Comments on Quick Takes: Call for Athletic Reform, Auburn Tightens Rules, Missouri Limits Coaches' Contracts, Southern Illinois Defends Leaders, Michigan State Eliminates Loans for Neediest, NCAA Clears Military School

• plagiarism
• Posted by Gary Roberts , Deputy Dean & Marks Professor of Law at Tulane Law School on July 24, 2006 at 10:30am EDT

• Re: The Southern Illinoid plagiarism debate -- There is no doubt that there is a big gray area in which it is unclear whether a statement made or document signed by someone that he/she did not author is improper plagiarism, but that does not mean that there is no such thing as improper plagiarism or that academics who commit what everyone universally recognizes as plagiarism should not be punished for it. The elements of plagiarism are that a novel idea or a specific collection of words that were originally authored by someone else is passed off by a plagiarizer as his/her own idea or words in a context where the plagiarizer gains direct and substantial professional benefit from doing so and he/she reasonably expects that the audience to whom the idea or words is directed would reasonably believe that the plagiarizer is the original author. To suggest that a welcome letter on a university web site is plagiarism is nonsense. That type of thing is quite common and nobody reasonably believes that a CEO of any organization actually originated such a pro forma document. The president of the United States (or any prominent politician or government leader)doesn't author any of his speeches or letters; senior partners at law firms every day sign briefs filed in courts or opinion letters sent to clients that are actually authored by younger lawyers in the firm; high ranking officers in corporations or any substantial organization routinely have their name affixed to the bottom of public documents they have never even seen. Such examples aren't even in the gray area -- they are not plagiarism because no one reasonably expects that the real author is the one whose name appears. On the other hand, when a professor publishes a scholarly article, which is the currency of the profession by which academics are judged, the unattributed statements contained therein are expected to be his/hers. Any copying from someone else in this context is also not in the gray area -- it is clearly plagiarism. Whether lines in a graduation speech could be considered plagiarism is in the gray area, with the best answer depending no doubt a great deal on context. But the bottom line is that just because there are many examples in our world where people don't write their own speeches or don't draft documents that have their name on the bottom does not mean that there is rampant plagiarism or that true plagiarism should be tolerated.

• Posted by Thane Doss on July 24, 2006 at 1:10pm EDT

• That the US Pres. doesn't author any of his own speeches obviously begs the question of in what sense they are "his." Given that those speeches are expected to reveal the policy aims that define him (so far always "him"), but that "he"--the person speaking the words--has not authored these formal definitions of himself, the situation also leads to questions about who "he" is. Academically, of course, this is ancient stuff, in the realm of the Queen's two bodies.

  Politically, though, perhaps it is worth wondering why any country would allow itself to be run by persons whose verbal identity is questionable. If the President is simply a function constructed by speechwriters, shouldn't voters be voting for the speechwriters, the little people behind the curtain, rather than for the next face of the Great and Powerful Oz?

  At any rate, that the speeches the President gives are not important enough for Presidents to write themselves, or that the Presidents we elect are essentially incapable of constructing speeches that convey their own ideas (or of constructing their own ideas clearly enough to form speeches about them) should not be viewed as a validation of ghost writing or of plagiarizing. It should be looked at as a symptom of what the American electoral system has become.

  What things are need not be the enemy of what things can be, if things can be better. Leadership by people who are actually capable of saying what they mean and intend without the assistance of cadres of writers would--I think--be better. It would be more transparent and, in many ways, more honest.