Hate is something we are taught, and from this hate we obtain our moral compass. What do we hate, and why do we hate it ? Who taught us to hate, and therefore to love ? What if we stop hating ? Valid questions, but only selectively put forth. I say selectively because they have become legion in cases like communalism (so you’re a beef-eating Muslim $*#$%^$ ?) and sexuality.
But there are other things, patent in society, that we must hate and never question why. Corruption for instance. And then there are things in academia that we hate without questioning. Lecherous teachers who cheat on their wives to make out with their colleagues. Sorry, cut that. Replace it with plagiarism. Yep, that seems safe enough. Corruption and plagiarism, a nice pair (made in the lowest depths of hell).
Now the point is not to raise moral arguments about these – that would make for a very long night indeed. Instead, let’s talk about why we’re taught about these (or learn) and how our hate for them is similar.
Take corruption. It’s that limitless force that causes rust and fungal growth in virtually every human-based structure in the world. More specifically, corruption pertains to the political sphere, where terms like embezzlement, black money, venality, etc. are thrown about with brute vehemence and vindictiveness. In this sphere, corruption generally means taking undue advantage of a system or allowing others to do so. As flies come to wounds, so money comes to the corrupt areas, enriching few and ruining the system and all who depend on it. Hence rations are hoarded and black marketed, pension funds are sucked off, ill-gotten funds are taken away to the Cayman Islands, unworthy get jobs and licenses and virtually everybody has to shell out something to get something done. Something over and above the usual fees that is.
Feeling angry ? Aye, me too. But hold on, let’s get you angrier. Talk of plagiarism. Plagiarism, or plag for short, means the art of taking stuff from people’s intellectual property and using it to decorate your own house. Or build it even. Imagine you worked for years to create a lovely piece of art. Someone comes in and clicks a photo of the canvas. Next day you find that your picture now forms a part of the portfolio of another artist! How can you produce something, put in your heart and soul into it, if you know that people may use it to their advantage ? Where is the respect and returns due to intellectual labour ?
Phew, those are angry words, and typing them out does push your typing speed to its limit. Now I’ll type slowly, and you take a few deep breaths. Let’s talk of idyllic worlds without mosquitoes, plagiarism and corruption.
In this world, the government would be corruption-free (not talking about the AAP here). It would create an education system that would be free of plagiarism, so academia would be corruption free. Why ? Because if we take corruption in the literal sense of being a distortion to something, and in the political sense of helping one and harming other by screwing the system, then plagiarism definitely fits the bill. Plagiarism is a short-cut that allows you to take more credit than is due to you while harming the rights of the ones who actually put in the effort to come up with the plagged work in the first place. A deviation from honest effort ? A short cut that harms one and gives undue advantage to another ? That’s corruption in the grammatical sense. Wait, make that corruption in the grammatical and quasi-political sense.
Academic corruption, or at least part of it, is plagiarism.
So if corruption is the set U, plagiarism is one of the circles in the Venn Diagram. To talk of corruption is to talk of something big, to talk of plagiarism is to talk of something more specific. Something more concrete and measurable, in both definition, practical application and impact.
Really?
You may say that a certain string of words may have been found to be copied from some previous work without a proper footnote. Without going into the intricacies of what a proper footnote is, let’s assume the footnote isn’t there or it’s improper. The reader can’t make out that this is not the original work of the author. Now it is perfectly possible that the author of the plagged work has decided to take credit for what is not his/hers. It is also possible that –
- He/she wrote the line in exactly the same fashion and was not aware of the original work.
- He/she omitted certain lines from earlier drafts that caused the footnote to be deleted.
- He/she had given the footnote earlier and did not bother adding the same book with Ibid. again.
- He/she gave the credit to the wrong person and at the wrong place. So the footnote ended up far away from where the quote has been placed (if quote it be).
- The text has been taken from web sources which did not credit the author and hence is of dubious validity.
Some of these make your blood boil more, some less. But these are just some of the possibilities. None of them can justify the plagiarism, but they help explain why. Compare them to the works of schoolchildren and you will see.
- He copied from a notebook with no name or with an unintelligible name.
- His lines came out the same as another boy’s.
- He used a guide book and hence could not say where the quote was taken from. He could not tell the teacher he used a guide book, hence he was in trouble.
- He found the information scrawled on a board or on a micro-xerox in the toilet.
- His parents filled up the text and so used sources which he was not aware of. Of course he could not admit that his parents did the work, so he got into a mess.
Compare this list with the one above, and note how schoolchildren’s mistakes become academics’ mistakes. We’ve been trained to hate plagiarism from a very early age, and this hatred is reflected continuously as, like overzealous kids, we continue to find each other’s faults endlessly. Academics are folks who have passed exams with high marks : they have learned their lessons well.
But have they also attended school on corruption ? For many speak about corruption with so much conviction that they may well have been in the administration itself. In the administration I said, corrupt I did not say. Don’t misquote me!
But such stands perhaps come from the same moral compass that leads to our hatred of plagiarism. Let’s see –
- A clerk took money not knowing that he could not take money for the task. Say he has shifted from being an agent of some company to a government employee. Habits die hard, rules are learned slowly.
- He overlooked some stuff for someone’s advantage.
- He helped someone he normally would have, except this time he credited the wrong person, and at the wrong place!
- He interpreted rules according to dubious sources and cynically manipulated them. And was caught.
Note how we need to add “intentionally” to every sentence to prove someone is corrupt. Did we do the same for plagiarism ? We didn’t. This is somewhat unfair on academics, since plagiarism after all falls within the ambit of corruption.
Yet this distinction does not obscure the fact that the two are similar. A schoolkid’s mistakes, an academic’s mistakes and a clerk’s mistakes – all appear similar when put down on pen and paper.
But the similarity doesn’t stop there. Let’s talk of limits. What are the limits of corruption ? Where can one be totally corruption-free, hypothetically and practically ? Similarly, where can one be totally sure that there is no plagiarism. The methods of measuring corruption vary, as do moral compasses. The methods of plagiarism checking vary too, as again do moral compasses. This leads to the domain of both being exceedingly vague. Vagueness lends itself to vigilantism, to finding scapegoats for various purposes and for foisting one set of rules upon another just to serve selfish purposes.
Again, both are easily hidden. There are two ways of doing this. One, you change the rules so that your corruption becomes legal and another’s legality becomes dubious. Similarly, moving from one standard to another, one journal to another, causes the methods to change.
Secondly, you can simply accuse someone else of plagiarism. Or corruption. He/she either makes counter-charges and/or becomes defensive. In the worst case scenario, your corruption is exposed, but by then it is always a political issue.
Fourthly, both become all-encompassing. A corrupt person is corrupt and nothing else. A plagging scholar is nothing but a plagger. A cheater who made his fame without the effort required and is therefore of dubious moral calibre. Corruption and plagiarism don’t become one quality – they become the only quality.
Fifthly, charges are usually levelled by those who are the least productive. They have the least to lose, because their trail of activities is the shortest. So the lazy person, who also fears being attacked for his laziness, seeks to divert attention from himself. Ditto for the lazy academic.
Now let’s go back to school.
- “He hasn’t done his homework”
- “I didn’t know it was wrong. Won’t happen again!”
- “ I thought I’d already done this/that”
- “I heard from a friend and decided to do…”
- “I didn’t notice/remember…”
Imagine each scenario with an angry teacher, plenty of ironed out student uniforms and souls which are being shaped to be the crusaders against corruption and plagiarism. We have been taught all this, and taught in a way that allows us to apply the same standards to both.
This doesn’t make for a plea of free-thinking. Too much of country and education depend on keeping corruption at bay and plagiarism out for us to let our guard down so we can wonder if the “Police” written on our clothes makes sense or not. Our system was built on these assumptions, we cannot help but shoulder the burden and carry on. We can’t turn our backs for a moment. So we have been taught, so we shall teach our children. Such notions, will at least, uphold the system as it exists. As they say, a bird in hand is worth two in the bush.
Yet why not reflect? How did we become such creatures, righteous yet monstrous ? Where did we lose our willingness to cooperate instead of fight with everyone else ? Could an alternative have been possible at some point of time ? Why did we accept this morality and not another one ? Why did we not question this when we questioned everything else in the heat of our college years ?
Perhaps these would answer the questions – why do we hate corruption and plagiarism, and why have we been taught to do so ?