Introduction
Plagiarism is a hot topic these days on college and university campuses. In response to what they see as a raging epidemic, many colleges and universities have written or rewritten “Honor Codes”; others have turned to plagiarism detection software, which compares student writing to a database of other writing, usually including other student work and anything available on the Internet; and some schools have begun to use or require texts like Charles Lipson’s Doing Honest Work in College: How to Prepare Citations, Avoid Plagiarism, and Achieve Real Academic Success. In their book Student Cheating and Plagiarism in the Internet Era: A Wake-Up Call Ann Lathrop and Kathleen Foss assert that it’s agreed upon by academics that (1) cheating is rampant, made easy by new electronic technologies, and (2) plagiarism is a deliberate, malicious attempt on the part of students to get by with doing less. One solution they offer is character education, including the teaching of ethics (5). All of these efforts, and others, are intended to curb “rampant plagiarism,” or what author David Callahan calls a “culture of cheating” (xvi) on campus.
Whether there really is an “epidemic” of cheating is still open to debate. At least one study claims that “serious cheating on tests [. . .] increased from 39 percent [of students] in 1963 to 64 percent in 1993,” but “serious cheating on written work remained stable [. . .] at 65 percent in 1963 and 66 percent in 1993” (McCabe, Trevino, and Butterfield, qtd. in Blum 2). What such a study doesn’t do well is distinguish between schools or types of schools, or between subjects, or kinds of assignments. Nor does it consider plagiarism as anything other than a form of cheating. It also relies on students’ self-reporting—and as the same authors suggest elsewhere, and one author shows in this volume, students may not consider certain acts as “cheating,” even though their teachers might view the same practices as plagiarism.
How did we get here? Concern about academic integrity is an old story, of course. Indeed, the fear of cheating in general has plagued education for decades. Longwood University, for example, has had an Honor Code in place since 1910. The code was re-ratified in 1930 and includes the Twelve Points of the Honor Code (virtues that define honor), the Honor Pledge, the Academic Pledge, and the Honor Creed. Longwood’s website boasts: “As one of the most respected traditions at Longwood University, the Honor System promotes an atmosphere of trust, where students are presumed honorable unless their actions prove them otherwise” (“The Honor Code”). In a matriculation tradition, first-year students traditionally attend an Honor Code signing ceremony where they read and sign a promise to adhere to the Honor Code. Elsewhere, The College of William & Mary’s honor code proudly boasts a history that goes back to 1736; new students are “administered” the honor code by other students (“Honor Code & Councils”).
Obviously, an honor code would not be deemed necessary were there no fear of plagiarism; thus, it is important to consider the history of plagiarism on campus and what impact the recent perception of its massive growth has had on the composition classroom. In writing specifically, plagiarism has been on the radar of teachers and students for quite some time. In his 1944 College English article “Let’s Teach Composition!” Edward Hamilton, in a partial defense of college students’ inability to engage outside ideas without being taught how, criticizes the instructor who does not offer students enough training in research:
Never having been trained to search out assumptions, interpretations, or conclusions in the essays contained in their anthology, [the students] turn in papers that are reminiscent of Literary Digest articles—mere chains of quotations joined by platitudinous links that reveal their incomprehension rather than represent their efforts to be unbiased. It is not surprising, furthermore, that almost every paper contains instances of innocent plagiarism. (160)
Only fifteen years later, however, in a 1959 issue of College Composition and Communication, Leo Hamalian turns the blame on the students themselves as he bemoans the problem of plagiarism in the composition classroom, and cites an Ohio State University survey that found that two thirds of students surveyed “said they would cheat if they had the chance” (50). His position sounds oddly familiar to today’s academics who complain about the effort involved in catching cheaters and in the prevalence of plagiarism: “teachers whom the author queried [. . .] admitted that plagiarism was fast becoming the collegiate counterpart of juvenile delinquency” (50). According to Hamalian, it is a student’s lack of time management, inability to engage a topic that is irrelevant to him or her, or the fact that he or she is “disturbed emotionally” (52) that leads to his or her cheating in composition, and Hamalian makes a case to his teacherly readers that “plagiarism can be controlled by the methods” he puts forth in the article. Sound familiar? This cat-and-mouse dynamic between teachers and their cheating students is not new.
Despite these early forays into the subject, plagiarism has been slow to emerge as a major concern in composition studies; yet, the issue cuts to the core of writing pedagogy and theory. Despite decades of process pedagogy(s), discussion of plagiarism remains locked in a product-oriented paradigm; but what is plagiarism if not a question of process? Traditional views would see it simply as avoiding or circumventing the writing process, but a more complicated view shows that writing processes—reading, analyzing, understanding, synthesizing, and integrating the writing of others—always touch upon and often overlap with the notion of plagiarism. Indeed, these are basic concepts of theories of writing as a social process.
Aside from this fundamental relationship between composition theory and plagiarism, there are other important reasons plagiarism is, or should be, a central concern of composition studies—practical, institutional, and cultural (i.e., technological) reasons. On a practical level, plagiarism at least seems virtually ubiquitous across composition courses and programs. This is so much the case that almost every first-year rhetoric and research guide has something to say on the subject. Moreover, because, obviously, students are typically expected to write a great deal more in writing courses, and class size is relatively small, teachers of writing are more likely to encounter plagiarism, intentional and unintentional, and/or to recognize it; they are also best positioned to recognize and take advantage of teachable moments. However, why limit discussions to those few, scattered, and idiosyncratic moments? Why not, instead, create opportunities to teach about the murky territory of plagiarism in advance?
There are, likewise, important institutional reasons for composition studies to claim plagiarism. When Deans of Students, Provosts, and Offices of Judicial Affairs constitute and reconstitute “plagiarism” in simple, uncritical ways and in so many different ways across (and sometimes within) institutions, the issue can become seriously confused. Further, these myriad constructions of plagiarism shape student-teacher relationships in ways that are beyond our control, unless the issue is foregrounded in explicit, complex ways. While the field rightfully resists the notion that first-year composition be a “dumping ground” for whatever doesn’t fit neatly into the curriculum elsewhere, compositionists must also ask, “If we don’t take charge of this issue, who will?”
Institutional concerns are particularly true with the advent of plagiarism detection software, which raises our next important set of reasons for plagiarism to be a central concern of composition studies: the cultural or, in this case, the technological. Developing technologies, one might say, have forced composition studies’ hand on the issue of plagiarism. As Charles Moran argued in 1993, and Cynthia Selfe in 1999, developing technologies have fundamentally altered both writing processes and, therefore, the teaching of composition. We should not underestimate the role technology has played in the recent development of the cultural issue of plagiarism. Despite longstanding “honor” traditions, anti-plagiarism policy statements, and professors’ many seemingly ironclad anti-plagiarism strategies, plagiarism as an issue has had an especially powerful effect on the field of composition and rhetoric in the years since computer technology and the Internet were introduced. It is both a growing topic of scholarly discussion—philosophically, politically, and academically—and a marketable one. As plagiarism has become perceived as an epidemic and a scourge upon academic ethics, it has consequently become a big business, and technology seems to be playing a major role. In fact, we can use technology itself to show us just how much more culturally visible plagiarism has become: A simple Google Scholar citation search