Customer Reviews

My Word!: Plagiarism and College Cultrue

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In this book, anthropologist Susan Blum explores the diverse meanings of plagiarism and intellectual property, and the context within which students decide to take shortcuts on assignments.

In her first section, she overviews the history of plagiarism, the development of intellectual property rights, and the way that proper citation varies by context. Next, she quotes interviews with students about the culture of college, how they cite others in speech and online ("intertextuality"), and where they draw the ethical lines on cheating. Third, she outlines the increasing over-involvement of students in extra-curriculars for the sake of their future 'careers,' which she suggests lead many students to burn-out and short-cuts.

Blum's contextualization of plagiarism and sympathetic exploration of self-reported student culture are valuable, and I recommend TAs and professors peruse this book in order to understand the context in which students make a decision to cheat or sloppily cite.

However, as reviewer Eilonwy commented, Blum seems at points to simply legitimate cheating as a cultural form. A greater discussion of how academics and administrators can challenge and shape student ethics in this area would be valuable, as would more observation of student paper-writing in order to supplement her second-hand transcripts of student-student interviews.

Blum begins with a superficial overview of the history of "owning" ideas, but quickly moves to explanations of why today's college students don't see anything wrong with taking materials not their own. These ideas would be a lot more compelling if Blum weren't so one-sided in her selection of evidence. For example, although she produces lots of quotations from students who admit to falsifying college application materials in order to win a spot at the prestigious institution they feel they deserve to join, she also labels them as a generation committed to sharing, due to their prefence for "performative" selves rather than "authentic" selves. She misses the irony that these students don't feel impelled to "share" what they think they deserve--high grades, college entrance, prestigious careers, high salaries. They only feel other people should "share" with them. Blum has somehow mistaken a sense of entitlement for a sense of communalism. Extending the study beyond the walls of a single privileged university might have been useful too (though Blum is very upfront about this limitation to the study).

Later chapters explore the pressures students face as they apply to high profile colleges. The evidence this section includes is accurate but well presented elsewhere. What it has to do with plagiarism is never well explained. The likelihood, however, that readers will stick with her through all the pablum to her useful concluding pages seems slim.

The final short chapter outlines the obvious argument that convincing people to comply with a rule, also entails explaining the rule--in this case the rule against plagiarism. Blum seems to think she is saying something relevatory. She isn't. Composition and Rhetoric and English professionals have been making this claim for years.

Despite the annoyingly apologist argument she "performs," if the book convinces anyone from disciplines outside of English to pay attention to plagiarism and how to educate students to value the practice of crediting sources, it is probably a worthwhile endeavor.

What is really good about Susan Blum's book is that she goes way beyond the technicalities of plagiarism. She outlines important issues of today's students and their culture. As a result, this book is important reading for many of today's students, teachers and parents.

First, Blum outlines plagiarism along with the variations of plagiarism that range from failure to use proper footnotes to simply buying a paper to turn in as one's own. She also discusses the history and practices of various authors. For example, would one expect to see piles of footnotes on a Bobby Dylan album?

And then, Blum brings up the role and importance of "patchwork writing" where the writer creates a sort of unique essay by stringing together other writer's ideas while failing to make proper citations (not unlike this review). But the student who does this still becomes a better writer. For example, partial imitation is regularly used by children trying to become more adult like.

Blum gives many examples of how today's students are less interested in "forging a unique identity" but very interested in sharing and getting along with their peers. Group studying is more popular than ever. And the idea of turning in a fellow student for plagiarism is pretty much taboo. This cultural shift explains why students are less interested in the finer points of "originality" and plagiarism.

Blum also reveals how the current huge demand for students to engage in extra curricular activities has forced students to become expert time managers along with focusing on getting the job done, no matter what.

And then Blum outlines the high stakes for today's students; getting a job after graduation to pay off the big loans taken out to pay tuition that is higher than ever...

First published on my blog on 2/9/11: [...]Our next book club selection for our Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL) is My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture, by Susan Debra Blum.

Do you do academic book clubbing on your campus?

I love these discussions. Our last book club was on The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, by Louis Menand.

As an incentive participate, we buy the book for anyone at our institution who signs up - and the book club is open to everyone in our community.

Any suggestions for our next book?

I'd certainly suggest that you read My Word, either individually or as a group.

Blum is an anthropologist at Notre Dame, and the book is written for an academic rather than a popular audience. This approach has its pluses and minuses, as the book adheres to academic norms of providing long quotes (almost transcripts) from informants, undergrads at Notre Dame - which Blum calls "Saint U" in order to make her conclusions more generalizable.

Blum sets out to discover, utilizing her anthropological toolkit, why plagiarism seems to have moved from deviant to normative behavior amongst college students. Her concern is not with outright cheating, or the wholesale purchasing of term papers, but rather the seeming inability of students to properly cite sources and give attribution for other peoples ideas and sentences. She seeks not to judge, but to understand, preferring to think about the failure to attribute as a teachable moment. Blum's main conclusions in My Word (and I hesitate to so simplify her complex and nuanced arguments and observations) are:

Students are mostly confused about attribution and citation, as the rules seem (to them) to be inconsistent, capricious, and illogical.

The dominant culture that students operate in is a "remix culture", one in which cultural capital is developed and displayed by one's ability to reference and quote from popular culture when interacting with peers. Lines from "The Simpsons" (or perhaps "Jersey Shore", "The Daily Show", or "Glee") contribute to the vernacular of the college sophomore. Footnoting one's cultural references would be beyond uncool. This remix culture does not extend to books or magazines or newspapers.

Academic norms of attribution are particularly alien to undergraduates. Learning to operate in the professorial culture of citation requires learning a new language, one at odds with the prevailing mode of communication and therefore difficult to master.

Class work (studying, going to class, writing papers etc.) competes with an endless list of social, paid work, entertainment, and volunteer opportunities and obligations that make up the life of a college student. Campuses are "total institutions", where students find the demands on their time to be both enticing and endless. The ethos of "work hard / party hard" best captures student life, a result Blum thinks of a performance culture that has pushed kids to be active achievers since pre-school. The result is that students spend less time on class work than professors would expect and want. Papers are written with an eye towards maximum efficiency, which when combined with Google and competing deadlines, often results in un-sourced and un-attributed quotes and ideas finding there way into final drafts.

The medium of the long-from (10 to 20 page paper) feels foreign and disconnected to the present and future work demands for almost all students. Comparable, perhaps, to speaking and reading in Latin. The disconnect between students fluency in absorbing, interacting with and creating rich media - and professors comfort with the long-form writing, is growing with each new class. Does Quentin Tarantino footnote his movies? Do the kids on Glee stop to give credit to the original artist for the songs they sing?

The solution, for Blum, is to take the time to engage issues around plagiarism and citation directly with our students. It may be necessary to craft different types of assignments, such as media mashups, ones that speak more directly to the cultural (and future employment skill concerns) of students. We should face the problem head on, and involve our students in coming up with a solution. The practice of hauling students into judicial proceedings for non-attribution is too close to the RIAA's strategy of suing individual college students, both unfair and ineffective in stemming the tide.

After reading My Word, it will be difficult to think of plagiarism through our traditional professorial lens.

What are you reading?

Like the author, I teach at a university and have encountered students who plagiarize. While she teaches anthropology, I teach a freshman English class where the topic of how to cite sources and avoid plagiarism is covered extensively. I would certainly recommend this book to anyone interested in this topic, even though I do not agree with everything the author says.

Since most of us consider plagiarism to be a moral issue, it is a bit disconcerting to encounter the anthropologist's cultural relativism. She states on page 147, "An anthropologist's task is first to understand." Through a study that involved interviewing numerous college students, she attempts to understand the "culture" that leads to so much cheating.

On page 140, she states, "Thus we can only partly blame the individuals who cheat; they have absorbed the cultural messages about competition, success, multitasking, and the bottom line."

On page 146, she states, "College students live in a world they did not make."

I don't think that she gives the students enough credit. Even in a world they didn't make, these students can still make choices. When it comes to blatant cheating, such as buying a paper online, the students know that what they are doing is a violation of the rules. Furthermore, if we don't punish students for plagiarizing, how can we expect them to take the rules seriously?

Nevertheless, I still think this book has much to offer. Anyone who works in a college setting will be interested to hear what the students say during the interviews. Susan Blum points out that many young people now feel a college degree is required for almost any kind of professional success, even in fields that once hired high school graduates. The result is many young people in college because they feel they have to be there, not because they want to be or because they are truly interested in the subjects they are learning. I must admit that I see among my students people who I think do not belong in college.

Furthermore, I do not think that citing sources is an easy skill to learn. For example, if a paraphrase comes too close to the wording of the source, that is considered plagiarism, even if the writer names the source in introducing the paraphrase and on the reference page. Even after extensive explanation, discussion, and practice in class, I have had students turn in papers that were plagiarized through this type of paraphrasing. They give me a blank look when I confront them, indicating that they did not do it intentionally to steal someone else's words. In these instances, rather than give them failing grades or reporting them for plagiarism, I discuss the papers with them and tell them that I cannot give them any credit until the papers are corrected and resubmitted.

It took me a long time to learn and truly understand the rules concerning plagiarism and properly citing sources. Now that I think I have a thorough understanding, I still worry that I might unintentionally plagiarize, with devastating professional consequences. I'm glad that Susan Blum discusses this anxiety. When I have heard about prominent and popular historians who were caught plagiarizing, I haven't been sure how to react. If they deliberately stole someone else's work to present as their own, I would condemn them, but what if a few citations were bungled in an otherwise substantial and well-documented piece of work? Could I make a similar mistake?

Susan Blum also raises the question of how far do we have to go in giving credit to our sources. After all, as she points out, almost everything that we say write is based on knowledge that we learned from someone else.

I have read a number of books on plagiarism (in order to be better prepared to teach my students), and many focus on what plagiarism is and how to avoid it. This book gave me a perspective that I did not find in the typical handbook.