on citation conventions, which may be equally procedurally complex, are morally equivalent since citation conventions exist to acknowledge an intellectual indebtedness customarily owed to real people and because the intent to deceive, more commonly cited as the

with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended” (After 187). 47 “Typical” utilitarians bracket off motives (McDonald 12). 48 I have in mind Jack Worthing’s remark from The Importance of Being Earnest: “a high moral tone can hardly be said to conduce very much to either one’s health or one’s happiness” (301).

200 reason to punish plagiarism, does not likely surface in a math class except in cases of cheating.49

(For more on parallels to cheating, see “Conclusion” section in this chapter.) Yet, not only does it avoid considering the intentions of the student—thereby avoiding inflicting the additional pain of shame on the student for exhibiting negative, morally censurable characteristics—but it avoids the extra work of having to read a paper again as in the case of mandatory revision, a practice that may also be unappealing to students for the reason that a professors’ having to read a paper again requires a student’s having to write the paper again (see also next section).

This quantitative approach seems to square most in practice with Aristotle’s description of rectificatory justice, which also does not consider the character of the offender. Rather, in

Aristotle’s words, “the law looks only to the difference made by the injury, and treats the parties as equals” which an impartial judge then attempts to make equal. Aristotle goes on to explain that the penalty applied “decreas[es] the gain that has been made” (NE V.4)—in this case, of course, the gain in academic credit.

Much more need not be said about this policy at present. Lying fairly halfway between requiring revision with no penalty and expulsion, such a response seems fairly obviously, and may arguably be the most, “centrist” (Howard, “Plagiarisms” 802), and, moreover, may indeed constitute the golden mean of responses supposing one may take mandatory revision without penalty and expulsion as ethical extremes.50 On a virtue ethics view, then, this response may, though not beyond dispute, inhabit the moral sweet spot. (One may raise questions about a possible ad temperantiam; see “Conclusion” below.) Adopting this response as policy would

49 Pressing such indebtedness leads to still other problems for this view: if someone is owed something, is the injury done, even if never felt, repaired by simple deduction of academic credit? See Pilon, “Criminal Remedies: Restitution, Punishment, or Both?” 50 Quite obviously, expulsion is viewed as an extreme by Ameliorists, and mandatory revision without penalty can be viewed as extreme by more Traditionalist practitioners.

201 require, to be sure, an Ameliorist’s effectively ending her commitment to the questionable fact claim that citation conventions are not learnable in the space of a few, short weeks, an ending which Howard may regard as a step backward in revising “law” to better reflect theory

(“Plagiarisms” 803). More forcefully still, care ethicists may assert that looking only at the fact of a plagiarized paper runs the risk of “violence” rooted in inequality stemming from a

“conception of justice blinded to the differences in human life” (Gilligan 100), specifically, the differences in citational know-how, due perhaps especially to background in literacy education, and intention.51 However, it may be fairly conceded by Traditionalists that plagiarism in this way may not be regarded necessarily as “cheating,” another major source of contention for

Ameliorists (see Price 103): a failure to cite is simply a failure to cite. For some, though, this response fails in that it does not, in itself, demand correction of incorrect writing practices. That requirement lies in the fourth and final response considered in this chapter.

Mandatory Revision: Liberation and Deficiency of Anger

In marked contrast to the above, primarily punitive responses, is mandatory revision, to which I will devote considerable space. The goal of this approach is clearly to encourage

“growth” as a writer (see Bolin 13) in a way perhaps most immediate relative to other responses.

Amy Robillard exemplifies the approach in her 2007 article subtitled, “On the Absence of Angry

Responses to Plagiarism in Composition Studies.” As we will see, this lack of anger is precisely what gives the approach its distinctive moral cast in the context of the literature. Seneca, stoically attuned to the role of emotion in the moral life, says that “anger is eager to punish”

(n.p.) and Robillard, a compositionist evidently knowing Seneca’s statement to be true, stands in an ambivalent, “complex relationship” to her own anger aroused by one of her PhD student’s

51 J. Elspeth Stuckey has famously noted, as her book title calls it, The Violence of Literacy.

202 plagiarized submissions (10). She reports the student’s paper bore marks of plagiarism due to the inclusion of “passages”—not simply words, phrases, or a single sentence—appearing in gray text relative to the other, ordinarily black text. Her student cited difficulties with her printer once confronted with this “most obvious indication of plagiarism.” Further investigation revealed the passages to be plagiarized (17). Some explanation of her response—required revision without penalty—follows, complicated by suspicion over the presence of anger, which she evidently shares with other practitioners. She isolates the cause of anger as having been assaulted in her identity as a capable, fully trained analyst of prose whose intelligence has been insulted (17; 24).

She compellingly argues that to feel this insult conflicts, however, with other values held by compositionists, resulting in the fact that “formal scholarship does not allow” the kind of anger she and others experience over plagiarism cases (22). Both this response and its emotional- moral context invite consideration.

I argue that this un-readiness to suspect a paper as plagiarized even where clear evidence warrants some investigation is not only rooted in a strong identification—and perhaps a misguided one, a possibility I consider below—with liberatory pedagogy, Robillard’s explicitly acknowledged pedagogical philosophy, but also with the perhaps unavoidable belief that papers are extensions of student’s identities. Professors, such as one of my colleagues, who explain to students that their evaluation is of the work and not the student—a statement clearly meant to encourage students’ trust in the fairness and professionalism of their professors—do not explain, perhaps prudently so, the entire picture. For the purposes of evaluation, it is correct, we have best assurances that our ratings and comments are fair when we bracket the identity of the student from our reading the paper: the all-too common temptation besetting professors who do not grade by scantron is the professor’s personal estimation of the character and overall likability

203 of a student. Maxims such as “grade the work, not the student” are helpful guides against such very human inclinations. Robillard, however, is not exercised over the mere presence of plagiarism, but over the student’s obvious belief (or hope) that she would be “too stupid” not to notice and, moreover, that she would be trusting enough to believe a lying and implausible explanation for the color of the font (24).

Robillard’s report of her experience with anger in this incident, and her decision to publish it in a major professional journal, deserve our attention as a description of how pedagogical principle, as she herself notes, may conflict with the carrying out of one’s job (20).

In hopes the terms do not appear too loaded, Robillard resorts to a measure of self-flagellation for, in effect, having discovered an act of fraud, the detection of which is part of her job description. Admittedly, her guilt reportedly arises from her having had suspicions in the first place, but, to repeat, the evidence by her own admission was present and would be recognized as cause for suspicion by most any experienced practitioner.52 Robillard thus appears to report a perfect instance of what Ayn Rand would call “accepting an unearned guilt” (Virtue 29). Surely, one might ask, she would not feel better had the student received credit for her fraudulent work?

It might be objected that if Robillard is too disinclined to see plagiarism where indeed it does exist, her state of mind is far preferable to a professor’s who is too ready to suspect students of plagiarism or who is too ready to, in Claudius’s words, where the offense is let the great axe fall: in other words, too lax is better than too strict. While this may be true, the ethical ideal—a guard against oversimplifying bifurcation—is always to avoid extremes, and it appears extreme to find lighter-colored font, which Robillard rightly identifies as “the most obvious indication of plagiarism” (17), and yet to feel guilty simply for noting the obvious and for doubting an

52 If Robillard feels guilt for getting suspicious in these circumstances, one might ask, are all composition teachers to experience the same thing when presented with similarly clear evidence?

204 improbable explanation about a faulty printer. By her own account, it would appear the simple exercise of her reason has been unnecessarily, and unjustly, impeded by liberatory pedagogical principle which places a preferential option for students.

A perhaps stronger objection may be raised, however: Robillard does not, in this instance, faithfully represent liberatory pedagogy. Properly understood, one might say, liberatory pedagogy that encourages critical thinking does not preclude enforcing requirements and does not entail the proposition of assuming guilt for others’ failures. After all, Robillard’s entire article is written ultimately to acknowledge and defend the importance and legitimacy of professors’ anger over plagiarism, the scholarly denial of which comes, she rightly asserts, at the cost of denying professors’ basic humanity53 and the high price of their “respect” in the eyes of those outside the discipline (28). Perhaps her decision to require revision does then arise from a misunderstanding of the implications of liberatory pedagogy.

These points are very well taken. But, we must also consider the example of Sean

Zwagerman, who seems to believe that the very power dynamics of the academic hierarchy tends to place students and professors in a potentially inimical relationship and that properly encouraging critical thinking in students, the goal of a liberatory pedagogy, requires professors’ yielding some of their institutionally conferred authority in the classroom to the students (703), as we have also seen from Andrea Lunsford in Chapter 2. Robillard mentions Lynn Z. Bloom’s observation that no matter what, composition studies seems to disallow negatively characterizing students (qtd. in 27). Howard, perhaps most notable of all plagiarism scholars in recent years, clearly maintains that the “hierarchical and exclusionary” nature of much college teaching,

53 Robillard’s use of words such as “identity” (occurring over two dozen times in the article) and “humanity” (occurring once) but non-use, if not avoidance, of words such as “dignity,” are further suggestive evidence of the moral theoretical premises she accepts.

205 including the framing and addressing of plagiarism, must be repudiated in favor of “empowering pedagogy” (“Ethics” 87; see also “Sexuality” 475) and speaks elsewhere of composition studies’ encumbering “hierarchical baggage” in the form of institutionalized student-teacher relationships.54 It should also be remembered in Zwagerman’s case, as well as in Sue Simmons’ case, that plagiarism was an understandable and rational response to students writing under oppressive, and certainly hierarchical, writing conditions.

Consider now Robillard’s own words: “I like to believe that I encourage students rather than punish them, that I teach them rather than shame them” (18). If Robillard does misrepresent liberatory pedagogy in her decision, her representation of it appears, on the face of it, more or less consonant with notable others in the field and so is not isolated: liberatory pedagogy does appear to foster cognitive dissonance about one’s position as a teacher, as suggested also in

Chapter 3 (“Plagiarism is a Means to Keep the Gates”; see also Yagelski 34). One must venture the suggestion that encouragement, and certainly teaching, and punishing are not mutually exclusive: to continue to frame the approach to one’s work by means of this dichotomy, which some identifying as advocates of liberatory pedagogy appear to espouse, will be to continue to make one’s job unnecessarily difficult and may be regarded, as already asserted, as inflicting an injustice on oneself.

Injustice to oneself may, by some standards, be the proper category for requiring revision of plagiarized submissions in this way: after all, a professor who requires revision without penalty effectively makes herself perform her duties twice, whereas the student in question, provided the paper was revised as required, has fulfilled his responsibilities only once. Kant’s

54 Howard elaborates: “Plagiarism is, indeed, an issue of ethics. In cases of cribbed exams and purchased term papers, it is an issue of students’ ethics. But in cases of patchwriting, it is an issue of teachers’ ethics, an issue of whether we will or will not engage in pedagogy consonant with our declared goals” (87, emphasis added).

206 ethical chestnut readily recommends itself: “What if everybody did that?” What would be the result if every professor, upon finding illegitimate work, forces a student to rewrite the paper without penalty? It means every professor would double her work because a student decided to violate prohibitions, and it almost certainly means that many students, pressed for time, will simply assemble a plagiarized submission, using the promised revision requirement to buy more time. Turned into a precept for general practice, revision without penalty becomes another form of extension. And while this policy may instill some gratitude in the occasional citational novice for the generous concession built into course policy, abuse of such misguided policy seems likely to become an equally if not more common result, with the professors being cheated of their already limited time, and the students having done very little to learn to manage time (a form of the classical virtue of prudence). Such a practice could justifiably be called permission to plagiarize and is therefore indefensible as a matter of general policy (it is unjust to professors) and indefensible if required of some students but not others (it is unjust to students).55 So, while her article upholds a professor’s right to be angry about plagiarism and highlights the least angry response possible to it while still demanding something from the student, that response nonetheless appears neither rational nor moral.

Or, does it? Suppose for the moment that the student, pursuing a PhD, makes the desperate move to write the paper quickly and so resorts to fraudulent patchwriting but, the professor knows, is typically competent in her work and insightful in her discussions. In the professor’s judgment, it is “out of character” for the student to submit the paper in this way, and she lied only because she feared, once the plagiarism was discovered, her investment of time and

55 As a matter of full disclosure, I regard the awarding of extensions without reliable documentation of some emergency as immoral for the same reasons. Allowing late submissions without penalty I regard to be wrong because it defeats the very purpose of a deadline, making it effectively non-existent.

207 money pursuing the degree would prove wasted. Perhaps her career would be ruined if she faced sanctions for cheating. Outside of this action, the professor believes, the student promises to be a capable professor and scholar. Why take action that would jeopardize a promising career from a promising person over a single action, bad though it may be? Once we start asking such questions, we have moved into the realm of situation ethics or act utilitarianism. Harris gives the example of an undergraduate facing graduation and who needs ten points in a non-major course

(philosophy, as it turns out). The student, having been offered a coaching position at a high school pending his graduation, approaches the professor privately to request the gift of the ten points, promising to disclose nothing to anyone about the matter to preserve his and the professor’s careers. Supposing the professor is an act utilitarian, Harris explains, the professor may award the points because it will result in the most utility for those immediately concerned: the professor may experience the pain of a guilty conscience for having awarded unearned credit, but he will have the pleasure of knowing that a young person is now able to provide for his family and go on to perform reasonably well in another profession. The students, their class standing being not significantly affected, feel no pain, and the student, though he can never experience the pleasure of having earned his grade by honest means, is, to repeat, in a position to be a provider (127).

One may entertain similar considerations for Robillard’s PhD student who has committed an act of plagiarism. And, in this case, the professor makes the student “earn” the credit by writing the paper again, whereas in Harris’s example, the professor awards the grade simply on the basis of “need” and no further performance. Act utilitarians, in this way, may furnish a rationale for a case-by-case requirement of revision, though it is likely not an approach that a professor might prudently broadcast to students or even to other faculty. For much the same

208 reason that a Kantian could not defend it, however, a rule utilitarian could not (see Harris 127-8).

Or, if one is willing to award grades on “need” (Harris 128), for matters to be aboveboard, doing so would require professors to keep fully documented records of the various needs of students, and it would also require institutions to justify and to publish, likely to some degree of ever- growing specificity, relative determinations of need. The proposition reduces to practical (and bureaucratic) absurdity.

Remarkably, however, Robillard nowhere makes any explicit mention of having considered the student’s career prospects when coming to her decision to require revision without penalty; she does not appear at all to have reasoned along act-utilitarian lines. Rather, she makes reference to herself, again, seeing herself as a “teacher” and an “encourager” rather than one who punishes and shames (18). This reference to herself as the agent signals a virtue approach to her reasoning, and, given emphasis on the relationship to students and her identification with liberatory pedagogy, a care ethics approach specifically. Her appeal to this sense of herself, her best self in giving and receiving care (Noddings 426), shows she identifies first with the profession of composition studies as interpreted through care ethics, not with the institution that employs her, and that—perhaps—she therefore desires “to see in [herself] the potential for being good and therefore [to be] worthy of social inclusion” (Gilligan 78), in this instance, worthy of continued inclusion, at least in terms of personal identity, by likeminded colleagues and readers of the journal.

If such inclusion does play a role in this decision, in one important respect, Robillard does not seem to fall in line with her former mentor and major voice in plagiarism studies,

Rebecca Moore Howard. In her “Sexuality, Textuality,” Howard agrees that getting angry over a fraudulent submission, the moral equivalent of “falsifying a transcript or hiring a test-taker,” is

209 perfectly appropriate and, so saying, she sounds a bit like Edward White: “It thwarts two of the academy’s most basic functions—to teach and to certify intellectual accomplishment” (qtd. in

Price 103; cf. Howard, “Plagiarisms” 794; cf. White 210). Here, however, Robillard does not believe she can “go ahead and get angry about it” (Howard, qtd. in Price 103). Rather, she desires to restrain her anger.

Robillard’s response thus raises questions about the moral permissibility of anger itself, and, given her conclusions, how a possible deficiency of anger may affect praxis. What is too angry and angry too little is not always clear. According to Aristotle, the even-tempered person

“is thought to miss the mark more in the direction of the deficiency, because the even-tempered person is inclined not to revenge so much as to forgiveness” (NE IV.5). That is, even when a person’s anger finds the golden mean, it will be often mistaken by others as a character defect.

Mandatory revision, and especially without penalty, on the surface appears that kind of response which is most lacking in anger without approving of plagiarism. Consider Aristotle’s above statement: while being more inclined to forgiveness than to revenge, some inclination to revenge is present. The lack of anger Robillard notes, though she distrusts anger in herself, may invite suggestions of a deficiency of anger. “It is slavish to put up with being insulted oneself”—insult is the source of Robillard’s anger—“or to overlook insults to those close to one” (NE IV.5). (Not becoming angry at plagiarism when committed as an insult to our colleagues, then, would amount to a deficiency of virtue among practitioners generally.) Yet, while Aristotle says there is a correct way to be angry, he says also “it is not easy to determine,” and that sometimes the extremes wrongly garner praise. However, he fully allows that insult can incite noble anger

(IV.5); resentment, the classicist Nietzsche tells us, is “ignoble” (Dawn n.p.), but so, too, is the lack of anger. If these two accounts are compatible, resentment must be the carrying of grudges,

210 not getting angry in itself. One can see how Robillard’s distrust of her anger may win commendation but also suspicion: perhaps she is not angry enough. Whether that is so may emerge when considering the intent.

Let us, then, despite these difficulties, attempt to determine when anger may be appropriate. Again, Aristotle observes: “there are indeed some things at which we ought to feel angry, and others, like health and learning, that we ought to want” (NE III.1). One wonders if

Aristotle did not associate anger with not getting those things which one ought to want, so that being deprived of learning, relevant particularly here, may be cause for anger. In any case, I take it for granted that being wrongfully deprived of a good is cause for anger if anything is. Two wrongfully deprived goods surface in Robillard’s article, namely, learning and honor. Now we may consider the characteristics that might be responsible for the plagiarism Robillard is faced with.

Aristotle observes that pardon is warranted when in unendurable circumstances people

(involuntarily) commit ignoble actions. By contrast, people who do what is wrong through

“spirit or appetite” voluntarily do what a person with self-mastery would never do through rational choice and so are worthy of blame. Rational choice, Aristotle asserts, excludes voluntary actions done on the spur of the moment (NE III.2). On this view, a student who plagiarizes out of desperation acts through spirit (fear) and appetite (craving a grade), though not through rational choice. In effect, forced revision without penalty may be called a kind of pardon, in that the professor has chosen to apply no penalty, at least no officially sanctioned one, to a clear violation of the rules. Robillard, while not reporting the psychological events leading up to the students’ decision to plagiarize, would have to assume her graduate students’ being in dire straits for her pardon to begin to be justified on Aristotle’s view.

211

Robillard’s case is noteworthy for the additional reason that her pardon was given to a graduate student, whereas Ameliorists tend to be concerned with undergraduate students whose knowledge of academic conventions is held to be tenuous, hence Ameliorists’ frequent repudiation of the charge of culpable negligence, which assumes knowledge “of any uncomplicated point of law that [offenders] ought to have known” (Aristotle, NE III.5). Here, presumably, no such plea of excusable ignorance can be urged, as Robillard does not report that the student is, for instance, an international student wrestling with conventions (see Scollon 6;

Sutherland-Smith 75-99; Valentine 98-100), but simply with a graduate student who bet on the possibility that Robillard would fail to notice the difference in text. This, then, leaves only three explanations: desperation, lack of industry (including laziness or carelessness), or malice.

Desperation, often brought up as extenuation in adjudicating cases of plagiarism, deserves some explication. Simply defined, desperation is the loss of the expectation of good, a species of fear, “the expectation of evil.” According to Aristotle, to fear disgrace is “right and noble,” as it is to fear the influence of vice on one’s actions (NE III.6). If desperate, Robillard’s student feared the loss of a good rather than the loss of the good life, which has already been established to be the end of the academy as a civic institution. The student, on this hypothesis, judges she cannot possibly write the paper necessary to merit the grade desired, a fear which does not suit any graduate student: “One kind of missing the mark [hamartia] is to fear the wrong thing, another to fear in the wrong way, another to fear at the wrong time, and so on” (NE

III.7). Accordingly, desperation looks like cowardice, whether through fearing the wrong thing

(as, perhaps, to lose a grade), in the wrong way (to lose a grade rather than one’s integrity) at the wrong time (at the last minute), or some combination. Courageous people belonging to the citizenry, Aristotle says, genuinely fear shame, as well as “legal penalties,” and desire honor

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(III.8). It is difficult to read Aristotle here without reference to the shame attached to plagiarism and to the academic practice of awarding honors to the best students. In no uncertain terms,

Aristotle links virtue to “shame and a desire for what is noble (honour [sic], in other words), and aversion to opprobrium, for the shame it brings” (NE III.8). Fearful of shame in the wrong way, and desiring honor by the wrong means, a desperate student fails to fall into this virtuous category. So doing, she does not exemplify the virtue of the citizen, that is, of the student.

Because cowardice is shameful, a virtue-ethics approach may call for the application of pain, perhaps in the form of shame or, if the student is insensible to it, then to some other painful method.

One might argue, however, that an Aristotelian approach might, with reservation, countenance Robillard’s response. Aristotle writes of cowardly soldiers whose commanders force them to do battle when they would run in fear; “under compulsion,” the soldier does what he ought, but not through noble motives (III.8). In forcing a rewrite of the paper, Robillard has compelled her student to do what she ought, even if we cannot say the student exemplified scholarly virtue, being ignobly motivated, in so doing. Even so, it seems that some shame, on a virtue-ethics view, ought to attach to such students, and not merely in the form of a forced rewrite, where the paper, being without penalty, could theoretically merit a score (i.e., honor) denoting excellent work. In this way, then, Robillard’s approach does not appear justified on a virtue-ethics analysis.

Further reasons emerge. Aristotle’s remarks on the differences between the citizen soldier and the mercenary surely apply, in principle, to some students. The passage is worth quoting at modest length:

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Professional soldiers turn out to be cowards [...] when the danger is too much for

them and they are inferior in numbers and equipment. They are the first to run

away, while the citizen troops stand fast and die […]. This is because, to the

citizens, running away is a disgrace, and death worth choosing in preference to

saving one’s life in such a way; but the professionals were facing the danger on

the initial assumption that they were stronger, and when they find out the truth,

fearing death more than disgrace, they run away; and the courageous person is

not like this. (NE III.8, emphasis added).

According to this, then, what is needed to prevent desperate recourse to plagiarizing papers rather than facing the risks and dangers of writing a paper for oneself is the cultivation of true citizenship, that is, studentship, and, in responding to plagiarized submissions—at least those resulting from cowardly fear—shame. On this score, it is important to note that, according to

Aristotle, the city, perhaps counter-intuitively, precedes the individual citizen (Politics I.2), a claim R. F. Stalley glosses by explaining that no human being, outside the polis, is “fully human” as the political animal Aristotle asserts human beings to be (321). To accept this proposition fully requires courage, since it necessarily puts considerable check on what moderns might call self-expression and by no means issues carte blanche to “doing whatever makes one happy.”56 If what Aristotle says is correct, it follows that the academy is prior to the individual student and that the student is only fully a student when he fulfills the ends of the academy. It also supports the commonplace idea that the more a student believes he or she belongs to the school, the more the student is likely to flourish.57

56 It hardly needs stating that Aristotle would not recognize contemporary uses of the word “happy” and “happiness” as congruent with his central concept of eudaimonia. 57 I prefer the Aristotelian term to the more impoverished contemporary idiom, “succeed.”

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In light of the foregoing discussion about desperation, it seems hardly necessary to comment further on the appropriateness of Robillard’s response in the event that lack of industry or malice was the motive for the plagiarized submission. If desperation, fairly commonly believed an extenuating factor, cannot be justifiably met with revision without penalty on a virtue-ethics view, a fortiori neither may lack of industry or malice, the latter case also qualifying for the label of unjust, having been effected through rational choice and not through mere feeling

(see V.8). An important distinction needs to be made here, however: only those who rationally choose to plagiarize may rightly be called plagiarists, whereas those who do so in panic may be called, though what is perhaps not much better or less potentially inflammatory, cowards (V.8).58

Such, however, is the nature of a virtue-ethics terminology.59

Robillard seems close to reasoning that one ought not to administer a punishment in anger because anger invalidates the punishment or, put differently, that only the absence of anger legitimizes it. One may reply that the punishment’s rightness or wrongness stands independently of the state of mind in which it was administered. A foul is a foul, whether the referee’s sympathies for the fouled are aroused or not: the question is whether the rules were violated, not whether the referee was personally affected. Taking the retributivist position, Alan Brudner may add, “Of course, feelings of revenge, revulsion, and moral indignation enter into punishment, but they have nothing to do with its essence or justification” (349). Moreover, as Aristotle rightly observes, since cities legislate morality all the time (NE V.1; Aquinas 44), the city’s laws theoretically require and punish in the way that a just person would. If Robillard feels

58 Aristotle is quite clear that one may, while committing an unjust action, not be unjust. To be unjust, a person must commit an action through rational choice. Acting on feeling may result in having committed an unjust action merely. 59 Significantly, Howard names plagiarist as a “neo-Aristotelian categorization” in “The New Abolitionism Comes to Plagiarism” (89).

215 uncomfortable administering justice while in a state of anger, the law, by virtue of being law, acts as a safeguard by having already required what a just person would require. In this way—if the regulation is just—Robillard cannot be said, in her capacity as a professor, to be exercising the virtue of self-control to restrain “possible intemperate exercises of [her] power” (Carr 227) since her response has been already prescribed for her by institutional policy. While the danger of leaving the administration of punishment up to discretion and not to the rule of law has been well noted (Aristotle, Politics II.9), Robillard has reserved the right to decide on the basis of her discretion, which seems compromised by her struggle with anger and guilt. Separating her official response from her private response in this way honors her identity as a prose analyst and her anger rooted in its having been attacked, while guaranteeing, in theory, that her anger does not do an injustice to the student.

Whether requiring revision without penalty is morally defensible appears doubtful, as we have already seen, on several analyses: it seems to fail on a Kantian analysis, a rule-utilitarian analysis (for much the same reason), an objectivist analysis, and a virtue analysis. Arguably, it also fails on a care ethics analysis, as it does not readily appear to take into account the care that must be accorded to the professor, whose time and resources are as precious as that of the student. In my view, it is only an act utilitarian, who would be well advised not to advertise his or her actions in requiring penalty-less revision, who may supply some justification for this course of action. Requiring revision with penalty, on the other hand, commends itself in that it furnishes some compensation to the professor who sits down to evaluate the student’s work for yet a second time, while also teaching the student to produce an acceptable specimen of writing.

If it is suggested that the compensation to the professor need not be considered—it is his job, after all, to teach students to write—then this may easily become warrant for requiring professors

216 to administer exams until a student passes, a practice with insidious results in the public school system (see, e.g., “Lowndes”; “SB 2033”). In the interests of preserving the distinctive character of higher education institutions, omitting such consideration of the professor’s time ought to be shunned. A student may regard the penalty attending mandatory revision as a mercy to him as well as a justice to those students who acted correctly in the first place.

For this final section, I have delayed discussion of the metaphor that seems to lie behind and give life to Robillard’s response. As I read it, her controlling metaphor is liberation. In the previous chapter, we saw that digestion is a prevalent metaphor, so prevalent that it may hardly be called salient, and, with respect to its adherents, emancipatory or liberatory pedagogy may have ceased to be closely examined; it therefore deserves another look. Lakoff and Johnson might categorize the “liberation” metaphor as an ontological metaphor in which education becomes a kind of entity, a move which “allows us to refer to it, quantify it, identify a particular aspect of it, to see it as a cause, act with respect to it, and perhaps even believe that we understand it.” Further, they state, “[o]ntological metaphors like this are necessary for even attempting to deal rationally with our experiences” (26). To speak of the “emancipatory” education with which many in composition studies identify and by which their pedagogical practices are licensed, is, as we have seen, to attempt to deal with the realities of educating less- than-honest students while identifying with a group of scholar-practitioners who do not wish to see dishonesty in students and who, in any case, wish above all to be encouraging even to the worst (Bloom qtd. in Robillard, “We” 27). Standing in the way of doing so, however, is the educational system in which she works.

After all, if education is liberation, by implication there must be some oppression or bondage. Identifying the tenor for this vehicle may not always be easy in any given case, but in

217 the immediate context of Robillard’s article, it would appear that the oppressive system is

“consumerist society” (18), and that the instrument of oppression here considered is the policy requiring faculty to report plagiarism wherever it occurs;60 as we have seen, Robillard aligns herself with her discipline, not her institution (21), in her action. It is this belief that allows

Robillard to judge the policy of her institution to be morally illegitimate and hence to warrant her disobedience, or what Howard might call her conscientious objection (“New” 95), to it. So, an implied tenor is that mandatory reporting of plagiarism is an instrument of oppression. To invoke once more the Oxford English Dictionary, “oppression” is here defined as “to keep (a person or group of people, esp. a minority or some other subordinate group) in subjection and hardship by the unjust exercise of authority, power, or strength; to exploit; to tyrannize over”

(“Oppression” 3a.). How it is that this policy, designed to uphold academic standards, may be viewed in this way, though it is not essential to my argument, may lie somewhat less in the direct effect it has on the student and more on the fact that does not allow the teacher to encourage a student in official capacities.61 That oppression must then include not only the student, but also the professor, who is an unwilling accomplice in systemic evil.

Are students oppressed by their academic institutions in this respect?62 The question may be answered perhaps better if put another way: what does it say of students if they are oppressed?

If students are oppressed by policies, it says at least that they may not reasonably be expected to comply with them in most if not all cases, or at least not without considerable personal cost.

60 How the policy may be seen as an instance of consumerist society does not readily appear in the context of the article. 61 As of this writing (October 2014), the Illinois State University policy does allow teachers to decide for themselves whether to recommend a student for disciplinary action, but written reports of these decisions must be filed with relevant authorities (Academic). 62 Because it is not germane to my purposes, I leave aside the controversy over rising tuition and textbook costs. In that respect, the case for oppression by a “consumerist society” in an academic setting might gain more purchase.

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Again, the Ameliorist concern about learning citation conventions does not reportedly apply in this case, so that one reason for extenuation is decidedly absent. Oppression may also occur, it may be argued, when the possibility of not applying a penalty as a form of mercy is removed. In answer to this latter concern, it seems useful to note that, as most theologians understand, justice is one thing, mercy quite another. But, then, whereto serves mercy but to confront the visage of offense? Ought one to take an approach that renders mercy purposeless? The concern seems perfectly valid, and, again, Aristotle recognizes extenuation—justice seems always to allow for the possibility of mercy, even if Aristotle cannot be said to embody something like the theological virtue of charity (MacIntyre, After 174).63 In this way, then, it does not readily appear that students suffer oppression in the form of this policy.

Perhaps consulting another definition of oppression would support Robillard’s statement.

As defined by Iris Marion Young, “[o]ppression consists in systematic institutional processes which prevent some people from learning and using satisfying and expansive skills in socially recognized settings, or institutionalized social processes which inhibit people’s ability to play and communicate with others or to express their feelings and perspective on social life in contexts where others can listen” (37). As I read her, Robillard herself may qualify as oppressed on this definition if she may be said to be significantly powerless (powerlessness being one of oppression’s “five faces” in Young’s view [64]) to use satisfying care in the “socially recognized setting” of the academic classroom. Having one’s hands tied by policy so that one cannot help even where one wishes to do so can certainly feel disempowering. Equally relevant, however, is the questionable legitimacy of Robillard’s decision not to report the plagiarized submission to

63 In addition to the classical virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude, the theological virtues are faith, hope, and charity. MacIntyre asserts that Aristotle “knew nothing” of these theological virtues (After 174).

219 the relevant authorities and thereby act out of place. If the policy is not oppressive to the teacher or to the student, then disobeying it would not seem justified as a form of disobedience. On the question of the student’s being oppressed according to Young’s definition, one may ask in what way the student was inhibited from learning by and within the institution.

As George Eliot writes in Middlemarch, “We all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them” (Eliot 45). If one believes that to do one’s job in reporting violations is to act the part of an oppressor, there can be no surprise when a would-be encourager decides not to comply with the system in which she is enmeshed but through which she may seize opportunity to liberate the oppressed.

It must be remembered, however, that Robillard ultimately defends teachers’ anger. Not to do so, she concludes, “dehumanizes” and “disembodies” composition teachers, and risks losing the respect of those outside the field of composition studies. Specifically in her defending

“the role of the reader”—here, the teacher evaluating the plagiarized submission—she stands up for the one who is to administer care (28-9). In short, in defending anger Robillard also defends one of the least angry responses possible to plagiarism, and she does so while remaining faithful to her convictions about the student-teacher relationship as essentially one of care. The perhaps unnecessary complexity of the “complex representation of teachers’ anger” she wishes to see in scholarship (21) seems if not a direct result then a more-than-likely association of a professor who does pride herself on both, as she states, her abilities to analyze prose as well as her acts of encouraging students in a system whose rules may not necessarily exemplify such obvious care.

In the absence of this liberation metaphor, and in the absence of the resulting felt need for such care, anger, while perhaps not always easily determined in its most virtuous form, does not present quite so many difficulties for the teacher, nor would it be likely to be overlooked or

220 denied in disciplinary publications. Robillard’s recommendations to recognize the humanity of the professors in according legitimacy to their anger seems to have been a long time in coming thanks to, if Robillard is correct, the ethical convictions of liberatory pedagogy, and, interestingly, her progression from self-suspicion toward self-assertion parallels the moral progression charted by Gilligan in Chapter 3 of In a Different Voice, “Concepts of Self and

Morality”; with virtue ethics, that recognition does not appear to require so much suspicion or apology, though it may present other problems.

Conclusion: Further Difficulties

Let us briefly survey the overall justifications for punishment according to the major moral theoretical approaches. For consequentialist theories such as utilitarianism or ethical egoism (objectivism), punishment derives its justification as a form of “crime control” (Scheid

262); in academic contexts, punishing plagiarism, to be morally permissible if not completely morally satisfactory, would have to deter students from plagiarizing in the first place, to protect the good of academic credit whose prerogative of distribution rests with the academic institution, to ensure the reform of the student, or some combination of these (see Brudner 341-42). For deontological theories such as Kantianism and natural law, the punishment derives its justification from the very fact of the offense itself and from the punishment’s suitability to that offense (Scheid 262-63). An academic institution is justified in punishing plagiarism on this view simply because plagiarism is a violation of academic law designed to protect the rights of the academic institution, and if the recipient is responded to in a way that respects his or her moral agency in committing that violation (see Brudner 347). Finally, for virtue ethics, the punishment derives its justification from the fact that meting out the punishment itself, intending even if not effecting the cultivation of virtuous character in the recipient, is in accordance with,

221 while reinforcing or producing, virtuous character in the agent (Carr 228). An academic institution that can maintain that it punishes, broadly speaking, “at the right time, to the right objects, towards the right people, and in the right way” (219), is therefore justified. All responses, of whatever severity, may generally be answerable to one or more sets of these qualifications. Doubtless, any response that could satisfy all qualifications, if one were available, would have the widest appeal.

Because moral theorizing is concerned first with the justificatory principles of action and secondly with the conclusions to which those principles may lead in practice, it does not have to be the case that, say, a care ethicist must in all instances disagree with the moral conclusions of a deontologist or utilitarian. In theory, a care ethicist may furnish a justification for suspending a student from school if the relevant and ascertainable facts of the case suggested that the student- teacher relationship may benefit most from the student’s taking time away from school to reassess personal priorities—with a view to returning to school, and resuming the student-teacher relationship, at a later time, thus lending to punishment a “restorative or reintegrative aspect”

(Gelfand 607). A deontologist, alternatively, might recommend expulsion as a kind of retribution, a just deprivation of student rights on the principle of forfeiture in view of the student’s assault on the dignity of the academic institution (see Pilon 352). To be sure, it may be unlikely that a care ethicist would reason from the premise that the student-teacher relationship must be preserved to the conclusion that suspension is the best means of that preservation—a low probability borne out by the survey of the academic literature on the subject—and it is moreover questionable whether a Kantian would be more likely to recommend expulsion rather than suspension in light of the characteristic ethical premium on moral will and the determinations as to what will had been at work in the given act of plagiarism. In principle,

222 however, the point remains that different moral theories may, in any given instance, simply furnish differing justifications for the same conclusion. As we have seen in this chapter, more than one theory may supply justification for a given response, not simply the theory evidently espoused by the scholar. In considerable detail, we have also seen how one moral theory may justify a response that another theory does not appear to justify at all.

Responses to plagiarism, to be sure, may correlate more strongly with some responses than with others in the field of composition studies. For example, expulsion, which seems congenial to Kantianism and natural law, raises questions on a consequentialist view (e.g., is it effective? does it result in too much pain relative to its benefits?) and merits outright repudiation from scholars motivated by care ethics. Simple deduction, to cite another example, may win measured approval if not commendation from a virtue ethicist, but will likely meet rejection from a deontologist. Mandatory revision, even with penalty, seems impermissible on a deontological view but permissible, even highly recommendable, on a utilitarian or care ethics view.

Each moral theory brings with it its own set of problems, both generally and here specifically in the context of response and punishment. Virtue ethics and care ethics, both because they consider character of the agent, invite scrutiny because each refer as much to an ideal role model as much as to the rule of law. Aristotle, while maintaining in the Politics that the rule of law is superior to individual discretion, seems to leave some matters about policy wide open when virtuous responses appear to be discretionary in nature and not merely rule- governed (Carr 219-20; cf. Harris 208). Here Michael Sandel’s gloss on Aristotle’s questions about preserving the integrity of the activity’s nature as well as according due honor to those qualities it is the proper function of the activity to draw out (Sandel) may act as a kind of

223 practical ballast to Aristotle’s virtuous judge, who is supposed to be the embodiment of law itself

(NE V.4). Deontology, on the other hand, while it does not leave the judging agent entirely free of having to consider his or her personal motives (as per the principle of double effect), arguably lays the more considerable burden of ascertaining and evaluating the motives of the recipient, without which it cannot determine punishment in the first place. Whereas, then, virtue ethics asks teachers to evaluate themselves as well as their students, deontology asks teachers to evaluate primarily their students. Consequentialism, on the other hand, may ask that teachers evaluate their students, especially when the aim of the punishment is reform, but it need not consult this consideration in all cases.

Whether to consider plagiarism essentially and pragmatically a failed performance,64 or, if to treat it as an infraction, whether to consider intention and, if so, to what extent, thus emerge as the two primary disciplinary points of moral dispute, each to be decided differently in accordance with differing moral assumptions. Intention, of course, is bound up with the practical definition of plagiarism. (Definitions, again, were covered in Chapter 3.) If plagiarism is simply, as Howard calls it, a “feature of text” (“Plagiarisms” 797)—really, a feature of texts, since plagiarism necessarily involves at least two texts65—then it is considered simply a descriptive term for a deficient object. If, on the other hand, it is called an act of theft, then this opens up questions of the quality of the act and not simply of the object (see Bolin); once this label is used, intention obtrudes as an at least potentially relevant factor. The same is true if one substitutes the Ameliorist metaphor of a breach of etiquette for the Traditionalist label of theft, since bad manners may be an instance either of intentional or unintentional rudeness. The

Ameliorist position, because it pleads the extenuation of a lack of knowledge on the part of

64 Recall Valentine’s discussion covered in Chapters 3 and 4. 65 “Texts,” of course, may be written or spoken.

224 novice academic writers, significantly agrees in this essential point with mainstream

Traditionalists on the importance of intention; it therefore attacks the data of the argument and not its warrant. In this way, Ameliorists effectively concede to Traditionalists that malicious intention may license responses to plagiarism more severe than mandatory revisions or simple deductions. Such a moral concession is perhaps more morally significant than may appear at first glance as an instance of profound agreement between those who sit, as it were, across the aisle from one another. Where a given Ameliorist’s case absolutely depends on the unreasonable difficulty of learning citation conventions in a given space of time, severe sanctions seem not to have been rejected in principle but only in practice. By the same token, a Kantian constitutionally unwilling to see malice in a student may thus appear in practice as understanding as the most committed care ethicist.

Those who do not consider intention on principle would, it would seem, be well advised to craft language that avoids any moral-practical definition of plagiarism at all. Not to call plagiarism theft or rudeness—or practice with literacy, or sin—while it will not likely contribute to allaying the practical controversy among practitioners as a whole, may, in cases where such vocabulary is eschewed, help to spare the professor the difficulties of having to categorize the action as well as of attempting an explanation, in moral terms, for the blameworthiness of the action to morally skeptical students, whether because it blights the character, marks a failure in duty, or because it results in negative consequences. To repeat, it follows that, in practice, the failed citation is marked off much as is a failed math problem. (Howard suggests a comma splice [“New” 94].) This fact means, moreover, that rectificatory justice may fail to appear immediately appropriate because, even though theoretically concerned with a loss of credit due

225 to a source author—always plagiarism’s result—the term finally treats the matter as an infraction rather than a failed performance.66

Not taking intention into account raises yet another important difficulty not considered above. If never considered intentional (or unintentional), then plagiarism can never be considered cheating. What would it say of an academic institution that punished cheating on an exam with expulsion—or suspension, or failure for a course or exam—while meeting even obviously intended plagiarism, even on multiple occasions, merely with reductions proportionate to the credit for the assignment? A paper, after all, may be weighted just as much as an exam, and, in the case of a completely copied-and-pasted submission, the plagiarism could not have been the product of ignorance.

By way of solution, one might suggest treating a first instance of plagiarism with proportionate reductions regardless of intention and a second with recommendation for disciplinary action. To answer a second instance of plagiarism in this way would be to treat it as cheating, an action requiring intent, and thereby honor the values commensurate between papers and exams. According to this solution, to submit one plagiarized paper is not to cheat, but to submit two plagiarized papers is. This solution cannot hold, however, because ignorance tends to account for milder or no penalties in the first instance, and weighing ignorance is to admit intention as a relevant consideration, a proposition excluded ex hypothesi. The proposed solution thus fails in coherence. Moreover, considering the audience of other students, professors, administrators, and the wider public—most of whom may recognize the relative equivalence of effort required to perform well on both an exam and a paper—not to consider intention and the possibility of cheating seems a pill too hard to swallow, much less to

66 Contrast Valentine’s explanation of plagiarism as a failed literacy performance, which I also here have in mind, with the teacher’s allegedly failed pedagogical performance.

226 countenance. To bracket off intention in a first instance of plagiarism and then to consider in a second may be to overlook bad motives a first time but not a second, on the order of “everyone deserves a second chance,” an axiom that may be at variance with institutional policy on cheating. Not only does the messiness of mercy here make itself known,67 but so does the assumption that one may accord to the act of writing a paper a special category: passing an exam cannot be compared, it seems to say, in difficulty to the superlative difficulty of writing a paper.

If such is the case, it is not obvious.68

Still more, without considering intent, what would become of students who would stand to lose nothing appreciable for their infraction? What of, for example, wealthy students who may plagiarize a paper and, if caught, simply shrug off the matter and then proceed to hire a capable ghostwriter? If such a student loses not only points but the price of tuition and, if expelled, effectively loses also the tuition paid for any and all other classes taken that semester, he will then be confronted with a response more in keeping with his malicious attempt to wrest from the institution credit against its will and so “affront [the] dignity” proper to higher education and the faculty who represent it in their persons (see Pilon 351-52).69

So, then, perhaps plagiarism policies should consider intention after all so long as cheating on exams is rightly to be treated as cause for disciplinary action up to and including expulsion. (Again, because Ameliorists argue by denying moral turpitude on the part of students, the premise that moral turpitude warrants severe sanctions has, in many instances, been

67 For a justification of mercy in the face of retributivist charges of injustice, see Brudner. 68 Consider further that many exams have significant writing portions. If the difficulty of writing is the relevant factor in the response, then a first instance of cheating on a written exam could not be met with a recommendation to the disciplinary board. Perhaps this is the way to iron out an inconsistency in policy? 69 Pilon considers how punishing wealthy criminals by monetary fines for intentional harms to persons entitled to respect highlights such punishment’s insufficiency on a Kantian view.

227 effectively conceded.) An additional etymological-metaphorical reason remains for considering intention. Plagiarism, because it does mean kidnapping, implies a property about an action and not an object merely. Though, as I say in the Introduction, the term has become simply a technical term for illicit textual practices, linguistically and rhetorically minded professors, especially those in language arts and composition departments, are not likely everywhere to forget the buried metaphor completely; to be as consistent as possible, a professor not considering intention may wish to follow, with a difference, Howard’s basic proposal to jettison plagiarism with its charged meaning, replacing it with, perhaps, two of Howard’s proposed terms: insufficient citation and excessive repetition. Her third category, fraud, clearly brings us back to the intentions with which we began. Wide adoption of the proposed terminology may be possible, but plagiarism’s entrenched place in the history not only of teaching writing but writing as such stands as a formidable practical as well as cognitive obstacle. I here again observe

Howard’s own abandonment of her proposal.70

What of those who do consider intention? To what extent shall they consider it? Recall again the academic principle isolated in the section on failure for the course: intention is irrelevant until academic law is broken, part of which was that not to follow academic law is tolerable if good faith is present, i.e., the intention to follow academic law even while failing to follow it is itself good. This principle alone does not lead to any certain conclusions. Kant, as we have seen, holds that a good will is in itself morally good. Don E. Scheid suggests that Kant, while he may or may not have not understood negligence as criminal, regarded as a “crime” any

“intentional transgression”; moreover, Kant, as a retributivist, espoused the view that

“punishments [must be] in proportion to their respective crimes” (273; 263). On this point,

70 I would surmise her abandonment has to do with cultural entrenchment in usage rather than with any cognitive obstruction.

228

Scheid claims that Kant is really of no further help because, as critics point out, he does not quantify crimes and punishments in such a way that they may become the objects of what is sometimes called a moral calculus (273-74). David Carr points to similar difficulties facing the virtue ethicist (221-22); Aquinas names this difficulty as well (50), as does ethical intuitionist W.

D. Ross (Right 62). It may with certain confidence be ventured that all moral theories run aground of this difficulty.

Yet the guiding light of the principle of suiting the punishment to the crime may point this far: just what is it that the student intended to do in failing to attribute X word, Y phrase, or

Z passage? If the point of plagiarizing a single word was to appear smart and, say, receive an A on the paper in recognition of brilliance, the principle would appear to recommend at least that the student not receive that for which he intended to commit plagiarism. It will at once appear that the principle may apply equally well whether the intentionally plagiarized material accounts for a little or a lot of the submission. In this way, again, Kant upholds Howard’s proposal for visiting malicious patchwriting with suspension. Similar extrapolations relative to the other moral theories here considered may be made.

In closing the previous chapter, I laid out an argument for the morally rational quality of choosing not to prevent plagiarism. Similarly, in closing this chapter, I would like to consider yet another discredited approach to punishment and, so doing, will invoke an instructive literary analogue. When on her wedding day it was discovered to Jane Eyre and the equally shocked witnesses standing by that her would-be husband, Edward Rochester, was legally bound to

Bertha Mason, Rochester makes a series of impassioned and eloquent pleas against the harshness of a strict adherence to rules. After relating his pitiable story of his unhappy marriage to Bertha

229 and subsequent years of loneliness following her madness, he begs Jane to be understanding and live with him as his mistress. Jane, with determined love and “agony,” refuses what she rejects as a very tempting but ultimately indecent (and sinful) proposal. Rochester then attacks in this way: “What a distortion in your judgment, what a perversity in your ideas, is proved by your conduct! Is it better to drive a fellow-creature to despair than to transgress a mere human law— no man being injured by the breach? for you have neither relatives nor acquaintances whom you need fear to offend by living with me” (Brontë 356). What follows is a moving description of

Jane’s inner war:

This was true: and while he spoke my very Conscience and Reason turned traitors

against me, and charged me with crime in resisting him. They spoke almost as

loud as Feeling: and that clamoured [sic] wildly. ‘Oh, comply!’ it said. ‘Think of

his misery; this of his danger—look at his state when left alone; remember his

headlong nature; consider the recklessness following on despair—soothe him;

save him; love him; tell him you love him and will be his. Who in the world cares

for you? or who will be injured by what you do? (356)

Who, in reading this, does not recognize the powerful appeals of sympathy underlying the act- utilitarian rationale considered in the section above? “Think of the consequences, and think of the suffering to be endured should one act on the principle.” And is it not a kind of warped judgment, as Rochester avers, to persist in such strict adherence when quality of life, if not life itself, is at stake? Moreover, who does not recognize these pleas for mercy in their own hearts?

What, indeed, other argument is there when pleading for mercy? I will suffer. Please relent.

Jane, once her Conscience and Reason had their say, moves for powerful rebuttal:

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I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I

am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned

by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not

mad—as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no

temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny

against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual

convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a

worth—so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I

am insane—quite insane. […] Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations,

are all I have at this hour to stand by. (Brontë 356)

This inner refutation to Rochester’s and Jane’s own urgings is part virtue-ethic, part deontological reply. Self-respect and integrity are at stake. Duty to God and man are demanded.

The very existence of principle itself is given succinct justification. Additionally, Jane is neither cold nor indifferent to Rochester’s suffering or to his quite possibly consequent self-destruction.

Whereas a utilitarian may argue that no pity is of any moral worth if it does not result in the real alleviation of suffering, here Jane’s ability to feel for Rochester is a virtue in itself in keeping with her Christian charity. Despite the tendency of his objections, Jane fully recognizes

Rochester as a “fellow creature” while remaining bound to a moral order which transcends them both. There is a sense of the tragic here. Like much tragedy, it comes of necessity—and it is aesthetically compelling to behold.71

It is immaterial to this illustration, of course, whether an academic administering the punishments following plagiarism believes in God. What is important is that those who believe

71 The aesthetic dimension of the moral life has been well noted (e.g., Harris 196).

231 in the principled adherence to law (or, by a less savory term, rules) may not necessarily be charged with pathology or evil intent in carrying out their duties. Not all sympathy looks like leniency; in Jane’s case, it looks precisely the opposite. Hamlet’s cruelty for kindness’s sake, though less aesthetically pleasing in execution—with Gertrude he uses no daggers but speaks a few—operates by a similar principle. It is, perhaps, this realization in nascent and antonym form that begins to open to Robillard when she admits and affirms the rightful presence of anger. If it is morally permissible to feel deeply angry and not to appear so on the surface in one’s conduct

(here, in one’s dispensation of punishment), perhaps it is also so permissible to feel profound pity while not appearing so on the surface. Cicero, notably, approves the appearance of anger for discipline’s sake while disallowing the administrator to feel it himself.

No doubt the inwardness of virtue here implied and the austerity if not severity of the effects of such a virtue will continue to draw its fair share of criticism. Yet I have in mind here

Sharon Crowley’s recommendation at the end of her Toward a Civil Discourse of the attractive and suasory power of narrative in the middle of ideological and argumentative deadlock (197-

98). Jane Eyre’s narrative is a compelling reminder that punishment need not be intended to even if it absolutely must hurt to satisfy obedience to an ideal. No more, however, is it a command, in Jane’s moral universe, to follow through on some austerities than it is a command to find and sympathize with the common humanity of those whose suffering they may inadvertently inflict. For teachers of writing, faced with the task of potentially inflicting considerable even if not life-threatening suffering on students who have intentionally broken those laws given by academia and sanctioned by faculty, this is at least a virtue portrait inviting observation, contemplation, and, I dare say, respect.

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Chapter 6

CONCLUSION

Metaphors […] are like Ignes Fatui, and reasoning upon them, is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities, and their end, contention, and sedition, or contempt.

—Hobbes, Leviathan

When people say a rule or practice or cultural meaning is wrong and should be changed, they are usually making a claim about social justice.

—Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference

A practice involves standards of excellence and obedience to rules as well as the achievement of goods. To enter into a practice is to accept the authority of those standards and the inadequacy of my own performance as judged by them.

—Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

The purpose of this project has been to review, examine, and critique some of the morally charged definitions, proposed methods of prevention, and responses to plagiarism, primarily though not exclusively as treated by scholars in composition studies. For many of these scholars, as we have seen, plagiarism, having appreciable effects on students’ academic experiences and lives outside the academy, as well as offering a testing site for the moral character of teachers, cannot be confined to theoretical speculation about the natural operations of language, nor its definitions and explanations limited to cursory treatment in handbooks or perfunctory warnings and policies in course catalogues and syllabi. At bottom, scholars worry that plagiarism as understood by faculty and administration will lead to unnecessary and, likely on that account, unjust impediments to the academic progress of many students as well as produce teachers disconnected from or indifferent to that progress. For consequentialist as well as virtue-based

233 reasons, then, plagiarism turns on a question of social justice. Thanks to the efforts of a loosely connected group of scholars whom I have called Ameliorists, practical and moral definitions of plagiarism once and still deeply entrenched in the academy and the broader public, and embraced by those I have called Traditionalists, can no longer be assumed as the unquestioned and working assumptions of practitioners in our and even other fields.

Because the terms Ameliorist and Traditionalist roughly correspond to the political categories of liberal and conservative, one would be ill-advised to assume that these labels necessarily mark extremes; instead, they allow for a range of commitment to pedagogical first principles and theoretical understandings along a spectrum. A writing teacher may, for example, use PDS without moral reservation but may respond encouragingly to a few unattributed sentences uncovered by PDS with required revision or minor deductions with a nonthreatening explanation. Yet, one might say that the Ameliorist project, in George Lakoff’s terms, is to oust the Strict Father from pedagogy and replace him with the Nurturant Parent. Moreover, if the

Ameliorist analysis that outmoded theories of authorship explain Traditionalist execrations is correct, then one may confidently posit the Romantic author as one of the favorite figures of

Strict Fathers (cf. Jarratt 120; Lauer 276). Still more, James Berlin’s characterization of writing instruction during the early twentieth century as a “conflict between those who saw literacy as utilitarian and those who saw it as self-fulfillment” (39) and Rebecca Moore Howard’s explicit linking of gatekeeping to liberal culture to some extent bears out consistent and long-term evidence of this conflict (Standing xxi; see also “Plagiarism Metaphors” below). Looking forward, I think it also potentially instructive to explore parallels in Sylvia Scribner’s characterization of “Literacy in Three Metaphors,” particularly those of “adaptation” and a “state of grace.” Quite readily, consequentialist theories of writing may be seen as adaptationist while

234 deontological and virtue theories of writing may be seen as, following Scribner’s “salvation,” salvific (9; 13) Howard may note, by the way, that one need not use literature in teaching composition in order to promote salvific ends for writing so long as one adheres consciously or unconsciously to Romantic theories of authorship: the moral engine driving the pedagogy is the same, even perhaps where conscious goals of care are also espoused, as with expressivism (see

Standing 50).

Thus, I see still more reason to link moral analysis with a rhetorical analysis of metaphor to better understand the ethical state of the field. As I close this chapter and this project, I will provide a final comment on the reasonableness of the metaphors herein considered, attempt to identify the apparently dominant trends in moral reasoning in composition’s plagiarism studies, and suggest directions for further study.

Plagiarism Metaphors: Which Should Stay, Which Should Go?

Rhetorically, the fight to recalibrate plagiarism definitions, preventative approaches, and responses invites consideration not only of the ethical justifications adduced for these recalibrations, but also, as I have endeavored to show, for the metaphors that strongly signal ethical commitments and function in many instances as challenges to more Traditionalist positions. As I have argued, some of these metaphors have much to commend them. For example, Bronwyn Williams and Stanley Fish’s metaphors that citation conventions may be likened to learning refined manners or to the “arcane” rules of golf, respectively, seem fairly reasonable taken simply as analogous descriptions. While the seasoned rarely need to consult a written manual, even expert academic writers may, as it were, occasionally forget their manners or encounter a writing situation in which protocol is unclear on how to proceed. Margaret

Price’s footnote dealing with the propriety of citing Freire when using “banking concept” in a

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2002 composition article and so with a writer’s “judgment calls” about what is, or perhaps ought to be, by now common knowledge stands as a notable example (112). Tracing the status of newly coined terminology requiring citation to words or phrases requiring no more than a nod of familiarity from the reasonably well read readership—perhaps a concept as problematic as the

“reasonable person” standard in a court of law (see, e.g., Parker 779-80; Young 13)—may be a study in itself worth conducting to help further demystify what remains unclear about the application of rules for citation within a given discipline. Such study, perhaps yielding perhaps as much descriptive as prescriptive rules, may fail to resolve some ambiguities. (See also

“Remaining Challenges” below.)

Theft, too, commonly held at arm’s length by some in the profession, has been shown under this analysis to be reasonable once understood that academic credit is the goal of the transaction between student and institution, as when work is exchanged for grades. To be sure, economic metaphors underlying academia itself may likewise imply the idea of “theft,” and it was mentioned in Chapter 3 that all morality may have its first principles encoded entirely in the metaphorical terms of debt and credit.

Additionally, I have argued that it seems reasonable to label a draconian policy as a

“dramatic device” whose function is to draw heavy attention to itself as well as to excite terror in its audience. I have also suggested that, in this instance, Anson has used “dramatic” consonant with the evaluative sense to denote a failed performance due to an actor’s faulty appreciation of the audience considered in both ethical as well as theatrical terms. For reasons impinging upon language theory that I will explore at the close of this project, there are reasons to consider “sin,” used perhaps as often earnestly as with critical irony, as a perfectly legitimate metaphor whose

236 currency is well deserved even if its implications are often easily dismissed and its moral derivation eschewed in a secular academy.

By contrast, several metaphors as commonly purposed do not fare so well under the analysis. I find that to compare plagiarism to a plant that naturally grows under certain conditions raises too many questions about responsible human agency in the act of writing, a similar problem that arises in the case of the text as co-laborer. The patch, while doing justice to some elements of the composing process and while following the discipline’s precedent of metaphorizing written discourse as textile, seems to crowd out still other elements of the writing process, as well as to elide what are the most basic units in a text (words?). Pejorative or what

Nedra Reynolds might call “uncommending metaphors” (900) such as gatekeeping (for plagiarism’s academic function), Big Brother/Panopticon (for PDS), poison (PDS), making a deal with the devil (PDS) cops (detecting and punishing plagiarism generally), and academic death penalty (expulsion) do not, after consideration of the relevant factors, carry a sufficient basis for comparison and hence serve to communicate little more than moral disapproval. Even if one assumes the point of composition is to do ideological critique and, at the same time, turn the critical gaze on the very practices in which the teachers and students are enmeshed (e.g., Fox;

Howard, “Ethics”; Worsham; Zwagerman), the pejorative metaphors listed above exaggerate or misprize those conditions held by exponents of critical pedagogy to be morally objectionable and so, to at least a small extent, undermine the critical/Ameliorist position. Wherever one’s role is

“to teach and certify intellectual accomplishment” (Howard, “Sexuality” 488; qtd. in Price 104), one must keep a gate (certify or not), and one must act as a cop (detect) as well as a judge

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(punish). To use these metaphors as an Ameliorist is, to remix Hamlet, to exclaim against one’s own profession.72

Whether those espousing critical pedagogy, with its tendency to view academia as an oppressive institution that unjustly reproduces and legitimates inequality, in this study have reasoned from the general axiom that academia is oppressive to the specific conclusion that plagiarism as understood by Traditionalists is part of that oppression, or whether critical pedagogy advocates have observed the specific definitions and policies and inductively reasoned to the axiom that academia is an oppressive institution is not entirely clear in all instances from the analysis; what does seem clear is that critical pedagogy and critique of plagiarism’s functions in academia are correlated. Doubtless one sympathetic to Lynn Worsham’s argument that ideology structures affect as well as reason (111-12) may suspect my rejection of these metaphors has as much to do with a predetermined ideological position—I would self-identify as a slightly conservative teacher of writing sympathetic to the goals, though not enacting the methods, of liberal culturalists—and I do not deny that I may have a tendency to dismiss some metaphors with more readiness than others, but I am not convinced that this is so due solely to prior commitments and ideological location.

Explicative payoff will always justify, in the abstract, the use of metaphors. When

Hobbes compares them to ignes fatui, one struggles to believe he was not aware of a certain irony, namely, that the use of a simile is but one conjugation of “to be” away from a metaphor in form and that, in essence and operation, there is no material difference between them. (To say that Hobbes was aware of the more fundamentally metaphorical nature of language as later

72 In an examination of the concept of the discourse community, David W. Smit writes that one attempts to alter the nature of a discourse community in the attempt to alter its norms: “All discourse communities must by definition have some sort of border […] and thus in some sense they must be normative” (95).

238 explicated by Lakoff and Johnson, however, seems doubtful.) As a caution that metaphors may occlude as much as they explain, however, Hobbes’s statement (quip?) deserves serious attention. From my review of the metaphors selected for analysis, it seems safe to say that occulted moral commitments (if they are occulted) often, as Hamlet might say, unkennel themselves in one speech; to be sure, metaphors are one way that scholars in composition choose to encode their most stringent criticisms. It is tempting but by no means necessary to think scholars in composition for their knack for metaphor may draw on their backgrounds in literature. Whatever the cause, I say again that composition studies may benefit from further rhetorical analysis of the myriad metaphors informing and shaping the moral arguments conducted in our field.

Moral Theories in the Literature

Moral theories color all they see in the light of their general axioms or first principles, permitting the reasonable conclusion that those responses to actions and attitudes which accord with certain moral theories are the probable if not certain signs of those moral theories in operation. This, of course, has been a working principle of analysis in the foregoing chapters.

For my purposes, it has not been necessary that any writer should self-identify as, say, a virtue ethicist or as a utilitarian; nor has it been important that any writer should be explicitly conscious of the type of his or her moral reasoning at all. All that is required for analysis is the textual presence of conclusions and their justifications. I have not hesitated, then, to assign a moral theoretical category to any given writer’s reasoning so long as that writer has provided that sufficient information.

Where some actions or attitudes have been ruled permissible or impermissible in the literature has afforded the intellectually and ethically useful opportunity to look for opposite

239 rulings by considering, usually, alternative moral theories or, in some cases, the same moral theory. (Care ethics has been shown both to justify and not to justify, for example, Robillard’s angry response in Chapter 5.) Exploring these alternative rulings may be viewed as disingenuous, self-serving attempts “to justify what we already believe or to rationalize a framework of meaning” that skirts the problematic material and affective ideological structures already in place (Worsham 104-5); however, the view that there are justifications for such approaches reasons that such problems, if there, do not warrant change. Such conclusions may be expected. Traditionalist assumptions about plagiarism focus primarily on the student as an individual; Ameliorist assumptions, by contrast, focus on the system of the teaching of writing itself and/or on the institutionalization in which such teaching takes place and from which it draws its character. The individual student, as we have seen on this view, may not necessarily be reasonably expected to conform to the set of academic expectations with which he is confronted in a writing class.

It would be incorrect to assume that any moral theory would necessarily lead to a single conclusion about how to approach plagiarism or, to be sure, how to approach the teaching of writing as a whole. In the chapters above, we have seen how liberatory/critcal pedagogy and care ethics have been congenial and even mutually reinforcing in approaching plagiarism. John

Ruszkiewicz, however, notes how Louise Whetherbee Phelps’s care ethics leads her to opt against adopting a liberatory pedagogy in her classes, a choice Ruszkiewicz, a conservative, perhaps predictably applauds as “maturity and professionalism” (24).73 Amy Robillard, by contrast, willingly adopts a liberatory stance as congenial to her care ethicist vision of herself as

73 See Iris Marion Young, whose stimulating critique of the “ethic of professionalism” in bureaucracies (77 ff.) lends support to a critical pedagogy perspective of a bureaucratized academe.

240 a “teacher” and “encourager” (“We” 18). Similarly, one might imagine how a virtue ethicist might approach punishing the same act of plagiarism, depending on the knotty question of which virtue one wishes to emphasize (see Carr 226). Kantians, as we have seen, may conceivably differ about how to respond to an intentional act of plagiarism according to different understandings of just what one intended to secure by the act. In such a case, Ayer is shown correct that ascertaining fact, not arriving at similar moral premises, may be the more difficult matter at hand (110).

Yet the analysis has also shown how the following characterization of moral argumentation may be charming but inapplicable:

Every one has heard people quarreling. Sometimes it sounds funny and

sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can

learn something very important from listening to the kinds of things they say.

They say things like this: ‘How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?’—

‘That’s my seat, I was there first’—‘Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any

harm’—Why should you shove in first?’—‘Give me a bit of your orange, I gave

you a bit of mine’—‘Come on, you promised.’ People say things like that every

day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.

Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes

them is not merely saying that the other man’s behaviour [sic] does not happen to

please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he

expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: ‘To

hell with your standard.’ Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has

been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some

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special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case

why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite

different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up

which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both

parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or

morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. (Lewis,

Mere 3)

“To hell with your standard,” in so many words, is, at times, precisely what we appear to witness in the Ameliorist challenge to the Traditionalist position on plagiarism. As I have noted, the problem is far more moral than theoretical. (In the closing section, I will have a few more words about theory.) Lynn Z. Bloom’s removal of the critical paper, for example, challenges the

Traditionalist standard that pleasure is irrelevant to the legitimacy of an academic assignment, and, moreover, the fact that the critical paper got there before the students did may be disregarded in order to make room for the pleasure principle above identified. So much, in this instance, for “that’s my seat, I got there first.” By contrast, Sue Simmons and Sean Zwagerman, who as scholars and teachers may be presumed generally to believe in the binding nature of a writing assignment, both resort to special pleading to undermine that binding status under onerous conditions. Robillard similarly reneges on a promise to an employer to abide by policy in favor of acting as a properly encouraging professor would act. These few instances and others considered in the preceding chapters show that competing moral standards are at work, some scholars deriving their energy from the adherence to some theories and the principled rejection of others.

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To continue this line of reasoning, my survey suggests that some theories, such as ethical egoism or objectivism, are virtually nowhere to be found in the literature, as was expected.

Retributivism, a principle found in Kantianism and natural law, though seemingly allowed for to some extent even in Howard’s “Plagiarisms, Authorship, and the Academic Death Penalty,” is modulated, as already seen, in the interests of “centrist” compromise (802); in other cases, it is tacitly repudiated. Likely for the additional reason that the metaphor of sin is commonly rejected, natural law appears to be virtually nowhere represented. Perhaps surprisingly, I did not identify many instances of obvious utilitarianism, despite Harris’s claim that the theory is

“probably the basic moral philosophy of most nonreligious humanists today” (121). Virtue ethics, additionally, does not appear much represented. In fact, the word virtue appears on a few occasions in the literature to distance the writer from a harsh assessment of a student who commits plagiarism (Howard, “Ethics” 84; “New” 89; “Sexuality” 477; Price 101; Bracher qtd. in Robillard, “We” 21; see, however, Whiteman and Gordon 29). Similarly, David Leight casts doubts on the appropriateness or usefulness of “self-respect” when discussing the failure of students to produce academic writing successfully and thereby avoid plagiarism (224-25). In light of such indications, it would seem that virtue as a concept, much less as a key element of ethics, is not deemed overly appropriate or relevant by important scholars in composition studies so far as plagiarism is concerned. (For a Marxist argument that holds Aristotelian virtue as an ideal but which maintains that certain material conditions must first be met, see Eagleton.) I venture the tentative conclusion that some Ameliorists may see such distancing as desirable not necessarily because virtue ethics is not espoused or devalued by the writer in question—though this may also explain it in certain instances—but perhaps because to invoke virtue, or the lack of

243 it, is often seen as conservative and/or masculinist in “orientation” (Harris 121).74 Possibly the fairly common presence of care ethics is due to what has been styled the “feminized” nature of composition studies (see, e.g., Brannon qtd. in Yagelski 45; Connors 67; Flynn; Robillard 28;

Traschel). I am, however, not convinced that “feminization,” or, relatedly, even theoretical and ethical commitment to feminism (see Connors 67) may alone explain the prevalence. It is possible that care ethics may not even motivate some evidently caring approaches. In Chapter 4,

I suggested that some preventative measures, strongly endorsed by care ethics, may be embraced for more prudential reasons. Nor am I convinced that commitment to feminism entails a commitment to certain theoretical challenges to plagiarism as a concept and hence to certain non- traditionalist definitions of it. Feminism, like other schools of thought, admits of variation and degree.

Remaining Challenges of Theory: Definition and Acquisition

While questions about the appropriateness of given moral theories remain open and while this is not an entirely deplorable state of affairs, two, or really three, related questions remain open in this debate whose closing, I argue, we ought to make it a priority to pursue. First, what exactly is plagiarism? Second, about how long—and how much effort—does it require to learn citation conventions in a given field of study? I have said of the first that the theoretical challenge to plagiarism as an idea is ultimately immaterial. Following Fish, I assert that the rules are the rules (“Plagiarism”). But, whereas Fish offered little more justification than to say that

“the practices rest on a foundation of themselves” (n.p.), I would like to offer a justification against Fish’s own rhetorical advice given elsewhere that justification effectively puts one

74 Virtue shares etymological kinship with virile; virtue, then, is quite literally a “manliness.” This meaning does not obtain in the Greek term, arête.

244 practice “in terms not its own.” Even to explain something, Fish warns, is simply to justify it in language “writ a bit softer” (ForaTv).

First, “what exactly is plagiarism?” has been asserted to be a question without much of an answer. Plagiarism, avers Howard, “remain[s] an undefined, and perhaps indefinable term”

(Standing 20), a claim she is by no means alone in making (e.g., Price 90). In summary form, here is one of the most vigorous though curious challenges to the Traditionalist position. As a counter, I offer that the statement may appear in a stranger and much less compelling light once put another way: the proper use of sources remains an undefined and perhaps undefinable question. So saying, I maintain a binary: proper citation conventions oppose plagiarism, a similar binary apparently maintained by Howard and the Citation Project (see Berrett). For the purposes of this discussion, it is not necessary to distinguish plagiarism from forgery (see Saint-

Amour). Also for my purposes, “proper citation conventions” means those which are recognized as common practice by academic writers within their proper fields and disciplines. Finally, I do not strictly oppose originality to plagiarism; this is not, however, because originality is defined variously by discipline (see Guetzkow et al.), but because plagiarism is failure to accord a source due acknowledgment, not the lack of originality as such (Spigelman 233). Perhaps more accurately: though all plagiarism is a lack of originality, not all lack of originality is plagiarism.75

My laying down of these stipulations, I maintain, does not underscore the shakiness of defining plagiarism but rather is a natural (i.e., logical) procession from the understanding that citation conventions are the products of regular academic practice (Fish, “Plagiarism”).76

75 For example, reports are “unoriginal” documents whose writers draw no new conclusions (originality here then is substantive, not organizational). Despite their being “unoriginal,” however, their writers may have accorded all sources due credit and hence not have plagiarized. 76 It may certainly be objected that Fish does not accord due recognition to the history of textual conditions (e.g., print culture, copyright, etc.) which are alleged to have led to academic citation

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Whereas Fish requires neither history of textuality nor poststructuralist theory to sanction the existence of academic citation conventions, I offer two explanations for their existence, both in the form of promising metaphors. These metaphors, as I will argue, will sufficiently demonstrate why the history of print and the undeniable given-ness of intertextuality are irrelevant to our pedagogy as well as why the learning of citation conventions may be presumed, on any view, a matter of ethical concern.

First, consider again the metaphor of sin, which may not receive due attention considered in light of poststructuralist theory. Howard says, “patchwriting might not be so much a sin into which writers lapse as it is a fundamental part of the writing process” (Standing 8). Without wanting to be ungenerous by pointing out that “so much” grants that there is some immoral property to patchwriting—her point in this context seems to be largely the opposite—I do want to respond to the commonly stated claim that because intertextuality is the natural property of language, patchwriting, a form of plagiarism, may not merit penalizing. What is natural, as was considered already in Chapter 3, Howard seems to reason, is perfectly moral (see Harris 88).

What, to press the matter, does sin have to do with it?

The doctrine of Original Sin, while complex in particulars, holds basically that to commit acts of sin is for human beings the most natural thing in the world. Complaints against the righteous requirements of religion take the form of allegations that such requirements do violence to human nature itself: who, for example, can love one’s neighbor as oneself? Several

practice, such as those described by Rose (Authors and Owners) and Pennycook. Fish’s contention, it will be remembered, is that academic citation “practices rest on a foundation of themselves” (n.p.). His claim is significant precisely because it does not look to history to, as it were, bless and sanction (much less to explain) current practices. (Fish has said that “explanation is just justification writ a bit softer” [ForaTV].) Fish’s argument is consistent with other statements he has made that academia requires no outside permission to exist or to teach as it does.

246 atheist critics, spanning from Freud to Hitchens, have countered that such love is impossible

(Freud 57; Collision). The natural inclination is to love one’s family, one’s friends, and one’s beneficiaries, but not one’s fellow human as such who may live many miles away (see, again,

Noddings 433), and certainly not one’s enemy.77 Yet for all that, the religious affirm, it is no less a “duty” to be discharged (Collision). To resist labeling patchwriting as a sin on the grounds that patchwriting is natural, then, will not persuade anyone already convinced that sin (e.g., a natural law theorist) is a perfectly reasonable concept. Poststructuralism, committed to the premise that all language interanimates (e.g., Buranen and Roy xvii; Howard, “New” 91; Lyon 235), is alone insufficient to challenge the sinfulness, literal or figurative, of plagiarism.

Consider a second metaphor. Where the Ameliorist may escape difficulties by avoiding theological questions, she may not when considering the profane realm of nature. In his

Evolution and Ethics, Thomas Huxley, explaining the difference between nature and art, seizes upon the example of a “small patch of the soil” that had only a few years earlier undergone careful tending by the hand of gardeners to bring forth and nourish vegetation not native to that region. The image of the garden, that “small patch” of ground transformed from a “state of nature” to a “state of art” (9), becomes his basis for an extended reflection on ethics understood as a constant struggle undertaken by civilized human beings against what Tennyson famously called nature red in tooth and claw. Granting that nature itself is at work in the horticulturalist even as it is at work in the ground and wind around him to destroy his work, Huxley nonetheless avers that the distinction between nature and art is “universal” as well as “useful and justifiable” in the present instance (11). The struggle of art against nature, for Huxley, is the sine qua non of

77 Aristotle and, similarly, Rand would say that friendship must be merited on the grounds of recognizable virtue (NE IX.5; Virtue 34). Rand explicitly rejects any duty to love one’s neighbor not on the grounds of its impossibility but on the grounds that no one ought to be compelled to effectively reward what has not been earned, in this case, love.

247 the ethical life: “Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of a society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it” (83).

Ethics, then, is designed to check in nature what is pernicious to the necessities and desirables of civilization.

Huxley’s characterization is a compelling one, and worth further consideration in light of the poststructuralist challenge to the academic notions of authorship and plagiarism. In the following passage, substitute “dialogism” or “intertextuality” for “cosmic process” and

“academic writer” for “gardener”:

The cosmic process uses unrestricted multiplication as the means whereby

hundreds compete for the place and nourishment for one; it employs frost and

drought to cut off the weak and unfortunate; to survive, there is need not only of

strength, but of flexibility and of good fortune.

The gardener, on the other hand, restricts multiplication; provides that

each plant shall have sufficient space and nourishment; protects from frost and

drought; and, in every other way attempts to modify the conditions, in such a

manner as to bring about the survival of those forms which most nearly approach

the standard of the useful, or the beautiful, which he has in his mind. (14)

Having accounted for the “cosmic process” and the “gardener,” what, to complete the analogy, are the frosts and droughts of academic writing? Surely it can be allowed that it is the

“naturally” antagonistic concomitants to the attempts to produce a piece of writing: the progress of time, the demands of family and friends, the ringing of phones, the persistence (and impersistence) of memory, and so on. What are the other plants? These, to be sure, are the words and phrases that come naturally from other sources but which must be pruned or

248 eradicated to bring forth that which is “useful, or the beautiful, which [the writer] has in mind”

(14). What, if not a garden space of this kind, is Woolf’s room of one’s own?

Academic writing is an ethical struggle perhaps because of the dynamics Huxley has described. Such a struggle may bring with it some further discomforts. Freud, were he alive today, may identify citation conventions as one more encroachment of civilization into the psyche, resulting in the magnification of the superego with further tendency to produce a neurotic, discontented member of civilization (108-10). To be sure, as we have seen, some have regarded citation precisely as a kind of neurosis and obsession (Anson, “We” 152; Fish,

“Plagiarism” n.p.; Schick n.p.; Lunsford 76). For academic writers, the neurotic tendency looks something like the persistent anxiety to be original (see Howard, “Plagiarisms”; Harold Bloom; cf. Devitt 579), taking the form of nagging questions that often shove the mellifluous Muse to one side, forcing the writer to doubt whether one’s Muse, perhaps uncharacteristically and therefore suspiciously eloquent, may have already inspired similar utterance in someone else (see

Howard, “Gendered” 3)—so commences a search, equal parts conscientious and nervous, in

Google or through the pages of one’s notes. If Freud’s observation that saints become more finely attuned to their guilt than to others due to saintly ability to internalize the commandments, exceeding others in self-reproach for sinfulness (87), perhaps experienced academic writers are more painfully aware of their writerly sins than anyone else. When Howard notes that she is herself a very practiced patchwriter who has simply learned to “cover the trail” (Standing 7; see also “New” 91), is this analogous to the saint’s awareness of being the chief of sinners? On this analysis, is not the attempt to teach academic writing to a considerable extent necessarily an attempt to convert and sanctify linguistic sinners, or an attempt to civilize the natural linguistic impulses?

249

The suggestion is, perhaps, strange, but I maintain that it is unavoidable. Whatever the foundations of ethics—revelation, innate sense, or cultivated struggle against nature—to live ethically is to invite the pains, including the painful reflections, of discipline. This is seemingly true regardless of whether one has free will or not. Added to the perhaps superlative difficulty of coming up with something original to say (Scollon 22) is the other difficulty of knowing which rule to follow. Both difficulties, however, do not nullify the principles—or tenors—identified in the above metaphors: the natural may be forbidden; the artificial may be required. Knowing what to cite, when, and in what way may be the mark of a virtuous handler of sources, and it may be that such a citer may work ultimately more by a highly intuitive “felt sensing” than by reference to rules; such sensing of the genre’s speech acts—of which, I add as something obviously true, citing a source is one—becomes “inseparable from communities of scholars and their shared research interests” (Popken 17). Yet, as noted above, difficulties of citation remain; however, as Rand affirms that the job of political theory is to lay down principles for society and it is the business of the philosophy of law to find the implementation of laws according to those principles (Virtue 135), so the questions of implementing rules for citation conventions are less questions of laying down principles for academic citation as such and more for examining case- by-case implementation (see also Aquinas 50; Harris 90). As a further suggestion, I offer that confusion over whether to cite a word, phrase, or idea probably has more to do with not having a sense of what is “common knowledge” as well as what is common phrasing (including technical terminology) than ignorance of the rules—there are only a handful—themselves. Knowledge of what is common through felt sense is the proper reward of deep and wide reading in a field or even several fields (see also Devitt 583). Lack of such reading, then, not want of direction or

250 overt instruction, may likely be the primary cause of some honest citational uncertainties.78

Having thus dispensed with the relevance of both print history and language theory by this argument and metaphors, and not by mere assertion as in Fish’s case, I believe it is advisable to close this question of what plagiarism is, or, better put, what properly citing sources is,79 and to move on to the more practical questions of acquisition facing teachers constrained by short semesters (see Popken 17).

Before moving on to those questions, however, there are objections with which I will have to contend. I put the following questions to myself: “You have maintained throughout that plagiarism is a feature of text, yet scholarship in the larger discipline maintains that genres are, as

Charles Bazerman states, the products of socially negotiated ‘perception’ in recurring situations

(Núcleo; see also Bawarshi, Devitt, Carolyn Miller), and this constructedness must include and contain what are socially deemed ‘proper’ citation conventions. Can you, then, in the face of this consensus, seriously maintain that the rules governing plagiarism are objective and that ‘proper’ citation conventions are truly, as you say, ‘reasonably well defined’? Does not, in fact, your own phrasing give the ambiguity inherent in the very binary of proper citation/plagiarism painfully away, standing as a concession to less formalist understandings of genre? Would it not be better

78 I have in mind here a statement from Ayn Rand on the “Nature of Government”: “even a society whose every member were fully rational and faultlessly moral, could not function in a state of anarchy; it is the need of objective laws and of an arbiter for honest disagreements among men [sic] that necessitates the establishment of a government” (Virtue 131). Sources of honest disagreement about whether the rule “cite” applies has to do with deciding not whether there is such an objective rule, but whether the given case warrants its application. Additionally, while Williams agrees about the limits of overt instruction, he leaves the rest to “trial and error” and “cultural custom” (351), which suggests an emphasis on practice with writing and less, I think, on necessary deep and wide reading. 79 In this way, I see profound agreement between Rebecca Moore Howard and other Ameliorists who recommend deep instruction in “how to understand unfamiliar source texts” (Howard, “Ethics” 86) and my own position (see Berrett, Howard, “Forget”; see also Chapter 4.)

251 and more defensible, then, to speak less of objective rules than of practices of relatively stable and consequently fluid characteristics?”

These challenges, having little to do with the interanimation of language as such and instead with the ever-changing nature of practices, are worth serious response. First, I state the universal citational imperative of academic writing: accord to sources due acknowledgment.

The violation of this imperative, that is, to fail to accord to sources due acknowledgment, is known as plagiarism. The challenge put here seems to say not so much that there are no rules secondary to the imperative (what Francis Bacon might call “middle axioms”) by which proper citation may be governed—and what would hence give rise to the need ever to place scare quotes around “proper”—but that some such rules, even if recognized and promulgated, cannot be universalized and certainly not, as Susan Blum might put it, eternized. Conceding such premises, Blum, one might say, rushes past difficulties into a cushy truism when she says that

“we still abide by the values of our time and place”—even if those values, and the rules deriving from them, ultimately change (178).

I am not convinced that Blum does too easily dismiss those concerns. Rules remain legitimate and in effect so long as they are promulgated (Aquinas 46) and enforced by proper authorities. Howard charges, however, that many English teachers—whose good will and competence we may assume—define plagiarism differently (Standing 4). What, then? Should we, like good postmodernists, think globally yet act (and define) locally, so locally that we limit the definitions of plagiarism to our own classrooms and teach the “rules” of citation by our own lights and our own codes, respecting the roles of our colleagues and trusting their competence to do the same in theirs? What, in that case, becomes of the check-and-balance of academic- honesty or grade-appeal committees who have to adjudicate plagiarism cases? Shall we just

252 leave matters up entirely to the interpretive community there assembled? What, then, is the basis for common reasoning between professor and committee in the event that the professor’s judgment is upheld or overturned? What standard preserves the integrity of the professor’s judgment if it does not at the same time affirm the reasoning of that professor and hence recognize the principles by which she judges “proper” and “improper” citation? Are professors, in such cases, under ethical and professional obligation to draw a list of citation rules and present them to the committee in those cases?

Perhaps, assuming the premises, this is not a bad way to go. But this apparent solution simply passes the problematic buck along: now citation becomes not a disciplinary variable; it becomes a classroom variable. Carried throughout the field, though, it would be expected also to vary by reviewers of scholarly journals. What, in practice, however, would this probably look like? Consider this hypothetical example. A scholar who believes he has written a sentence in accordance with his felt sense of the discipline’s common terms, phrasings, and ideas may learn that the reviewer desires a citation. This feedback comes as a small surprise to the scholar, who is perhaps pained by some embarrassment or shame at the thought that the reviewer may have suspected some laziness or worse (while giving him the benefit of the doubt) on his part. He, after all, has read the scholarship fairly deeply and knows that the phrasing and ideas he has inscribed in the relevant sentence are common, having been in circulation for several years and in several journals. If the scholar wishes to see his work in print by that journal, however, he must follow the hypothetical imperative and comply with the instructions he has been given. He will have to cite what he believes requires no citation and, in his own mind, will be guilty of an over-citation—the shameful mark of a novice. Surely such a scenario is conceivable. (Perhaps, too, the scholar in question is overly sensitive.) Such a difference in opinion, however, I

253 maintain, would likely illustrate not a difference in the rules of citation themselves but rather in their relevant application—the reviewer, we might suppose, was not quite as deeply read in the area scholarship as the scholar. In other words, it is in application, I contend, that ambiguity and the room for interpretation most often lies, not in the seemingly anomic conditions of “changing practices” or in the principles underlying those changes supposedly resistant to codification.

One more objection must be met. “If,” someone might say, “what you say is true and that felt sensing will be the best arbiter of the application of these readily codifiable rules, why not concede to Ameliorists without further argument that mastering citation conventions does take a long time—perhaps, as Fish as well as Fountain and Fitzgerald suggest, years? Do you maintain this reasoning in face of the obvious implications of your own argument?” I suggest the problem may vanish once an important distinction is made. Academic practice of assigning source- integrated writing, as I have said throughout, assumes that students may be reasonably expected to write within the rules. Well-meaning students overly cautious or unsure of what is common knowledge or phrasing will likely over-cite. Howard acknowledges this and advises that over- citation, though an “error,” is better than under-citation (“Plagiarisms” 800; qtd. in Price 92).

Over-citation, after all, is not plagiarism. It is according due acknowledgment to a source—and then some. It is, put in terms of which Williams may approve, being overly polite. Placed on an

Aristotelian moral spectrum, it would land on excess and, in this way, qualify as a vice. Such viciousness, however, is treated a sign of good faith on part of the student, whereas under- citation (a deficiency occupying the other end of the spectrum), is not. Surely it is the hiding of sources that inform the argument, then, and the possible intent to deceive it may signal, that accounts for this tendency. So, then, while learning citation conventions so as to avoid plagiarism is accounted by academic assignment practices to be a reasonable proposition, it may

254 be that it does take “years” to learn what is common knowledge and phrasing and, accordingly, to avoid the novice’s error of over-citation. If, that is, finding the golden mean of citation between the deficiency of under-citation and the excess of over-citation is what is meant as mastering source conventions, perhaps it does take more time than what fifteen-week semesters allow.

Still, more remains to be done in any case. If one contends that it does take a long time to learn the rules of citation, whether a writer possesses knowledge of common ideas and phrasings or not, two questions remain unfortunately open in this debate: “How long—and how much effort—does it take to learn citation conventions in a given area?” If the claim that it takes quite some time is central or very important to the Ameliorist position, especially where undergraduate and international graduate students are concerned, obviously the justice of the Ameliorist case and recommendations depends a great deal on whether the claim is true. As I have suggested in

Chapters 3 and 5 as well as immediately above, such a claim is highly questionable, but here I say further that the claim may not reasonably have any bearing on pedagogical practice without a body of well-designed empirical studies repeatedly finding persuasive evidence for the claim— the burden of proof, after all, rests with the asserting party. Such studies would have the added benefit of defining the claim’s timeline. The closest that scholars whom I have consulted seem to come to furnishing such evidence is the conclusion that literacy requires situated learning (see, e.g., William’s citation of Gee). On the face of it, to be sure, it appears reasonable to apply broadly some principles concerning learning, such as those identified by Susan Ambrose in her

How Learning Works, particularly her emphasis on the repetition and practice required to turn declarative into procedural knowledge (34; cf. Popken). No scholar I am aware of, however, has cited any empirical study designed specifically to determine how long and with how much effort,

255 on average, college-level students in introductory or other courses take to demonstrate working knowledge of these conventions. To be sure, academic writing as a whole may take time to learn to do well and with increasing confidence and proficiency (see, e.g., Carroll), but it would be a mistake to be content with this generalization and a further mistake to equate academic writing as a whole with one of its basic and quite possibly easier components, namely, the documentation of sources.80

Currently, then, the claim that such citations require a long time to learn remains vague at best, even allowing for the always varying competence among different writers. Given the current state of our knowledge, it seems advisable to dismiss the contention until further, more useful information is brought forward, including but by no means limited to that currently emerging from the Citation Project (“Phase”), and to presume instead upon the reasonableness of current academic practice of assigning source-integrated writing within a few weeks.81 Once, however, such evidence is brought forward, members of the composition studies field, whatever their moral theoretical approaches, must accordingly integrate such factual basis into their understanding of academic writing. Depending on those findings, such studies may or may not have the effect of turning a best practice into an obligatory one. It may be within the best interests of the field that these studies accumulate sooner rather than later, and it seems

80 No doubt the “quest for certainty” characteristic of a scientific approach to discourse acquisition can prove problematic if due consideration is not accorded the situatedness of discourse conventions by community (Bizzell), and the issues facing experimental research in composition are complex (MacNealy). To quest for a moral certainty under well-designed experimental conditions, however, seems incumbent on those espousing the Ameliorist position. 81 It will be noted that the research questions of the Citation Project (“Research Questions”) are different from my own in terms of complexity and purpose. Whereas the Citation Project is interested in what it takes for students to show mature, deeply involved negotiation with source texts, my purposes are limited simply to what level of mastery is required to prevent a plagiarized text. To repeat, plagiarism is not the opposite of originality, only a type of unoriginality. I agree generally with the Citation Project, of course, that students’ intellectual involvement with their texts is both ideal and worth our efforts to promote.

256 regrettable that debates over citation instruction and plagiarism have gone on for so long without a robust body of such studies. While we may be confident that such studies’ findings may require years for gathering and interpretation (to say nothing of gaining wide acceptance), the sooner such findings come in, the sooner the teaching of writing may benefit from such desirable, if not necessary, closure.

Until such knowledge may be generated in our field, the ethical arguments in which scholars and practitioners ranging from more Traditionalist to more Ameliorist orientations find themselves have been furnished with plenty of other material for vigorous discussion. It is, again, my hope that deep moral reflection and conscientious rhetorical analysis will precede and follow our pronouncements on these matters. To do less is to run the risk of deploying unnecessarily inflammatory or hyperbolic language, whether of colleagues or students, that reveals far more about a moral commitment than perhaps about any given set of relevant, ascertainable facts. Additionally, we should attend carefully to the ways we questionably presume upon a supposedly insufficient agency and will of students and how we may better accord students’ moral efficacy its due respect and consideration. Relatedly, I urge that we make it our goal to honor the genuinely noble in the profession of the teaching of writing by thinking deeply about its essential nature and correlative activities and virtues (see Sandel). Moral responsibility in our profession is not comprehended by simple reference to the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of our pedagogies or even of the emotional climate they may play a role in creating; even John Stuart Mill, committed to consequences as the determining factor in an action’s moral value, nonetheless could not escape the compelling and winsome draw of virtue and attempted, however successfully or unsuccessfully, to adjust his definition of utility and

257 pleasure accordingly. Care ethics in composition, with its eyes on preserving the student-teacher relationship, nonetheless remains a virtue-based theory whose central question is the character of the agent(s). Is it possible that questions about the characters of teachers have in the literature crowded attention to the kinds of people our students ostensibly commit themselves to become when they enter the academy? Is it possible that rational self-interest under moral side constraints has not adequately informed our discussions of this inescapably moral issue? Has duty, despite Anscombe’s compelling criticisms (“Modern”), a place in our deliberations? These and other questions remain excitingly open. It is to encourage a more comprehensive, more vigorous, and more advisedly, critically pluralistic moral reflection on how we sponsor our students’ academic literacy apprenticeship that this project has been devoted.

258

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VITA

Brandon Dulane Barnes received a Bachelor of Arts in English from Hardin-Simmons

University in Abilene, Texas (2002), a Master of Arts in English from Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas (2005), and entered the English doctoral program at Texas A&M

University-Commerce to focus on Written Discourse in 2008. He teaches freshman and sophomore English courses, both composition and literature, at Trinity Valley Community

College in Athens, Texas. To date he has published one article, on the influence of Plato’s

Gorgias in a Pauline epistle, in the March 2009 volume of The Journal of Communication and

Religion.

Permanent address: Trinity Valley Community College 100 Cardinal Drive Athens, TX 75751 Email: [email protected]