News reports, personal experience, and hearsay all suggest a rise in plagiarism among University students that some observers say is reaching epidemic proportions. (1) Attempts to define plagiarism accurately have foundered on account of the fuzzy boundary that exists between using other people’s ideas – as we all do – and ‘stealing’ them. Shakespeare famously often drew on other people’s works, even echoing their language in places, without public acknowledgement of his indebtedness. Shakespeare’s knowledge of some of these materials and his use of them has been compared to what we would call ‘research’. (2) However, he wasn’t writing a university essay, but drama meant for the stage. It is only when we ‘study’ his plays in an academic context that these debts become obvious. Moreover copyright laws as we know them – which began with the Statute of Anne in 1709 – did not exist in Shakespeare’s day, and evidently the full concept of plagiarism which those laws reflect wasn’t available to him. (3) He borrowed ideas freely and left a legacy of literary texts that have been plundered for inspiration as probably no other writer’s has ever been, before or since.
But another canonical literary figure, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was certainly a plagiarist, disavowing his borrowings from German philosophy with a variety of disingenuous statements which were blown apart when his younger disciple and fellow opium-addict, Thomas De Quincey, exposed his literary thefts immediately after his death. And yet the book which included the most damaging of Coleridge’s plagiarisms, his Biographia Literaria (1817), is now studied as one of the greatest works of English criticism, notwithstanding those undeniable plagiarisms. It was regarded by I.A. Richards and the New Critics as a foundational text of practical criticism, and, paradoxically, has been hailed more recently as an exceptional early work of literary ‘theory’, flying courageously in the face of postrevolutionary English antipathy to Germanic metaphysical thinking. (4) De Quincey, Coleridge’s denouncer, depicted him as a kind of millionaire kleptomaniac, stooping ‘to filch a handful of gold from any man whose purse he fancied’ while possessing himself the intellectual equivalent of the riches of El Dorado. (5) Ironically, later scholarship suggests that De Quincey himself was more indebted than he liked to admit to various recondite German sources in some of the popular writings that he provided for the journals of his day. (6) And yet many of us continue to regard De Quincey too as among the most quirky and rewarding writers of the nineteenth century. The literary canon seems to include some notable instances of indebtedness and plagiarism.
What are we to make of this? Are we as teachers of English being harder on our students than we are on the ‘great’ writers we teach as models of literary creativity? Should we be more provisional about ‘originality’ and allow for a degree of borrowing that is perhaps appropriate to much student work, if not published research? Clearly there is confusion as to what plagiarism is, whether this is genuinely a new problem, and, if so, what we should do about it. Sceptics have suggested that the supposed rise may be the result of sophisticated checking methods such as the JISC service whereby essays are run through a computerised searching programme which can identify the extent of indebtedness to a high degree of statistical accuracy (http://www.jiscpas.ac.uk). Universities across the UK have responded to reports of plagiarism by adopting ‘robust’ policies of dealing with it, at least one university student expulsion being reported in the last year. (7) But are these policies misguided in isolating individuals without understanding a wider cultural malaise?
My own experience of noticing academic plagiarism is based on all of six years of teaching in the UK. I was born and educated in India up to my Master’s degree before coming here. My Ph.D. thesis in English Lit. at Cambridge was on (you’ve guessed it) Coleridge and De Quincey, both plagiarists – though my own Ph.D. I should hope remains unsullied, if only because I was careful to signal my indebtedness with reasonable care. What can I have to contribute to this discussion with my academic and cultural experience? Admittedly, all I can offer is an awareness of varied cultural assumptions about the matter, and not necessarily any decisive wisdom.
As a teacher of English in India before I came to England, I knew of only one mode of assessment available to undergraduate students. In the college I taught in, Loyola College, Chennai (1987-88), assessments were done in examination halls. One of my jobs was to patrol the exam hall looking suitably grave and handing out fresh sheets of paper to the perspiring students. It was tough for them. We did not stop to mop their brows. There wasn’t any question of plagiarism, as we kept an eye on students: the only copying that could realistically be done was in ‘objective’ questions. Undergraduate essays were certainly free of plagiarism of the kind that we are constantly punishing in the UK these days. The academic shortcomings of students were all too evident on the scripts we marked, and any excellence was equally evident. This is a tempting solution no doubt in an environment which after all prepares people for testing situations in real life. There’s no time to consult a book in most work situations. We are supposed to know our stuff if we have a degree in whatever it is we profess.
And yet, having grown up (and survived) such an undoubtedly rigorous system, I’m not entirely in favour of it. The exam hall measures performance under very limiting constraints; some of us were better at exams than others and this was not necessarily a matter of academic brilliance. Moreover, we did repeat other people’s views in examinations, and the format did not even allow us to acknowledge that in footnotes. At best we could signal our indebtedness to a critic or a critical text, and then go on to summarize (and, if we were truly rebellious, argue with) those views in an examination. One prepared for examinations by focussing on likely issues and questions, and even ‘mugging up’ quotable passages and phrases from primary and secondary sources. A lot depended on your frame of mind on the day, and ability to synthesize (rather than critically examine) knowledge. In comparison, the assessed essay allows for students to consider a question in depth, research other people’s views on the matter, and to provide a considered (and often considerably original) response to it. The best work that comes of such a system is immeasurably better than that which comes out of an exam hall. It encourages critical thinking of a higher order than the examination does.
It is the very freedom to access other people’s thoughts – nowadays delivered instantly through web searches, without even the difficulty of traipsing down to the library and ploughing through books – that is paradoxically a liability to the assessment system, in so far as we expect students to labour at achieving a critical position. There is also the issue of acknowledgement. When students seek to borrow the words of others who have perhaps already expressed what they want to say pithily and attractively, such borrowings need to be placed within quotes, and an exact reference provided. But one may despair at being able to say something better than what has already been said, and one may be tempted to pass off as one’s own opinions that one indeed agrees with. I agree with X – or am convinced by his arguments – and hence I offer his words as expressing my thoughts on the matter. My mistake is merely not to put this within quotation marks and give it a footnote. The examiner may see this as a lack of engagement or understanding on the part of the student. But this judgement is not necessarily confirmed by the act of plagiarism. Coleridge apparently deluded himself into thinking that what he had worked out for himself philosophically had merely been put into print earlier in German by someone else (8) – hence it was hardly plagiarism to translate it back into English for his English audiences!
This brings us to a crucial distinction between an action and the agent of an action. The act of plagiarism often propels us into making judgements about the perpetrator of such an act. Plagiarists are condemned as cheats who debase the system. And indeed they often are. One does know of students who hardly attend classes, show no knowledge of their texts when questioned in class, and then go on to hand in an essay taken verbatim from the web. They are the ones who usually get caught. I would like to think, though, that these are the exceptions. There are also the more troubling cases of evidently sincere and engaged students who ‘lapse’ into plagiarism in the final assessment, perhaps under pressure of other work or personal difficulties at the time. But most plagiarism, I believe, is of a more subtle kind, whereby other people’s arguments are merely reworded and passed off as original without due acknowledgement. Much of this passes undetected, or would be so difficult to prove that it is accepted as ‘derivative’ and hence meriting perhaps a low mark, but not a fail. Arguably some of this kind of plagiarism is unintentional as there is often a fi ne line to be drawn between what is to be footnoted and what is assumed as being well enough established as not to need a reference. We don’t usually need to footnote the source from which we’ve learnt the year of Wordsworth’s birth – whilst references to his spying activity in Germany (now disproved) are more likely to need a footnote. (9) But students encountering new information are often genuinely in doubt about what needs to be footnoted.
We also need to recognize that widespread plagiarism like any other social phenomenon is the product of a culture. For Romantics like De Quincey and Coleridge, the notion of their own originality was so precious that they were loath to allow credit to other sources, most of all when those sources happened to be Germans who were in competition with themselves for national literary glory. Ironically, by asserting their originality and affecting to despise their German sources, they exposed themselves posthumously to scholarly accusations of plagiarism. Arguably, De Quincey’s recognition of Coleridge’s essential originality despite his plagiarisms came out of his deep understanding of this situation.
Looking back on my Indian education, a lot of it did involve what might be called plagiarism – in the sense of unacknowledged borrowing of ideas – but it was largely accepted, as long as one could articulate one’s ideas coherently enough. But, by understanding other people’s ideas and putting them into our own language, as the exam forced us to do, we made those ideas our own in many ways, subtly altering them and fusing them with other points of view. This is distinct from ‘cutting and pasting’ or even the ‘disguising’ of someone else’s text so that it does not appear to be plagiarism. I don’t think it was bad practice at all. At least we were forced to make those synthetic analyses of other people’s arguments and views which some students now seem unable or unprepared to do. But it was forced in that we had no choice but the exam. Nor did we have ready internet access in the way that students have today. Our habits of study were different. Seeing my children grow up in the UK I am struck by how much of the ‘project’ work that they are asked to do is accomplished on the basis of internet browsing, and even ‘cutting and pasting’. This seems inevitable, and I admit that all I do for my children is to insist that my daughter of 11 rewrites, by herself, the material she accesses in this way. Fortunately they are also given more creative exercises and examinations which keep them from relying entirely on the internet, but it isn’t surprising that web-reliant work habits are not easy to drop when teenagers come to the university.
Another difference relevant to this issue that strikes me between the university system in the UK and the one I experienced in India is that in the (fairly élite) Indian colleges I was lucky enough to study and teach in, there was never any difficulty of student recruitment. As teachers we never felt responsible for student numbers: that was a matter for the management to decide upon, on the basis of capacity. Indian middle-class aspirations for education are among the most competitive in the world, and we were readily supplied with full classrooms of eager students. The need to attract and retain students was something that did not impinge on me then, as it does now. Some of my colleagues attribute the prevalence of plagiarism to the poor quality of students, or the poor preparation that they receive in school. This does not seem true to me. My Indian students were learning English as a second language and were often quite weak in written and oral English. Though they were clever I don’t flatter myself (being Indian myself) that they were any smarter, by and large, than their English peers. Perhaps they had a different kind of intelligence, more acute in certain kinds of empirical analysis, but not always so attuned to the kind of critical thinking we encourage in most Humanities disciplines in the UK. Again I attribute this to the cultural environment. A culture privileges the kind of intelligence it values. But they were definitely better motivated, and worked harder at their studies. Most students in those colleges, it has to be said, didn’t undertake any paid employment alongside their studies.
As teachers in India we also put more effort into teaching as opposed to research: more contact hours, more basic teaching, and close marking of essays. Research was not expected of us: we were qualified to teach and were expected to reproduce the same knowledge to successive generations of students without continually revising our thinking. Though we did not achieve spectacular results, we did manage to raise the average level of work considerably over the space of three undergraduate years. But teachers themselves very often stagnated, intellectually. New Labour’s target of putting 50% of young people through university does not seem to take into account properly the pressures this exerts on universities with regard to assessment procedures and standards. The introduction of fees has put an ever-greater pressure on students to complete their degrees as quickly as possible. The flip side of this thrust is that we are reluctant to fail students, and that students are often prepared to take short cuts in obtaining the marks they need to get their degrees. Plagiarism, then, is a consequence of all these factors. The ubiquity of the internet, the poor work habits of students, high critical expectations, governmental imperatives on student numbers, and low resource inputs are all contributory to the phenomenon. Until those things change, I doubt very much that the spectre of plagiarism can be banished from our midst. Ideally we need a system that will penalize the action stringently enough to act as a deterrent to further attempts, but also flexible enough to reclaim the erring person if that is possible too. For now, the best I can suggest is to devote as much time as we can to rigorous and closely-marked formative assessment in the early stages of the degree – at least as much as we can spare or our research co-ordinators will allow. (10)
Notes
1. According to a recent THES survey one in six university students admits to copying from friends, and one in 10 confesses to looking for essays online (Jessica Shepherd, Times Higher Education Supplement, 17 March 2006, p. 1).
2. The new Arden edition of Othello provides an Appendix with text from Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi (1565) and other minor sources indicating verbal parallels to an extent not acknowledged before. The editor, E.A. J. Honigmann, concludes, ‘Anyone who thinks of Othello as a short story blown up beyond its capacity should keep in mind that Shakespeare packed into it much miscellaneous reading as well as something not far removed from research, his perusal of very recent books on the Mediterranean world, on north Africa and on Venice’ (London: Thomas Nelson, 1997), p.387, italics added. Shakespeare’s sources are of course legion, and have spawned an industry of scholarship. Some standard works are Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967- 75) and Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Methuen, 1977).
3. The first recorded use of ‘plagiarism’ in the OED is dated 1621, five years after Shakespeare’s death.
4. As Leask suggests in his Introduction to the Everyman edition of the Biographia, ‘In a tradition such as the English, marked by a perennial distrust of philosophy and ‘grand theory’, the Biographia stands as a monument, however fl awed, of Coleridge’s bid to base critical practice upon a philosophical deduction of imagination’ (London: J.M. Dent, 1997) p. llii. See also David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1993) which relates the culture of Anglo-American suspicion of ‘theory’ to the revolutionary debates of the Romantic period.
5. Autobiographic Sketches, ed. Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, vol. 19 of The Works of Thomas De Quincey (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003) p. 307.
6. Albert Goldman, The Mine and the Mint: Sources for the Writings of Thomas De Quincey (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965).
7. ‘Poll finds elite top cheats list’, Jessica Shepherd, Times Higher Education Supplement, 17 March 2006, p. 9.
8. In the ninth chapter of his Biographia Coleridge notoriously set forth his ‘defence’ against future charges of plagiarism: ‘In Schelling’s ‘natur-philosophie,’ and the “system des transcendentalen idealismus,” I first found a genial coincidence with much that I had toiled out for myself, and a powerful assistance in what I had yet to do …. It would be but a mere act of justice to myself, were I to warn my future readers, that an identity of thought, or even similarity of phrase, will not be at all times a certain proof that the passage has been borrowed from Schelling, or that the conceptions were originally learnt from him. In this instance, as in the dramatic lectures of Schlegel …, from the same motive of self-defence against the charge of plagiarism, many of the most striking resemblances, indeed all the main and fundamental ideas, were born and matured in my mind before I had ever seen a single page of the German Philosopher; and I might indeed affirm with truth, before the more important works of Schelling had been written, or at least made public’ (Nigel Leask, ed., Biographia, pp. 92-93). The most sympathetic scholarly account of Coleridge’s plagiarisms is made by Thomas McFarland in Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1969) pp. xxiii-52; his most trenchant critic is undoubtedly Norman Fruman, Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel (New York: Braziller, 1971).
9. The case for Wordsworth’s spying was made in Kenneth Johnston’s biography, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York, 1998); it was discredited in The Times Literary Supplement by Michael Durey, ‘The Spy who never was’, TLS, 10 March 2000, pp. 14-15.
10. For more on plagiarism, see the plagiarism pages on the English Subject Centre website.
