(I Don’t Want A) Photograph

Many years ago, with my ‘faculty teaching quality assurance’ hat on, I had to go and observe a lecture as several students in the class had complained that the lecturer’s presentations were heavily plagiarised. This seemed an entirely bizarre and improbable accusation, but they were insistent and credible – and it did indeed turn out to be the case; it wasn’t just that large chunks of text from scholarly publications were included on the PowerPoint slides without any attribution, but these passages, and associated material that wasn’t posted on the slides, were read out word for word without any indication that these weren’t the lecturer’s own words. I don’t know how the students had first twigged this, but once you have that sort of suspicion, it was incredibly easy just to google a few phrases and identify the source.

Looking back, what I still find astonishing about this episode is not so much that something like it might happen occasionally – I guess we’ve all been in the position of trying to prepare a class at the last minute on a topic that we don’t actually know much about – but that the lecturer’s response, when I arranged a meeting to talk through this clearly serious issue, was something to the effect of: Yes, and? The fact that this was happening week after week was not, as I’d been expecting, the result of them simply not keeping on top of the demands of the job for whatever reason, but the result of them not seeing any issue with the practice.

I had thought it would be enough simply to mention the dread word ‘plagiarism’ and agree that it wouldn’t happen again; an hour or so later, a pretty frustrating hour of my talking about proper scholarly practice and the need to set the right example for students and the fact that the students were losing all faith in the lecturer’s knowledge and expertise, we concluded with my insistence that it mustn’t happen again, with no sense that this was being accepted for any reason other than a grudging recognition of my authority to make such a demand.

I still find this baffling, not least because I wasn’t offered any sort of counter-justification, but simply an attitude of ‘How is this a problem?’ against which all my arguments seemed impotent. Obviously it wasn’t that the publications being quoted were regarded as unscholarly and hence not deserving of credit (unlike a blog, say…); was it then that lecturing was not seen as the sort of activity where credit – or indeed originality – was necessary? I would have to admit that my instincts in this area were shaped by the first year of my undergraduate degree, where I simply switched off during lectures that were basically summaries of the core textbook and then just stopped attending as I could cover the material quicker and better by reading it – but at least in those instances the lecturer was actually the author of the core textbook. Reading out someone else’s book? Really?

One thing I find myself wondering at the moment is what would have happened if the lecturer had responded to my admonitions by turning to the law – invoking constructive dismissal or bullying or the like. Improbable? Recent events in the world of medieval manuscripts suggest not. If taken-for-granted norms of scholarly practice, like the avoidance of plagiarism, aren’t actually held by all academics (or at least not in exactly the same way), then it is easy to imagine that equally norm-defying methods might be adopted in response.

And because these are just norms and traditions, the sorts of expectations one acquires in the course of one’s training rather than something explicitly mandated and codified, it’s also easy to imagine how they could be questioned from outside – in a court of law, for example. “So, Professor Morley, are all your lectures completely original in every respect?” “No, I draw on the research and writing of others. But I generally rely on a range of such sources, and I produce a synthesis of them in my own words.” “And does that make them into your ideas?” “Not exactly, but it presents them in a new way, and it also models for students the fact that they should not simply copy other people’s work and present it as their own.” “So, copying a scholar’s work accurately is unacceptable, but producing your own version of it is somehow fine? Is this a sound basis for your defamation of my client..?”

Something can be plagiarism, and hence unacceptable academic practice, without breaking the law on copyright. There is certainly room for debate about how much similarity, or how much inadequate referencing, might be excusable as poor academic practice rather than outright misconduct – I’ve sometimes felt this in reading discussions of the regular ‘outing’ of German politicians’ doctoral dissertations as plagiarised – but there’s generally no doubt that there is, somewhere, a line that shouldn’t be crossed. Similarly, a lecture might draw heavily on a published source, even to the point of using exactly the same examples, and still remain within acceptable bounds as being the lecturer’s considered and assimilated version of the material; not claiming to be original, but still representing their own understanding, rather than just an unacknowledged reproduction.

Might this be a purely or largely Western mindset? I’m conscious of the risk of making some racist/culturalist assumptions while trying not to universalise my own cultural prejudices, but one hears of classes in some Asian countries where the whole point is to convey the contents of an officially-sanctioned textbook, where any originality or personal perspective from either teacher or student is entirely undesirable. That rests on the idea that there is a reliable pre-determined truth to be transferred from book to student with the lecturer as conduit, which is not the usual understanding of university-level humanities classes. I see part of the point of any such class as being exploration of the ways knowledge is constructed; but even if your view of first-year lectures, at least, is that they’re about the presentation of facts, it’s still a big leap to the idea that therefore the lecturer doesn’t need to offer their own account of the facts.

Obviously what this really brings home to me is that, according to the recent training hoop I had to jump through on ‘Handling Difficult Conversations’, I was far too focused on “oh my gods the students are going to sue us and what if this goes public?” and the intended outcome of the conversation (“Stop doing this!”), and too little focused on listening to understand, entering into my interlocutor’s world etc. – and now it’s too late…