To the Editor:
While Dostoyevsky’s plot required several hundreds of pages of exquisitely detailed text to examine the complicated motives in Crime and Punishment, last week’s news article about student plagiarism is cause for grave concerns. But this story involves real characters as students, faculty, and university administrators are caught in a literal “web” of confusion.
As a community we owe it to ourselves to illuminate the facts of this new cyber age problem catching us without clear parameters.
First, should we view this ‘cyber paraphrasing’ as classic plagiarism? Professor Curt Naser has applied his interpretation of the widely unknown plagiarism standard [from an obscure library web page, which is hardly a community goalpost] as is to be expected from any conscientious faculty member. Faculty will be supportive of his stringent plagiarism position.
On page 308 of the university catalogue there is noble but non-specific language about “Academic Honesty.” This vague language could have been written at Oxford in 1604 – but hardly relates to the megabytes of data flowing out of the internet in 2004. Naser believes he has acted ethically and correctly, and he is to be respected for taking considerable heat and criticism on this painfully public issue. I genuinely believe he too is a victim in this blistering matter acting out of conscience.
While I do not know any of the students involved, it worries me that four students in one class could have possibly attempted the same academic ‘cheating’ scheme unbeknownst to each other. The very fact that we have four students operating in this class under ambiguous assumptions about correct scholarly citations, is enough evidence, (at least to me,) that it is the university’s failure to promulgate clear and specific standards for the uses and abuses of web-generated text and citations.
We should seek to immediately remedy the situation by ensuring that every student has been given the most rigorous formal presentation on the ‘do’s ‘ don’ts’ of academic paper formats and citations.
There has never been a mandated course or required orientation program which thoroughly indoctrinates our students on these practices. Furthermore, I might mention that many of us ‘old timer’ professors came of age at in an era when working with Dewey-decimal library card catalogues and handwritten bibliographies were the bread and butter of our research. Indeed, there is a ‘generational gap’ as our internet-cradle, Gen X students have only known the infinite search engines of the cybernet web and thus have mistakenly come to believe in its ultimate infallibility.
Five years ago I began seeing the first evidences of web-generated ideas and suspected language appearing without quotation marks in my Art History writing projects. Ensuring that my students would make physical contact with the DiMenna-Nyselius Library’s superb collection, I established an ironclad “no web material” mandate for all papers. This surely is not applicable in courses for which web sources are both relevant and essential. But this was my proactive, however personal, response to a university-wide problem.
As our friends, colleagues are suffering from these ambiguities, we might reflect on the basic issues: Sloppy, and clearly irresponsible web-driven research skills? Most definitely. Willful misrepresentation due to an illegitimate failure to identify materials “taken from other sources” worthy of the most severe academic punishment? Those questions will require us to seek humane and justifiable answers. To all parties in this distressing episode, we can only ask them to come together and establish an omnipresent “Plagiarism Policy Handbook” for traditional and web-generated scholarly citation standards.
Until we rectify these new cyber-age community issues, there will be many more bibliographic crimes, unknown numbers of unequal punishments, and countlessly damaged reputations of faculty and students alike.
Sincerely,
Dr. Philip Eliasoph
Art History, Dept of V’PA
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