Honest Historians, and the Other Kind
Like it or not, most monographs could be rewritten by William Shakespeare then edited by Mark Twain and they still would not sell.
--Elliot J. Gorn
Right now, on most college campuses, faculty struggle to understand and repair what seem like the loss of academic integrity. Like the little Dutch boy trying to stem the leak in the dike, many of us feel like we’re running out of fingers and the water is already around our belts. My colleague Michael Arnzen, in Pedablogue, has posted reflections, with links, on these concerns from a variety of points of view. Plagiarism may, in fact, provide a “teachable moment” in which teachers can explore with students the mysteries of the creation of knowledge. Or, perhaps, we live in an age in which knowledge has become so abundant that it has been de-commodified; that is, it becomes like all goods and services in a Communist utopia, free for the taking whether from learned journals or from the blogosphere. But, even though these notions may intrigue us and help us, as intellectuals, better understand the life of the post-modern mind, when a student hands in a paper that appropriates information and insights and even the more or less exact language of someone else, we have a problem.
At this moment, for historians, especially historians of the United States, questions of academic honesty have become especially pointed since several prominent historians have been revealed to have followed methods that ranged from sloppy to clearly dishonest. The current number of the Journal of American History contains a set of short essays by historians and editors (of one of the leading journals and of one of the top tier academic publishing houses) probing this thorny issue. Elliot Gorn points to the pressures that academic historians feel to publish to gain tenure and status within the profession. The four academics most in the news in the last two years have all had more than simple academic success—all of them achieved market success with highly readable and, in one case, provocative books. For most historians, as Gorn points out in my epigraph, this kind of attention is probably not in the cards.
For me, the most interesting of these articles grapples with the subtle calculus of originality, one that perplexes professional historians and must certainly mystify students. In “A Heartbreaking Problem of Staggering Proportions” (excerpt only) Richard Wightman Fox considers the difficulty of recognizing the distinction between common knowledge and specialized knowledge. He cites passages from Shakespeare that need no reference or even quotation marks, since presumably everyone will recognize the quote or paraphrase from the Bard. I know that in my own writing I often use phrasing that may be drawn from the Bible, on the assumption that everyone, like me, spent many childhood hours memorizing scripture. More subtle still is a style that I know I’ve taken from Mark Twain (cf. the title of this piece). But as a historian, I should be eager to make my connections and debts and also disagreements with other authors clear and precise. In fact, Fox notes that this is one of the great advantages of academic history: “Since we historians are nonfiction writers who create texts, not paintings, photographs, or songs, we have the opportunity to do something novelists, artists, and musicians cannot ordinarily do. We can put the names of our colleagues or predecessors into our texts at no cost to either the originality or the dramatic force of our creations.” (1344)
None of this should give comfort to academic cheats. Rather, the point of Fox’ essay is that we should have a greater awareness of our intellectual debts and take advantage of the invitation to join the conversation (thank you, Richard Rorty, by the way). As teachers, we should also recognize that we have a responsibility to not only teach student what plagiarism is (so we can punish them with a good conscience when they commit it) but also what good scholarly practice means. In his syllabi Fox includes a statement on plagiarism that also states the following:
Don’t claim the ideas or words of someone else as your own. Do use the ideas and words of others to help develop your own. Do have friends read and comment on drafts of your papers. Always give explicit credit when you use anyone’s exact thoughts or language, whether in paraphrasing or quoting them. Give an acknowledgment of someone who’s helped you overall. Intellectual work is about developing and sharing your ideas, and it’s about taking note of and praising other people who have shared good ones with you.
Comments
The Hartford Courant recently published an article admonishing the president of Central Connecticut State University. Reportedly, he handed in a plagiarised article to the Courant. Here's the link:
http://adserver.trb.com/html.ng/site=stamford&adplacement=14&adtype=popwindow
Just for the record, I found this piece through a post on my friends blog.
Posted by: Neha | March 15, 2004 1:33 AM
Brilliant discussion. Historians are in a weird position when it comes to representing past events and I like how you articulate that. As far as students go, it's very complicated and there's a different pathology behind every plagiarist's motives. But if we can 'liberate' them from this worldview, this sense of knowledge poaching for profit, this assumption that the educational system is a game that can be "played" if one only knows the rules (and the loopholes), then we're doing our jobs well. I really like how Fox transforms the "don'ts" into "dos." I love a teacher who can transform a policy statement into something that inspires, or to take what one expects to be a prohibition and turn it into something approaching advocacy.
Posted by: Mike Arnzen | March 15, 2004 9:57 PM