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Monday, December 13, 2004
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OKLAHOMA STATE UNIVERSITY:
A PIONEER IN PLAGIARISM CREDIT One of the ways universities judge the research-activity of their professors is through citation-searches. If your work is routinely cited by many other scholars, this indicates a high stature in your field, and it adds significant points to whatever point-system your institution uses in their evaluation of you for the purposes of salary and promotion. Now that scholar-to-scholar plagiarism is rampant in American universities (see the article in the December 17 2004 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education), one university is leading the way in thinking creatively about the problem. If professors are rewarded when they are cited, should they not receive even more credit when they are plagiarized? Oklahoma State University has been embarrassed by recent revelations that one of its highest ranking, most beloved, professors has for decades been a majorly shitfaced plagiaristo. While OSU has no intention of even talking about, let alone punishing this man, its provost has announced that “in the interest of leveling the playing field,” OSU will now extend research-activity credit not only to faculty whose work has been cited (and of course to faculty who have plagiarized their work), but also to those whose work has been plagiarized. “We see our new Plagiarism Credit Initiative, or PCI, serving as a model for universities all over this country which want both to right a wrong and acknowledge work whose high quality is such that other scholars are writing it too,” says one high-ranking OSU administrator. Details of the PCI have yet to be worked out, but this administrator was able to sketch a few of its features for UD. “Obviously, the better known your plagiarist, the more points you will receive for having been plagiarized. The committee will be less impressed by some graduate student plagiarizing you than by (to take a recent case) Charles Ogletree. Similarly, the degree to which the plagiarism is word-for-word will count. Vague reiterations of your ideas in language that echoes, in a Proustian way, your own argot, even if these ideas are presented in strict sequentiality, will not make the cut. On the other hand, if, as in the case of plagiarist Neil Winn of the University of Leeds, your plagiarist has retained your words but Anglicized them, it will still count as verbatim plagiarism.” Other universities, including Harvard, are beginning to take notice of OSU’s leadership on the issue. “Yes, we’re aware of what they’re doing at OSU,” says Harvard’s president; “but until we have a critical mass of faculty plagiarism cases at Harvard -- say, twenty a semester, rather than four, which is about where we are now -- we’re going to take a wait and see approach.” |