CREATIVITY REQUIRED

There are some things that no matter where you live in the world are always the same. One is the behavior of students. No matter where you teach student behavior rarely seems to change. Procrastination, all night revision sessions, weekend parties, and complaints to parents and lecturers when the results of this life style become apparent seem to be the nature of university students around the world. I must look like a complete ogre in my academic enforcement of plagiarism. I am beginning to think that no one understands what I am talking about. I’ve tried for some time to explain what plagiarism is, why it’s wrong, and how it not only destroys our integrity; but it also undermines our ability for development, but it seems I am getting nowhere. Allow me to try again.

Our habits become our character and only deliberate disciplined efforts can truly change us. My observation is that student’s struggles may get more sophisticated in the work place, but don’t really change. Ethical students are ethical employees. My hope is that the culture of plagiarism is not entrenched into our character.

The dictionary defines plagiarism as “a piece of writing that has been copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work (WordNet ® 2.0, © 2003 Princeton University. http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=2&q=plagiarism.)” It seems that all of us that are both voracious readers and writers inadvertently struggle with plagiarism. One of my favorite professors in university used to open his writings with an acknowledgment that he had read and written so much that he could not always remember which ideas were his. Some ideas he had quoted so frequently that he had forgotten the source and assumed it was his own creativity that had generated it. I found his candor refreshing. At least he had the honesty to acknowledge his absentmindedness. In the end he went out of his way to honor all he could remember who influenced his thinking.

Others of us struggle to get all the academic details right as we quote our sources. Maybe, the fear of red ink on our papers from academic nit pickers pushes us to plagiarism. Sometimes it’s just easier to bluff and hope we don’t get caught then it is to learn how to write properly. Besides the rules are always changing. Even in this article, I struggled to know how to quote my internet dictionary as I defined plagiarism.

My concern is not with absentmindedness or academic nit picking. My concern is with the fruit of intellectual theft and the inability to create. These ethical pitfalls will lead to disastrous consequences. If I chose to tolerate plagiarism I chose to accept my students as failures at life. Because of my hope for them plagiarism is completely unacceptable. I am willing to be seen as an academic ogre so that they can see the potential within themselves. My worry for academic authorities is that we either enjoy too much the ability that academia gives us to belittle others, or on the opposite spectrum care too little for our student’s wellbeing to require their intellectual integrity.

A year ago, I taught on a wireless university campus. Every student and faculty member had a computer and could access the internet anywhere on campus. It made communication and research much easier. However, it also made plagiarism easier. All one had to do was surf to a useful site, cut the information one needed, move it over to a word processing program, paste it in, and then turn in a paper with all the right academic details and grammar marketed as one’s creation. At first glance most professors could take great pride in their student’s academic prowess. But it was all an illusion. Now teaching in Rwanda, I thought surely this could not happen. In fact, I used my student’s plagiarism in America as an example of Western moral failures. But the universal university student culture soon caught up with me as I began marking assignments. Plagiarism lives on in all students around the world. Truly, we are all made in the same image with the same struggles. Only external details such as race, religion, ethnicity, traditions, and language change.

So what is wrong with a cut and paste paper? First, it’s theft. A plagiarizer in a suit is no different from the street boy stealing a car’s mirror. Second, all work regardless of its status is worthy of honor. We should honor the creative mechanic who repairs our car when he can’t find original parts. We should honor the creative artist whose work calls us to ponder and dream. We should honor the leader who turns crisis into vision. We must also honor the academic whose research expands our horizons. A plagiarizer robs the honor of another’s work. Third, it undermines the human dignity of the plagiarizer. By plagiarizing he admits that he is unable to assess a situation, explore the options, and creatively find a solution. He is only comfortable with borrowed ideas. Lastly, plagiarism robs our community of answers to our own problems. Our situation is unique. The solutions of others are helpful in our thinking process, but can not be our answers. A cut and paste answer will never be owned. It is by nature destined to fail when our community’s unique problems tear into its bankrupt intellect

Our student habits become our adult character. Plagiarism can not be tolerated. All one has to do is look at copy cat industry and idea theft in business to see its disastrous consequences on development. Development requires creativity.

Let’s run to a place we have never been before.