This conference knits together three themes: first, "academic integrity" or the values and practices of a healthy community of shared inquiry; second, "new technology," especially the internet, which has so transformed the relationship between scholars and information; and third, the concept of "intellectual property," which unites the first two themes, insofar as the use of new technologies to infringe on intellectual property seems to threaten academic integrity. The meaning and consequences of each of these themes are far from clear; and the challenge I feel is to explore how these themes bear on each other. To skip ahead, I believe that students’ uses and abuses of new technology expose two momentous conflicts involving the academy. Deciding on the best pedagogy in the new age of internet scholarship depends on understanding these two conflicts. The first conflict involves the very idea of intellectual property: Is intellectual property at root a concept that supports shared inquiry by acknowledging the contributions of scholars and artists to that inquiry, or is it at root a concept that transforms the fruits of inquiry into commodities controlled for the sake of profit, thus in some respects restraining that inquiry? The second conflict involves the idea of the academy itself: is the academy at root an idealistic community of shared inquiry pursuing the true and the beautiful, or is the academy at root the purveyor of a commodity (namely, the degree) that can be used in the pursuit of further commodities?

Plagiarism and the Internet

The problem of internet-aided plagiarism is the starting point for these reflections, because that phenomenon is the point where large conflicts about the nature of the academy and the nature of intellectual property hit home in our libraries and classrooms. Moreover there is a palpable sense of alarm in the popular (and largely accurate) perceptions that internet-aided plagiarism is easy and widespread, and that students are in most cases untroubled by many scruples about it—even to the point of making loud, unrepentant protests when they are caught and sanctioned. Several cases in the news reveal key issues about the phenomenon.

Piper High School in Piper, Kansas, won unwanted notoriety when biology teacher Christine Pelton found evidence of plagiarism in student responses to an assignment about tree leaves.² Using a trial version of a program available at turnitin.com Pelton found matches between work handed in by students and material available online. Pelton failed 28 students, in keeping with policies she had stated at the beginning of the class. Parents rallied to their children’s defense and complained to the school board. The board met in executive session and subsequently instructed Pelton to reduce the penalty for the plagiarism, so that the offending students were able to complete the class for credit. Pelton resigned in frustration and protest at the board’s refusal to support her. She declared she had lost credibility in her students’ eyes, and that the standard of academic integrity she prized had been scorned by her employer. It was reported that one parent had complained to the board that her daughter felt injured and betrayed by the experience, because she had not approached the assignment any differently than any other assignment in her successful school career. The parent was either saying that her child had done no wrong, or that any wrong was the fault of previous teachers who had not taught proper rules for use of internet sources. In later radio interviews one parent claimed that the children "were not effectively taught the meaning of plagiarism," even though students said, in the words of one, "everybody knows about it. They've been taught."³

Several things are noteworthy in the Piper case: first, the parents who found fault with the teacher regarded their children’s plagiarism as a forgivable academic error, or even as the fault of the teacher and her peers, who had failed to teach the children the meaning of plagiarism; and second, at least some of the children confessed that what had been denounced as plagiarism in this case had been standard practice in their school lives up to this point.

Doris Kearns Goodwin became the focal point of another celebrated controversy when it was disclosed that her best selling book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys contained lengthy passages from previously published works.⁴ Goodwin reached a monetary settlement with the author of one of those works, and added appropriate citations in later editions of her own book. Goodwin defended herself against charges that she had plagiarized by declaring that she had simply been careless in moving her research from longhand notes to the longhand manuscript of her book. That is, in haste, she had lost track of what were originally the language and ideas of others and inadvertently claimed them as her own. There was no intent to deceive, Goodwin said, but rather a pardonable cutting of corners.

What’s noteworthy about this case is the sheer ease with which an author, in hot pursuit of the final product can simply lose track of the sources of ideas, even when they are originally taken longhand. How much easier it is to lose track of sources when they can be simply cut and pasted! Keeping faith with the scholars and artists on whom we rely requires a positive discipline in order to trace and report that reliance.

I uncovered my own prototypical case of plagiarism in one of my classes. Having missed all of the intermediate deadlines for outlines, drafts, and lists of sources, a student turned in an essay whose powerful argumentation and ornate vocabulary came out of the blue. Using google.com to search for a distinctive phrase from the essay I found virtually the entire essay published in an online journal. Following college policy, I failed the student. He protested, and initially claimed that he had simply turned in a source document by accident (the fact that a few original paragraphs had been interpolated in an effort to adjust the previously published essay to the assignment made this claim impossible to believe). The student’s father also became involved, and I learned among other things that the student was under intense pressure to achieve specific target grades in his course work, and that both the father and the student viewed the value of his studies in instrumental terms—as a credential necessary for lucrative employment. The student finally admitted that he had submitted the stolen essay when he began to fear that the essay he was working on would not earn the grade he was, in a sense, obligated to earn.

What’s noteworthy in this case is that the student plagiarized because it was so darn easy to do, and because he was in a situation of parental pressure that made it seem there was more to be gained by trying to get a better grade on false pretenses than by learning whatever was to be learned through doing his own work.

The other noteworthy thing is that it was as easy for me to catch the plagiarism as it was for the student to commit it.⁵ Indeed I think this is one of the most important points about internet-aided plagiarism. It crystallizes the opportunities and pitfalls represented by new technologies. But it is not particularly interesting and important for its own sake—after all, specific acts of plagiarism, which offend the codes of conduct in place in the academy, can be effectively combated by the very tools that make it easy to commit. We should quit wringing our hands about the ease of internet plagiarism and address the deeply worrisome erosion of the basic concept of the academy as a community of shared inquiry. The issue is not that internet plagiarism is so easy that students are frequently tempted and frequently succumb to temptation. It is that students see plagiarism as defensible, sensible, and often in their own best interests, when in fact plagiarism is repellent, foolish, and profoundly contrary to their own best interests.

If we want to treat internet-aided plagiarism as a valuable window into a broader understanding of academic integrity in the context of new technology, we have to grapple with the cultural contests that have made plagiarism seem to so many students like a reasonable, defensible practice that serves their interests.

Of course, the faculty who police against plagiarism and the students who wittingly or unwittingly commit it have vastly different perceptions of what it actually is. Faculty experience it as a betrayal. For in our best moments, when we are being most idealistic, we faculty like to think of ourselves as joint partners with students in communities of inquiry; so we are confused and surprised when widespread plagiarism reveals that students actually have a very different conception of the nature of the community and the nature of the enterprise that characterizes academic life. On the other hand, most students who plagiarize don’t think of themselves as doing something terribly wrong—they don’t say "Evil be thou my good," and make an intentional choice to become pariahs of the academic world. They think their choice makes sense in light of some understanding of the world. The challenge for us is to understand why students who plagiarize don’t grasp the seriousness of plagiarism: Why do they see it as a sensible alternative to carrying our research and thinking on their own? Why do they see it as justifiable, expedient, or even in some cases (as I will argue) honorable? Why don’t they recognize it as self-destructive and contrary to basic values of the academy? What is the context of their decision to do it?

Cultural Contexts I: "Owning Ideas"

Pondering these questions reveals fundamental struggles in contemporary culture over two basic things: first, the very concepts of intellectual property and the "ownership of ideas"; and second, the very concepts of the academy and its relation to the aspirations of the greater society. An understanding of internet-aided plagiarism has to be situated in the context of these conflicts.

In academic communities "intellectual property" means the insight or discovery of a historian, chemist, or political scientist working in a laboratory or library carrel, as well as the particular expression of that insight. It is a contribution to the shared project of inquiry undertaken by a community of people who identify themselves with that project. Because that project is real—that is, the members of the community really are trying to discern what is true and valuable in terms that make sense within the community’s own history—we do not "scam" the project by pretending to make a contribution, when in fact we are simply passing along someone else’s contribution. Moreover, in order to facilitate wide understanding of the origin and movement of ideas within the community of inquiry, we give credit to the originators of ideas, or particular ways of expressing ideas. But this meaning of intellectual property is challenged by other meanings, particularly meanings that have emerged with great clarity on the internet; and it is by no means the first meaning students have in mind when they face the responsibility to give credit to others on whom they rely.

The very characteristics that define the internet (together with the culture surrounding the new medium) have created fundamentally new concepts and struggles over the ownership of ideas, and placed the notion of intellectual property in an utterly new context. Because it reduces ideas to bits and bytes and enables users to transfer these bits and bytes at will, the internet has opened up a profound struggle over the concept of information itself. On one side are groups asserting that "information wants to be free"—that, in fact, it is free, insofar as information is just accumulations of bits on a network that can be moved, and of right ought to be moved around at the whim of users anywhere. On the other side are corporations asserting that information is owned, that it can be controlled by its owners, and that the owners have the right to profit from it any time another person uses it. Both sides indulge in rhetorical excesses, and neither position articulates the Academy’s interest in honoring the originators of new ideas.

Two cases crystallize this culture clash: the Napster case and the controversy at Berkeley over corporate funding of science research. Each case involves a contested right of corporations to control ideas and profit from their distribution; and each involves protest against that right on the grounds that while ideas can be credited, they can’t be owned.

Napster

The Napster case is fraught with contradiction, because although the courts quickly decided as a matter of law that Napster functioned to facilitate the violation of copyrights, and although it appears clear that many Napster users simply sought to steal copyrighted property, the case also revealed the extent to which the music industry is ready to employ the rhetoric of "protecting artists’ rights" in a cynical defense of corporate profits. Most Napster defenders were outraged by the record companies’ claim to be defending artists’ interests. Granted, most Napster users were not expressing a carefully considered revolt against the effort of corporations to control artistic pleasures in order to maximize and corner profits; they were stealing songs. But stealing songs was in itself a protest against the unbearable self-righteousness of corporate spokespersons. Indeed many Napster users seemed to think of themselves as allies of the artists against the recording industry: by sharing files, they viewed themselves as establishing a direct link to the artists and the other fans that simply deprived the corporations of profits they got through exploitation of the artists.

What the recording industry was defending as it sued Napster is entirely different from what the academy defends as the basis for inquiry in a community. On one side is the claim of an exclusive right of a corporation, perhaps only loosely connected to the origin of ideas and artworks, to profit from the enjoyment or use of those ideas. On the other side is an effort to advance inquiry. Securing academic integrity in a wired context depends on making this distinction clear.

To see how this difference influences students’ attitudes about using others’ ideas, picture a student at work on a computer: there is an instant messenger window burbling in the lower right corner; in the background a song or video is being downloaded from one of the file sharing communities that has sprung up in Napster’s place; there is a WWW session seeking information for a research project; and there is a word processor open to gather notes for the research project. Information of many kinds is streaming into the students’ consciousness in chorus: personal information from the instant messenger; a commodity from the file sharing program; research data from the web. She does not necessarily adopt dramatically different attitudes towards these different kinds of information. The differences are flattened out. Does she cut and paste a paragraph from an online research source in something like the same mood that she downloads a song from an anonymous user? After all, the Web is the place where students "get stuff." It is the place where rules of ownership have been abrogated. It is the place where the suits are circumvented, the fat cats are outwitted, and a solitary computer user gets a little back from the bloated profits of international corporations . . . the kids beat the grownups! In the case of the music corporations, Napster-using students had a vague sense that the recording industry’s claim to ownership was bogus and overbearing. Do they have a similar sense about the implied claim to the ownership of ideas made by the author’s name appearing at the head of an online article?

If so, then the issue raised by internet plagiarism is not a technical issue about easy access to uncited material, but a cultural issue about what it means to "own" ideas. And insofar as the academy might to some extent join with students in suspicion about the efforts of corporations to claim and profit from nearly all information, our challenge is not so simple as a blanket defense of "intellectual property." It is the challenge to invite students to join us in a nuanced reflection on the idea of ideas and the ownership of ideas.

Berkeley and Novartis

Still another context that complicates our understanding of intellectual property involves the rise of new schemes for corporate funding of university research. As public funding for pure science research has declined or remained constant, universities have turned increasingly to corporations to fund that research. In 1998, for example, Berkeley announced a new alliance between the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology in the College of Natural Resources and Novartis Agricultural Development Institute—an arrangement that brought focus to a debate about the fundamental character of the community of scientific inquiry, its goals, its practices as a community, and the concept of the ownership of ideas.⁶ Under the agreement, Novartis provides $25 million over five years to fund basic science research in agricultural genomics; in return, Novartis has "first rights to license a fraction of the research developments in the department," and a significant influence (two seats out of five on the research grants committee) in determining the direction of future research (Berkeley Press Release). The chief architect of the alliance, Dean Gordon Rausser of the College of Natural Resources, touted it as a fruitful and economically indispensable partnership between academy and industry. But critics claimed that this and other partnerships tended to transform the universities from "centers of learning and basic research" into "sources of commercially valuable ideas" (The Atlantic Monthly), with a corresponding erosion of the ethos of research. The critics cherish an ideal image of scientific inquiry where knowledge is the common property of the community of inquiry (given that appropriate credit for findings is granted). Knowledge, they say, progresses most rapidly when findings are shared widely and freely among colleagues. But under the pressure of the new "corporatization" of science—where corporate owners of ideas sometimes pre-screen publications for data that reflect negatively on their products, and where the scientists themselves are sometimes shareholders in the corporations that fund their research—new findings are kept under wraps as closely guarded company secrets. Threats of espionage, suspicion, and litigation begin to vie with collegial cooperation in complementary research ventures.

Obviously, the concept of "intellectual property" functions differently in a culture where discoveries are patentable corporate secrets, or hot-selling singles, than it does in a culture where discoveries are the common property of a community of inquiry. In the Novartis case, as in the Napster case, the law and rhetoric of intellectual property have apparently served to increase the power of people and businesses to generate profits by controlling ideas, not to strengthen the shared commitment of the academy to inquiry. And this places the phenomenon of plagiarism in a striking new light.

When we want students to take the "ownership of ideas" seriously we don’t really mean that we want all ideas to be the secret property of individuals or corporations who hold them in reserve until they can profit from them; what we mean is that we want to promote critical thinking and that we can’t do that unless we take thinking itself seriously enough to insist that students do it for themselves.

In the contexts created by cases like Napster and Novartis, students mistake the academy’s reasons for defending intellectual property. As it happens, the academy has little interest in defending any conception of intellectual property that functions to stifle inquiry and hoard up ideas for the sake of profit. And we have every interest in defending a conception of intellectual property that serves the community of inquiry by urging people to do their own work, give credit where it is due, and appreciate the origins and movements of new ideas. For students to have a useful sense of "academic integrity," they must be able to differentiate these competing concepts of intellectual property. So long as they see "intellectual property" as a defense of corporations’ power to profit, they will see no harm (and perhaps even a little heroism) in circumventing the big guys, grabbing their ideas, and making whatever use of them is expedient or pleasurable. From this point of view, plagiarism seems no great evil. But I think if students see the idea of intellectual property in the context of a community of inquiry, they will regard plagiarism as both offensive and foolish.

Cultural Contexts II: What the Academy is For

In describing the cultural contest over the meaning of intellectual property, I have repeatedly referred to the academy as a community of inquiry, but that notion is itself the object of another cultural contest; and this contest, too, is part of the context within which plagiarism seems to make sense to many students.

In a recent address to the AAC&U, the political scientist Benjamin Barber traced a changing American understanding of the role of the academy in American society. Barber pointed out that for Thomas Jefferson, and indeed for most of the framers of American democracy, education was the indispensable condition of a civil society. To be a citizen required learning, therefore democracy required an educated citizenry. The new nation required institutions of higher education for its very survival. The point of education, therefore, was primarily to endow citizens with the knowledge and virtues necessary for participation in civil society. In the late 19^th c., Barber argued, new paradigms of disciplinary research began to supplant the general, humane agenda of the nation’s universities, and inquiry came to serve more specialized ends—ends of interest to narrower guilds of professionals. The increasing power of corporations and the near total triumph in the late 20^th c. of the ideologies of the market and consuming have brought yet another paradigm to the fore: education today is seen by many as a consumer good acquired in order to leverage greater power to acquire more consumer goods. This produces a conviction that education is chiefly valuable as a means to acquire employable skills; but even more coarsely, a degree is sometimes perceived quite cynically as a stepping stone to professional advancement having no intrinsic value.

Under the spell of this consumerist paradigm, learning must seem to many students like a commodity to be acquired like any other commodity—namely, for the sake of an advantage it confers in acquiring further commodities. The point of the academy boils down to a credential (namely the degree) whose value is more or less unrelated to any distinctive activity of the academy. A student who understands the academy in this way approaches "education" as a kind of con right from the start ("it’s something I have to do, but I don’t see why, and I will seek to achieve the end goal—the degree—by any expedient means").

Perhaps this attitude towards the academy is also related to a sense of entitlement fostered by consumer culture. Ads promise that fulfillment can be purchased. Why should academic success be any different from any other promised fulfillment—available for purchase at the right price? For a student who views academic success this way, the decision to lift some online paragraphs, or even to purchase an essay online, is just a tactical judgment about how to acquire academic success

Students who have adopted the paradigm of the degree as commodity see their work in a fundamentally different way than their faculty do. They treat it as a mere thing to be turned in (the purchase price, as it were, for a grade); whereas the academy idealistically imagines the work to be the manifestation of a process of thought contributing to the intellectual development of the author. Faculty believe inquiry is a real and important activity, so they do it and they take and give credit for it. Students pursuing the commodified degree believe inquiry is nothing, so they present its tokens by whatever means they can be acquired—and plagiarism is often the most straightforward means.

Conclusion: A Summons

The reason I dwell on these "cultural contexts" of plagiarism is because there can be no appropriate community defense against plagiarism unless we understand the situation in which students plagiarize. I’m convinced that most students who submit work that is not their own are nearly oblivious to the real reasons the Academy scorns plagiarism (even though they have been told not to do it). They confront the choice to lift paragraphs or buy essays in the context of attitudes about intellectual property that bear the stamp of the Napster phenomenon, or in the context of attitudes about the enterprise of education that bear the stamp of its commodification as a passport to material success.

Thus effective community defenses against plagiarism in a wired age have less to do with "law and order," stern warnings, tough penalties, technological countermeasures, and the like, and more to do with the intellectual development that acculturates students to the values of the academy. After all, you can catch plagiarists and fail them, but unless you win them over to a culture of values wherein they perceive plagiarism to be truly unappealing you haven’t done anything worthwhile.

The wired contexts within which new practices of academic integrity are taking shape call us to craft our assignments in ways that cultivate students’ appreciation of the fundamental goals of the academy. We are merely sidetracked if we invest too much effort in frustrating plagiarists’ technical strategies; we need to think about the basic character of students’ intellectual development, the basic character of the academy as a community of inquiry, and the basic character of what the academy is ultimately striving for, namely, the true and the beautiful (or another phrase if you prefer).

Ultimately, the offense of plagiarism among undergraduates matters far less as a theft of ideas than as a failure to do one’s own thinking. No scholar-author is really injured when a sophomore cuts and pastes a few paragraphs from an online publication. But the students are immeasurably harmed when they get past the hurdle of an assignment without doing the work that the assignment proposed. The ethos of the academy is harmed when people offer up counterfeits of thinking instead of the real thing. And, not to be too romantic, the true and the beautiful are undermined.

First, in the assignments we invent and the practices we model we must embody what a community of inquiry is. In such a community, the reasons for citing sources grow out of the nature of the community and its activities, not out of an authoritarian demand or to protect the profitability of ideas. The reasons arise from the nature of "interest" in communities: that is, the convergence of attention to compelling subjects among scholars. They arise from the pleasure of sharing ideas among people with overlapping commitments and curiosities. And they arise from the simple value of taking and giving credit so as to enhance our appreciation of ideas by understanding their origins.

Second, in the assignments we invent and the practices we model we must constantly set before students the pleasures of real thinking: seeking evidence, drawing conclusions, making persuasive arguments to support those conclusions, evaluating sources, discerning and interpreting beauty.

Assignments like these reveal to students the real reasons not to plagiarize: when you do your own work you learn, whereas you don’t learn from turning in someone else’s work; giving grateful credit strengthens the bonds of community within which inquiry and shared understanding can progress towards the true and the beautiful; and giving credit allows other participants in a shared project of inquiry to trace and appreciate the origins, movements, and transformations of ideas.

In the end, academic integrity for a wired age means the same thing it has always meant. And sustaining it involves promoting students’ intellectual development to the point where they understand and value the culture of inquiry—just as it always has. Students who appreciate what the culture of thinking and inquiry means will view plagiarism (no matter how easy) as abhorrent, not merely forbidden.

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