The 21^st Century Plagiarist: An Old Problem Meets a New Age

Victoria Smith Ekstrand

Lise Buranen and Alice M. Roy, editors. Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. 302 pages. $23.95 (paper).

In July 2000, Jeff Jacoby, a 41-year-old attorney turned Boston Globe columnist, entertained his readers with a patriotic tale involving the signers of the Declaration of Independence, who risked their lives and fortunes to help build the United States. The tale was familiar to readers—too familiar—and a number of them questioned Jacoby’s lack of attribution for the story. Within days, the Globe responded to reader inquiries and wrote an editor’s note that credited the tale to a "widely circulated e-mail," an "Ann Landers column," and "other variations in books and Web sites" (A15). Jacoby was suspended for failing to attribute the tale.

While Globe editors were careful not to label the incident as "plagiarism," the connection to two other infamous Globe columnists—Mike Barnicle and Patricia Smith—was inevitable. Barnicle was fired in 1998 after he was accused of plagiarizing work from comedian George Carlin, and Smith, who resigned the same year, admitted to fabricating sources for her column. Editor & Publisher, the newspaper trade magazine, labeled these incidents and others "an epidemic" and called such writers so "boneheaded that one question immediately comes to mind: What the hell was this guy or gal thinking?" (Fitzgerald, 23).

Lise Buranen’s and Alice M. Roy’s Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World, is one attempt to answer just that question. The book takes a postmodernist’s view of the problem, which is to say it begins from the belief that words and ideas cannot be owned but that some "honor and compensation" may be due to those whose words and ideas we use (xviii). At a time when several million online music lovers find little problem downloading file after file from Napster and similar services, Buranen and Roy raise timely new questions about the boundaries of authorship and continue the important scholarship begun by Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi in The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature.

Perspectives on Plagiarism features a collection of essays from multiple fields that challenge the traditional "boneheaded" view of the plagiarist. As teachers at California State University in Los Angeles, Buranen, a lecturer in the English department, and Roy, a professor of English and Linguistics, have grappled with student plagiarism and the accompanying frustration, lack of understanding, and struggle for punishment that each case presents. As Buranen explains in her essay about the teaching myths that surround plagiarism, the word itself is so loaded that it has become "a kind of wastebasket, into which we toss anything we do not know what to with" (64). Depending on the circumstances, Buranen says, plagiarism can explain everything from outright cheating—such as the purchase of another’s paper—to Jacoby-like errors in which attribution is neglected or mistaken. Or it can be defined as appropriating whole paragraphs, omitting citations, or collaborating too closely (64).

Perspectives on Plagiarism is an attempt to sort through the "wastebasket" and make some sense of the confusion for students, educators, researchers, and many others for whom original authorship is a valued goal. Buranen and Roy make good on their claim to "lay bare the misconceptions and fuzzy definitions that derive from a dearth of inquiry into the nature of the beast" (xix). Although much of the book addresses plagiarism from a pedagogical perspective, the editors deliver interdisciplinary and cross-cultural views from a variety of fields, including law, literary studies, history, and political science. Few solutions are offered. Instead, Perspectives on Plagiarism suggests new ways of problematizing plagiarism, an important first step if we are to help our students understand what it is and why they should care.

The 24 essays in the book are loosely organized in two parts: definitions of plagiarism, which include legal, historical, academic, literary, and theoretical definitions; and applications of such definitions, such as the presence of plagiarism in university writing centers and the way university administrations deal with or ought to deal with accusations of plagiarism. Throughout, a few key themes emerge, which readers from all fields should find helpful in their own struggle with defining and punishing plagiarism.

First, Perspectives on Plagiarism makes clear that as a "problem," plagiarism is relatively recent and notions of it more complex than generally asserted today. Essays by C. Jan Swearingen, James Thomas Zebroski, and Gilbert Larochelle trace the historical roots of attribution in theory and practice. Swearingen looks at plagiarism in old Western rhetorics and their influence on the modern classroom. Zebroski identifies four kinds of plagiarism throughout history: the "creative process" (in which two authors simultaneously come to the same conclusion); "collaboration" (in which distinctions can be made but are of no consequence); "contested plagiarism" (in which a community disputes what information is in the public domain and what isn’t) and "policed plagiarism" (in which sanctions and mechanisms for punishment prevail) (36). Larochelle revisits Foucault’s "death of the author" from a Kantian perspective to address what remains of the author in the postmodern world.

Perspectives on Plagiarism also draws attention to how poorly we have defined plagiarism for students, writers, and others, and how inconsistently and skittishly our academic institutions have adapted to the needs of struggling new writers. Laurie Stearns addresses the fine line between plagiarism and copyright infringement in the law (5), while Terri LeClercq examines how poorly law schools have understood the distinction and how inadequately they have addressed plagiarism in legal scholarship (195). Several authors (Clark; Haviland and Mullin; Shamoon and Burns) address fears that the introduction of college writing centers has created a new haven for plagiarists. In a compelling and controversial essay about the direction of college composition studies, Rebecca Moore Howard looks at the practice of "patchwriting," a form of plagiarism and a frequently used device of students and scholars that replaces some of the words of authors and rearranges their order. Howard asks us: "Now, let us do a little bit of soul-baring here. Who among us has not patchwritten? Who does not still do it from time to time? Lying? Deceit? Ignorance of citation conventions? Patchwriting is a textual activity that we all take part in. Do we do so in moments of moral lapse? In moments when the MLA Handbook is not at hand? Or does it sound more plausible that we do it in moments of cognitive difficulty?" (90) Howard calls on educators to embrace patchwriting as part and parcel of learning to write and to understand complex, new ideas.

While Perspectives on Plagiarism is most directly targeted at students of pedagogy, teachers, and their administrators, the book is equally valuable to communication theorists, legal scholars, and other researchers for whom original scholarship and a free-flowing and vibrant public domain are critical, if sometimes conflicting, goals.

Works Cited