i never viewed plagiarism as a moral issue. i view it as a social convention: if you're writing academic stuff, be it low-wattage undergraduate stuff or advanced research pieces, there are certain rules. one set of rules involves citation. there's alot of arguments for them, most of which i think are stupid, frankly. the one i don't think stupid has to do with intellectual transparency--here's the tradition with respect to which this project operates, here are the reference points.
there's a real problem with the notion of "originality" in a critical essay. but that's the nature of the form--if there has to be an Authority that stands between a writer/researcher and what is actually of interest, then what much of the critique amounts to is a abstracting and rearranging elements pulled from the Authority. so nothing is "original" really. except the arrangement and suturing. but that seems to me good plagiarism, a recycling and a displacement rather than a copying---so an appropriation that makes the original do something other.
but this was a couple years ago about some hysterical over-reaction on the part of god knows who at uva to some rule breach. obviously these folk thought the plagiarism involves some Ethical Problem. i think that's ridiculous. at the same time, the student(s) obviously had talked to some sort of counsel and were outlining the only plausible defense against a plagiarism charge, which is that s/he/they hadn't understood the rules.
but better to know the rules exactly and violate them deliberately and some some conceptual purpose.
if i was going to go after a student for plagiarism, it'd be more about the intellectual laziness than the copying. i've had to do that before. but you really need to think about launching a formal procedure because you can get a student thrown out of school for it. but i digress.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
Last edited by roachboy; 08-30-2010 at 11:56 AM..
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