Higher Education.

Thomas Bertonneau meditates on college plagiarism:

Although I cannot give scientific evidence for it, I believe that the percentage of calculating plagiarists has also increased, but the calculation remains as unwise as it always was. It still rests on the plagiarist’s ignorance of his own ignorance, his inability to recognize the specificity of his own incompetence. At the same time that plagiarism itself has become easier, the ability to detect plagiarism has also become easier, another reality of which the plagiarist himself has not the faintest inkling.


Even a fairly esoteric topic such as Henrik Ibsen’s play Emperor and Galilean—which I taught in a course on modern drama recently—when entered into the Google browser, yields close to eighty thousand results. On the first page there are at least a half a dozen essayistic commentaries on the Norwegian playwright’s Symbolist tragedy. At the end of the semester, I collected a strongly suspect term paper in response to an assignment that asked students to compare a number of modern plays, including Emperor and Galilean.

If there were such a thing as an intelligent or well-educated plagiarist, the idea of a careful patchwork of paragraphs, culled from various websites and rewritten to make the style homogeneous and framed within original prose that endowed on the whole something like a convincing structure—that, I say, might occur to him. But if the plagiarist were intelligent and well educated, if he were that capable, he would probably not be a plagiarist; he would be an honest student who acquits himself in courses.

In the case of the Ibsen plagiarist, two facts worked together to arouse my suspicion. One was that I could neither picture the student nor connect her to a single comment made in any classroom discussion during the semester. She had effectively not participated in the course.

The other was the prose itself, which contained no references to my remarks made during the term (student writers invariably rehearse instructor observations), and which had a bland competence little resembling student expression. In one instance, a paragraph began with a long appositive, a rhetorical device I have never known any student to employ. In addition, the prose indicated knowledge of Ibsen well beyond what I had sketched in lecture in the two weeks set aside for Emperor and Galilean.

It took thirty seconds to type the provocative appositive into the Google browser, whereupon I double-clicked the first item and immediately beheld that selfsame front-loaded construction. The entire paper, save for a single introductory sentence, had been blatantly downloaded from the website, without alteration.

As in the Hemingway case, the Ibsen plagiarist, although caught red-handed, stubbornly denied her guilt. There was something perversely comical about it. Like the other student, this one expected, first me, and then the dean, to whom I reported the violation, to put down as a fantastic coincidence the word-for-word identity of the prose over which she had put her name with that from Uncle Harlan’s Down Home Ibsen Website (or whatever it called itself).

This was calculating plagiarism of the most barefaced species, with complete absence of acknowledgment in the transgression and absolutely no sign of remorse. The student’s written communications with me were indignant and sub-literate. At one point she held it against me, as she wrote, that, “you are my only one professor that says I plagiarized.”

In a separate case, a different plagiarist compulsively confessed to the offense and submitted written apologies to me and to my department chair. The chair and I were sufficiently moved that I merely failed the assignment. That student passed the course with the lowest possible grade, on the strength of other work. This was a panic-stricken plagiarist who showed keen, believable remorse.

The Ibsen plagiarist, in contrast, was a self-serving con artist, a superlative cynic. My instinct was to fail her in the course, which the dean in fact insisted I should do. I hardly required persuasion. What happened to the Ibsen plagiarist beyond flunking Modern Drama? I cannot say.

And:

Plagiarism is one more index of the long-heralded Decline of the West. More and more students go to college; fewer and fewer of them are actually capable of rising to the higher learning. Colleges and universities, operating by the enrollment economy, actively seek students and bend or ignore admissions criteria to recruit them in numbers. Aggressively cynical and uncivilized, the popular culture promotes crass self-interest and narcissism.


The sitting vice president of the U.S.A. once, when a senator, plagiarized a campaign speech from his British member-of-Parliament counterpart, but he is the sitting vice president of the U.S.A. The epistemology of plagiarism is worth describing, and I have tried to do so, but ultimately, it is necessary to repeat, rampant plagiarism is an alarming moral problem. The destruction of shame makes theft and fraud thinkable options for an increasing number of students.