(PDF) “Evil in the Classroom: Deception and Desire,” with David E. Alexander.

I analyze the potential a link between the problem of plagiarism and academic responsibility. I consider whether or not the way teachers and students view each other, education, and the writing process is irresponsible wherein producing papers becomes more valuable than the genuine learning that paper writing is originally intended to indicate and facilitate. This irresponsibility applies to both students and teachers who allow writing papers to be industrialized into meaningless tasks done in order to obtain a grade / pass a course. In this irresponsible situation, plagiarism can appear an efficient, albeit dishonest, gamble to succeed. Using the thought of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jan Patočka to philosophically assess and respond to this academic situation, I argue for a way to restore the teacher-student relationship to a proper state of care and responsibility.

Plagiarism is a particularly pertinent topic for Freshman English teachers for two reasons. The first is obviously that we encounter a considerable amount of plagiarism (possibly more than other departments because of the emphasis on essay-writing); the second is that we are often expected to play a major role in initiating students into academic culture. In other words, we are expected to detect, discourage and punish plagiarism, but also to teach students what it is, why they shouldn't do it, and how they can avoid it. I intend to examine the latter role by questioning how as institutions and individuals we present plagiarism to our students. I shall argue that some of our thinking here is confused, and that this can sabotage our attempts to educate students about plagiarism. University Policies To get an idea of the official view of plagiarism, I simply typed 'plagiarism policy' into a user-neutral search engine (Startpage). From the results, I kept those documents which were written by universities or departments and excluded those by individual instructors or people outside universities, such as essay mills and purveyors of plagiarism detection software. This left 89 documents. I analysed language in four categories: 1. commit,unprofessional, unfair, abusive, and their various word forms. I discounted terms that referred merely to breaking rules, such as misconduct, 4. Terms indicative of stealing and other property violation: stealing, borrowing, wrongfully taking material that is not our own, kidnapping, property, theft, appropriating. All but five of the documents included words in at least one of these categories and around half contained general moral terms. Indications of a belief that plagiarism was lying came in 15 of them, and the view that it is cheating had the same number. 19 documents contained language indicating a view of plagiarism as having something to do with property rights.

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“Evil in the Classroom: Deception and Desire,” with David E. Alexander.

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