The Purposes of Plagiarism

Pondering the roots of academic malpractice

Dec 12, 2023

On the eve of the start of my high school career, I received a pamphlet that, among many other things, reminded me that all of my written work was to be “original.” That word, which I construed to mean, "entirely unprecedented,” put ice into my veins. Where would I, a mere lad of fourteen, find so many ground-breaking ideas?

Happily, I soon realized that all the brochure asked was that I refrain from committing plagiarism. As long as I bounded quotations with suitably superscripted sets of commas and provided condign citations for all borrowed blocks of text, whether clothed in my own words or au naturel, I would avoid a stay in the academic hoosegow.

It was not long before I discovered that originality of the sort I had originally imagined would get me into more trouble (to include a trip to the principal’s office on a charge of McCarthyism) than the mindless rehashing of the painfully fashionable texts I was given to read. I often heard that I might not say what I had said, and read in red ink scribbled in margins, that I might write what I had written. At the same time, no teacher ever took me to task for failing to say something new.

With this experience in mind, I find myself thinking that people who throve in the aforementioned environment could do so because they had mastered the art of smothering any original thought that managed to rear its unhomely head. Thus, by the time when, late in the long day of their school-bound careers, they were asked to insert a modicum of novelty into their written work, they had lost the ability to do so.

This theory, however, fails to explain instances where a scholar neglected to do the easy things that would have provided him with perfect protection against charges of plagiarism. (In the age of the typewriter, when the provision of a footnote required both a modicum of prior planning and a style guide, this was easy enough. Today, when the chore involves little more than the cutting and pasting of a reference formatted à choix, the necessary transposition can be done and dusted in a matter of seconds.)

One possible explanation for this peculiar sort of sloth occurred to me while I was doing dhobi duties. Why is it, I wondered, that, I enjoy loading clothes into a washing machine, and can tolerate transferring them to a dryer, but heartily dislike the act of folding? Could it be that human beings find it the beginning of a task more congenial than its completion? (This theory also explains the sixty-two unfinished drafts loitering, like the suitors of the fabled queen of Ithaca, in the electronic antechamber of Extra Muros.)

Another hypothesis rests upon the proposition that a certain percentage of the population will break rules for no other reason than the pleasure of transgression. In other words, while fully capable of original work, some copy cats might engage in plagiarism for the same reason that well-heeled shoplifters steal chocolate bars. (This, I think, was the case of the only undergraduate citation-skipper I ever caught en flagrant délit. In fact, the rest of his essay was so well crafted that the offending block of text would have escaped my attention had it not been for the presence of some ill-behaved formatting in the word-processing file.)

A third thesis starts with the suspicion that some people perpetrate plagiarism because they have nothing to say. That is, rather than entering the Groves of Academe in order to solve a problem, plumb the depths of a mystery, or create something new, such persons larp as scholars in order to spend their days in positions of honor and advantage in places well supplied with fawning undergraduates, stately buildings, and cozy coffee shops.

For Further Reading: