More Than Words

Puny mortals of the pathetic Higher Education System (HES)! In one hour, from this fearsome orbital battle station, I shall release my legions of AI monkeys to scrutinise the publications of every academic in the world for plagiarism! No one’s reputation is safe! This will destroy you all! Unless you pay me…respect. Mwahaha!

Ah, plagiarism. One of the many ways in which, in retrospect, my undergraduate education was extremely deficient was its complete obliviousness to referencing. No one ever told me to use footnotes, or even suggested that it might be a good idea, or explained their different functions. There certainly wasn’t any penalty for paraphrasing material from books without acknowledgement – indeed, it seemed rather than the inclusion of easily-recognisable paraphrases of key arguments was one of the main ways in which the supervisor determined whether a student had actually read the books their bibliography claimed they had.

It has genuinely only just occurred to me, in the light of the current situation in the US, how odd this is. When I embarked on my PhD, it was clearly expected that one should follow proper academic conventions, so I underwent a crash course in different approaches to referencing – and by the time I finished and was in my first teaching position, it was expected that students should all be doing this. What I really don’t know is whether there was an actual change in the early 1990s, with all universities introducing new guidelines and regulations – perhaps because the advent of cheaper word processors made it much easier to do footnotes – or whether Cambridge was seriously out of step in the late 1980s, presumably because the task of hacking out a plausible bit of waffle on a weekly basis would have been rendered less practical if footnotes were required, and obviously the core assessment activity of unseen exams wouldn’t expect any such thing. It is of course not impossible that Cambridge remains out of step in this regard…

This does mean that I am much more sympathetic to the ‘actually plagiarism is complicated’ position of a billionaire defending his academic wife than the ‘plagiarism is always wrong’ position of a billionaire seeking to dictate to universities. Indeed, ‘plagiarism’ is so complicated that I can still see a case for my undergraduate experience not actually being too much of an issue. Yes, it meant that the 1980s-vintage History BA (at any rate in Cambridge) was a fairly terrible preparation for academic research, but the minority who continued on that path could learn referencing on the job, so to speak, while everybody else had no particular need of it – ‘academic integrity’ was about making sure that it was you, not an imposter, improvising smartarse arguments in the exam hall. Student essays aren’t academic publications, so why should the expectations of the latter be imposed on the former?

The shift to coursework that counted towards the degree, rather than just being a dress rehearsal for the aforementioned exam improvisation, created a whole set of problems for students and staff alike. Suddenly academic integrity entailed producing a facsimile of proper academic writing, with students having to keep track of their notes to reference points and avoid reproducing text without quote marks, and staff having to spend time testing and tracking down suspicious-looking passages. Now, academic integrity obviously matters, including to prospective employers. But this shift towards requiring proper referencing has dramatically expanded the level of jeopardy for students – the number of ways in which they might fall foul of the rules – without a corresponding increase in relevance to future activities for anyone besides prospective research students.

Plagiarism constitutes an academic offence; being found guilty of an academic offence is a serious impediment if not an absolute bar to various careers; lots of instances of technical plagiarism seem far too trivial to merit such consequences, especially when, often, determining their seriousness depends on ascertaining motive, which is basically impossible; and so staff spend a lot of time and effort investigating ‘plagiarism’ in order to reach a finding of ‘poor academic practice’, which is then mostly punished by creating yet more work to mark a replacement bit of coursework. What’s the lesson here? Don’t do it again.

Counterpoint: the reason for expecting proper referencing from undergraduate students is not as an end in itself or simply a defence against accusations of plagiarism as a bad thing in itself (even if that’s how it probably looks to a lot of students), nor is it because the imitation of correct academic practice is a core learning outcome of degree programmes. Rather, correct referencing goes to the heart of the development of critical understanding and analytical argument, which are skills we aim to teach and which will be relevant to the future activities of those students who won’t be going on to further academic research.

Critical understanding has to involve engagement with a range of source material, that needs to be compared and set into dialogue. Simply copying a single source, let alone a Wikipedia definition, doesn’t demonstrate understanding, let alone critical understanding; and individual understanding based on critical grasp of a wide range of sources still needs to be grounded in the supporting material, establishing its relationship to existing work, because that is part of what needs to be (shown to be) understood. Further, it’s not just a matter of defensively citing sources, but of developing a sense of how one deploys different sources and engages with material in different ways to ground and elaborate one’s own analysis.

This is what my undergraduate education lacked; the approach to analysis and argument was almost entirely focused on logical coherence and persuasive rhetoric, with the use of examples as mere decoration. Those are relevant skills – but arguably less important than actual understanding of the material and how to use it. And, while I was able to get up to speed when I started doctoral research – I am not one of those academics trembling at the thought of right-wing billionaires directing their minions to scrutinise my publications – I did have to get to grips with this all at once, whereas my subsequent experience is that it’s far preferable to lead students gradually through the process, the multifarious purposes and uses of references, from diligent anti-plagiarism self-defence at the beginning to critical engagement with the scholarship and sophisticated argument by the end – including getting enough of a sense of different topics to recognise when referencing isn’t necessary.

So, references are needed to demonstrate knowledge and understanding – but, still more, learning how to reference properly is a process not just of learning how to reference properly but how to engage with evidence and scholarship, how to construct and support arguments, and how indeed to develop original ideas through dialogue – and through the performance of dialogue, one might say – with the scholarly tradition.

This multifariousness is of course why ‘plagiarism’ continues to be a messy business when it comes to ‘proper’ academic writing. At this point, we can start talking seriously about the possible theft of someone else’s ideas, which is manifestly heinous. But that might not entail any duplication of language at all, especially if the ideas are being taken from a conference paper or a graduate student’s work, and so won’t be detected by any software. Conversely, duplication of language without proper acknowledgement – let alone cases where the source is acknowledged but words aren’t put in quote marks – doesn’t often indicate the theft of ideas or an unwarranted claim of originality.

That’s not to say it’s not bad, but it’s a different sort of bad. Above all, it’s a sign of sloppiness; maybe the author hasn’t properly understood the material, if they’ve resorted to Wikipedia definitions, but at any rate they haven’t bothered to make the effort to put things into their own words, compare a couple of different definitions or get their quote marks in order.

That isn’t necessarily a hanging offence; it doesn’t necessarily invalidate the work as a whole. But it is a warning sign. I think of it as something rather like the story about Van Halen’s gig rider including the provision of a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones taken out: if a promoter forgets or doesn’t bother, what else might they have forgotten or not bothered with? If I’m reviewing a submission or a PhD, I start with the references and bibliography, because if the author hasn’t taken trouble with those, what else might they not have done properly? Sometimes, the answer is: nothing; everything else is fine, they just ran out of time or suffer from dyslexia or the like, and so I can simply add these points to the list of required corrections.

Sometimes, it is indeed a sign of more worrying weaknesses and/or limited knowledge. The point is that, at least in my view, you don’t fail a PhD or reject a submission simply because of a bit of sloppy referencing; you see how far it’s a symptom or a consistent pattern. If someone keeps doing it in a range of publications, that starts getting more problematic – not least because such a person is then also likely to be failing in their responsibilities in training younger researchers.

The problem is that these are not easy judgements. It’s much more straightforward to identify duplicated words, especially with software, than to determine the significance of that duplication, or to explain why sometimes duplication is less of an issue than at other times. When this question enters the public domain, bound up with wider political and/or cultural issues, insistence on the complexity of the issues looks like academics closing ranks and making special pleas for their own kind. It’s easy to imagine the consequences if/when the work of thousands of academics is revealed to contain ‘plagiarism’ in a narrow sense; for academics, this will confirm the emptiness of the exercise, and for the enemies of free intellectual discourse it will confirm the bankruptcy of the entire Higher Education System (HES).

In some ways it’s surprising that an obsession with detecting plagiarism has taken so long to spread beyond Germany – the von und zwischen Guttenberg affair was over ten years ago! UK and US public figures are, I guess, either less likely to have doctorates or less likely to emphasise them as part of their public profile, hence less likely to be vulnerable to such investigations. With academics, on the other hand, it’s an obvious line of attack – they’re using our own publications against us! Well, when I say ‘our’ publications, I mean all these words that other people have also used at some point in the past…