Try the Guillotine

To judge by the recent spate of articles-from the Atlantic Monthly to Newsweek to my local newspaper to the pages of Community College Week-this issue (or sin, crime, or whatever you would like to label it) is now on the educational front burner. Academics and teachers in all areas seem to be upset about all of the students who (allegedly) are not writing their own stuff. Of course, part of this furor is just a sign of the times. For one thing, the (sort of) rich and famous seem to be getting caught right and left lately. And it is terrible when it is not just politicians getting caught for fudging long-ago exams and papers (just practicing, after all, for those speeches they will not write themselves), but respected professional writers and scholars who seem to be forgetting stuff that we expect lowly composition students to know. Indeed, when a wellrespected historian (or historiographer) such as Richard Jensen claims, as he does in a recent opinion piece in the Organization of American Historians Newsletter, that it "is a canard" (2002) to hold Stephen Ambrose to the same standards as college students when it comes to using quotation marks, we community college teachers might be forgiven our confusion and concern. (This sort of hairsplitting might, however, explain the lack of respect for authority that Professor Deborah Straw, in her "Point of View" [2002] piece in Community College Week, intuits as the cause of the "Why Not" generation's tendency to go the storebought route rather than rolling their own.) Throw in the spectacle of major corporations and the CEOs of same cooking the books, Martha Stewart suspected of insider trading, and so on, and you've got a climate right? Like el Nifio and global warming and the Arctic ice cap melt, it is just the season. And then there is the technology, the Internet, the temptation, etc. What is a poor professor to do? Let me give you a list that may make your life easier. It may even deter plagiarism, but definitely make it less stressful trolling for the dreadful beastie, plagiarism. First, let's get our minds right. Your attitude toward plagiarism is much more important-to your mental health and stress level at least-than penalties and crime fighting methodology. In brief, as your students might say, "Chill out, prof." It is not like we invented the problem. Plagiarism has been around for so long that half of the stuff that burned in the library at Alexandria was probably cobbled by those famous ancients from other ancients who never received credit-or who sold same to keep body and soul together. (For that matter, if we take as a basic definition of plagiarism-your name on someone else's stuff-what does that make most celebrity "autobiographies" but consensual plagiarism?) More important, from the students' point of view, it is simply not a deep ethical question at all, nor is the ri e and fall of Western Civilization as they know it riding on whose term paper has whose name on it. For those who do it, and for those who are tempted to do it (almost everyone at one point or another), it is a game. Yes, professor, I am sorry, but I did say "game." And the name of the students' game (which perforce is yours, however unwilling or unwitting a player you may be) is do not get caught. Maybe that is not the way it should be, but that is the way it is. A plagiarist is not troubled with nightmares over that unearned A in Comp II, nor will he rush to turn himself in because of guilt that his purchased research paper saved his 4.0 grade point average last semester. If a cheater suffers