Book Review: “My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture”
My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture
by Susan D. Blum. Cornell University Press, 2009. Hardcover.
by Deborah Straw
This title, My Word!,brings back fond memories. My high school English teacher used that expression a lot. Richard Blanchard had a worldly, traveled accent; he was a gentleman. He wore suits and bow ties and loved Shakespeare and Dickinson. Mr. Blanchard was passionate, and he wielded a strong influence. He cared, and his passion encouraged us to care, too.
This book, entitled My Word!, is not about long-gone, old-fashioned English teachers. However, it does involve the notion of caring. The book is about a terribly nagging situation: the rising incidence of plagiarism among college students, worldwide, it seems. And it’s about the current culture on American college campuses. Blum strives to explain these concepts and offers a few suggestions on how to address the situation.
Between fifty and seventy-five percent of college students in the U.S. admit that they have cheated in one way or another, according to a variety of surveys performed during the last decade. Researchers for The Impact of Policies for Plagiarism in Higher Education Across Europe, a three-year project hosted by Coventry University in England, found “…that almost a third of British students think they have plagiarized either deliberately or accidentally. This compares with 65 percent in Lithuania, 46 percent in France and only 10 percent in Germany.”
Blum, an anthropologist, teaches at a four-year college, the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. For her study and the book, she took on four high-grading undergraduates to do interviews of students about the issue of plagiarism over 26 months. Two hundred thirty-four people participated in the study. Students mostly ranged from eighteen to twenty-two, mostly lived in dorms, were mostly from middle-class backgrounds.
As a writer with friends who are writers and musicians, I have always been keenly aware of plagiarism and have taught many lessons and given out many exercises on the topic. Sure, some students don’t want to take the time, or are actually lazy. However, also, in my experience, some teachers fail to explain plagiarism and citations adequately. Some professors feel students should have gotten enough instruction in high school, or believe it’s only up to English teachers to go over it, again. Presenting students with examples of citations and explaining how difficult—and special—it is to be published in journals, music or books helps my students better understand the integrity angle. They also need to learn that citing is not about memorization, how to find current examples, and the ramifications of being caught cheating.
Based on her extensive research, Blum has a different take on plagiarism than I. She writes, “The bottom line is that we cannot treat all student plagiarism solely as a matter of individual morality, dependent of all the supporting messages from the educational and social contexts in which they find themselves.” She believes that “cultural influences” are behind this huge wave of “patchwork” writing, a term coined by Rebecca Moore Howard and re-introduced in Blum’s book.
Howard explains that patchwork writing (copying, plugging in new words, deleting others) ought to be considered “a gesture of reverence.” The student writer knows the importance of her source and “strives to join the conversation in which the source participates.”
Besides plagiarism, this book tackles the topic of working in groups in the college setting. As the author notes, “The ideal—or myth—of originality does not drive this generation of students. They are more interested in sharing, belonging, resembling, converging. Thus plagiarism… does not horrify them….” They want to get their educations quite quickly and easily, to be successful and to make money. They enjoy working in groups, as witnessed by the time they spend together texting, watching films, playing games, etc…. Blum finds that they are nowhere near as engrossed in their studies as students once were, and that they spend much less time studying than we professors might wish.
Even though some of us have worried that the Internet – and a certain addiction to it — has isolated students, this author would disagree. “I believe there is greater [social] interaction today than in the past, though some of this interaction is mediated by technology.”
Of course, one of the reasons that plagiarism has become more possible and widespread is the Internet, and especially, Wikipedia. However, Blum notes some scholars even use the latter. And she explains, related to the entire Internet, “The prohibition on plagiarism—the unacknowledged use of material by a named author—makes no sense in a context in which unnamed series of people offer their work free of credit, free of charge, free of attribution.” She also notes that journalists do not need to formally cite (except for name) and professors, in general, are taken to task much less for slipping with citations than students. The author of My Word! never condones buying, borrowing or re-using a paper.
If you teach at a two-year community college or related institution, the majority of the students live in a different culture than those Blum teaches. They may be older; they may live far from campus; they may be poorer; they may be single parents. They may come from countries where the concept of plagiarism matters little. They may have little or no need for academic writing in their future careers. That said, this book’s most appropriate audience appears to be professors in four-year and/or graduate degree-granting colleges. Not that plagiarism does not exist everywhere, but it may exist for somewhat different reasons.
Blum is not advocating that professors overlook plagiarism, especially the most blatant examples of it. Rather, she is attempting to understand why students do this, and to explain that student culture and professor culture have almost become like two different universes. She attempts to bridge some of that gap.
In her final chapter, the author offers a few suggestions to educators of how to deal with plagiarism. Here are five that look especially effective:
1. “Don’t panic.”;
2. Deeply educate your students about academic honesty and about the ins and outs of citations.;
3. “Admit the rules are somewhat arbitrary”;
4. “Really educate these young people. Empower them. Don’t treat them as children to be disciplined ‘because I say so,'”; and finally, her most revolutionary idea,
5 “…[A]bolish college as the major adolescent challenge….Institutionalize a two-year service obligation prior to beginning higher education.” Blum believes this would enable students to become more adult and thoughtful before they entered college classrooms.
I do feel she might have added more on how academics can better explain and model the process of academic research. In the end, she admits, “here’s no simple answer [about how to deal with the issue of plagiarism.]” She retains “concerns, worries, grave doubts” of the relationship between how we’re educating young people and “our ideas of childhood and success.”
My Word! is written in a scholarly style. Blum also uses personal examples from her teaching background. Chapters are best read individually, with time spent between them to ponder the concepts or look at some of her references. The book contains twenty-three pages of Notes and Bibliography, proving that this author, indeed, did not plagiarize.
