AMDG

THE WAR ON PLAGIARISM

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing, he knew nobody

had said it before.

Mark Twain

Lawrence Tribe, Alan Dershowitz, Dolores Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose, Senator Joseph Biden---What do these names have in common? You’ve guessed it: they have all been accused of plagiarism. Poor Alan Dershowitz was accused of failing to cite his secondary sources. I can’t even guess at how many times I have penalized students for citing secondary sources instead of primary sources.

The word plagiarism is taken from the Latin noun, plagiarius, meaning “pirate or kidnapper” It simply means taking another author’s language or original ideas and passing them off as one's own. In the world of academe, it has become a capital crime comparable to stealing goods from someone’s locker or trashing a dormitory corridor in a drunken fury. In the decades-old “cat and mouse” game that undergraduate students and faculty play on this issue, the ratio of punishment to crimes has always been a small one. I have spent a good percentage of my time in the past 45 years of college teaching searching for the original sources for an “A+” research paper written by a student who normally demonstrates ninth grade writing skills. Now, with technological advances and the advent of Internet, this task has become even more difficult and, quite frankly, very frustrating. The students have too many weapons in this “catch me if you can” scenario.

We have tried to battle this new insurgency with weapons of our own: software like plagiarism.com; highly original assignments; academic honesty contracts and outright threats of severe punishment. Some concerned institutions make special efforts in Freshman English classes to advise students to avoid the practice of plagiarism. They forewarn students about Mosaic Plagiarism, a term that has been introduced to cover those students who pirate brief phrases and terms from the source and integrate them into their own prose. They also inform them that Accidental Plagiarism will no longer be tolerated. This is the term used to identify students who are ignorant of the rules or forms for citation and have unintentionally kept the original source hidden from the reader. Intentionality has always been a problem for faculty whose students plead innocence and ignorance of the rules when confronted. It is impossible, of course, to prove intentionality unless a student confesses outright. Most college student manuals publicly profess little tolerance for these unintentional offenses and group them along with premeditated acts of plagiarism.

All of these strategies and caveats have apparently failed to significantly reduce the incidence of academic dishonesty on college campuses. In a 1999 survey of 21,000 students at 21 campuses throughout the country, Donald McCabe at the Rutgers University Center for Academic Integrity (CAI) found that half of the students surveyed admitted to cheating on written assignments at least once. Internet plagiarism, in very recent years, has run rampant on college campuses. In another CAI study, the incidence of plagiarizing from the Internet has been reported to have increased from 10% in 1999 to 41% in 2001. There are websites that will write a student’s paper for as little as ten dollars a page.

Most recently, a few colleges and universities have now decided to resort to a sort of Patriot Act of their own to what appears to be an attempt to increase the numbers of offenders publicly punished for plagiarism. They seem to want to send a message to the larger numbers of students who escape punishment by borrowing old papers from classmates or purchasing original papers from a variety of websites. They have arbitrarily “stretched” the definition of plagiarism to include any citation errors that a student may commit on a research paper. This would include incorrect pagination, omission of a page number in the text or citing an incorrect source. As a result, hey have added one more label to the rubric of plagiarism---- Misrepresentation. No piracy is involved here – just carelessness.

Once penalized by reducing the grade for the paper, this sort of negligence is now justification for university sanction on grounds of “academic dishonesty” or a violation of “academic integrity”. The problem with this is that placing the adjective “academic’ in front of “honesty” and “integrity” doesn’t alter the definition or connotation of these words. Accusations of ”dishonesty” and “lack of integrity” have moral implications and cast public aspersions on a student’s character. To publicly sanction students for unintentionally and/or carelessly misrepresenting their sources on an undergraduate research paper doesn’t simply evaluate their performance, it impugns their character. If a cashier carelessly returns the incorrect change to a customer, it reflects on his or her job performance not his or her character. A pirate is a thief not an inept boatman. It is our role as academic mentors to inspire, motivate, inform and yes, to evaluate those students who enroll for our classes. Moral judgments and punishment are the business of those offices in any institution that exist to deal with student misbehavior, including cheating and intentionally plagiarizing on papers from undisclosed sources.

In a recent survey of 160 university websites, two undergraduate researchers, Salhany and Roig, reported in the Psy Chi Journal that only 66% of the institutions sampled publish an academic dishonesty policy and that a little more than half bother to include any statements at all about plagiarism. To their credit, a few institutions are responsible enough to publish this expanded definition of plagiarism so that at the very least their students are forewarned. Some, however, have decided to publish only the traditional definition in student handbooks but add the phrase “not limited to”, which subsequently leaves the newer, broader definition to the discretion of individual professors. Needless to say, uninformed students sanctioned under these mysterious new guidelines always have access to the College’s internal appeals process, which usually involves members of the professor’s own department reviewing their colleague’s decision and judgment. This is hardly a good example of the kind of unbiased due process that faculty demand for their own appeals. Ombudsmen, especially in private colleges, are pretty much non-existent these days. Students and their parents who have the funds can try to take legal action, but the courts are very reluctant to intervene in the academic process. Accountability appears to end at the gates of the institution.

So, in the final analysis, we find ourselves in a situation where those students who do make a sincere attempt to cite their sources (however carelessly) become more open to scrutiny and university sanctions than those students who cleverly mask their sources in a premeditated attempt to plagiarize. The obsessive need to publicly sanction a student for misrepresentation instead of simply lowering the student’s grade for these errors is an abuse of power. Furthermore, those university administrators who feel they must support their colleagues at all costs and uphold their action perpetuate the injustice to these students and demonstrate a callous disregard for their rights.

If the courts continue to be reluctant to intervene in academic matters, it is the responsibility of the universities and colleges in this country to come to an agreement on a detailed operational definition of academic dishonesty and plagiarism and publish this definition in its entirety in catalogs, student handbooks and websites. To continue to do otherwise would truly be a breach of academic integrity.

AMDG

I’M AHEAD OF THE CURVE
In the past few posts on this blog I have been insisting that the problem with this country is its people not just its politicians and its government. Well Evan Thomas of Newsweek just published an article squarely on that point. It’s sometimes heartening to know that you are not just shouting in the wind. I have reprinted it below.

WE THE PROBLEM
By Evan Thomas | NEWSWEEK
Published Feb 26, 2010
From the magazine issue dated Mar 8, 2010

Watching your government at work can be an appalling spectacle. Politicians posture and bicker, and not much gets done. It's gotten so bad—or at least seems so bad—that pundits are beginning to wonder if the system is broken in some fundamental way and to cast about for a big fix. Some little fixes might help—reforming the Senate filibuster would be a start. But the nation is not about to have a constitutional convention, and we don't need one. The Founders got it right, more or less, some 220 years ago, when they created a system of checks and balances that permits the exercise of power while protecting the rights of individuals and political minorities.

The problem is not the system. It's us—our "got mine" culture of entitlement. Politicians, never known for their bravery, precisely represent the people. Our leaders are paralyzed by the very thought of asking their constituents to make short-term sacrifices for long-term rewards. They cannot bring themselves to raise taxes on the middle class or cut Social Security and medical benefits for the elderly. They'd get clobbered at the polls. So any day of reckoning gets put off, and put off again, and the debts pile up.

In the last 30 or so years, Americans have lived as if there is no tomorrow. They have racked up personal debt, spending more than they save and borrowing heavily. Americans have become fatter: between 1960 and 2002, the average adult male in the United States put on 25 pounds, and the average woman gained 24; between 1998 and 2006, the percentage of obese Americans in-creased by 37 percent. Some attribute these gains to factors beyond individual control, but who can deny that self-restraint and self-denial are antiquated values? (In the college hookup culture, the ethos is to have sex first and only then, maybe, get to know the other person.) It's not just in Lake Wobegon, where all children are above average. Grade inflation is so out of control in the nation's high schools that 43 percent of college-bound seniors taking the SATs have A averages—even though SAT scores have remained flat or drifted slowly downward for years.

It is hard to know exactly how or when we got this self-indulgent. The '60s are partly to blame. The triumph of individual and civil rights, a wondrous fulfillment of the true meaning of the Constitution, was too often perverted into an "I got my rights" sense of victimhood. The noble push of the New Deal and the Great Society to fight poverty and illness, particularly among the very old and very young, hardened into the nonsensical defiance some tea partiers show when they shout, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!" The casting off of conformity and explosion of free expression contributed to the sour and selfish "Me Decade" of the 1970s. The spurt of economic activity in the 1980s and '90s spawned a generation of Gordon Gekkos on Wall Street and profligate spenders in the shopping malls of America (financed and enabled in part by more frugal Chinese buying American debt).

Politicians have never been very good at asking for sacrifice from their constituents. (And the ones who have tried have generally lost reelection.) Outside of wartime, there was never any golden age when political leaders successfully called on their people to give up what they perceived as their economic entitlements for the greater good. The last presidential candidate to call for tax increases on the middle class was Walter Mondale of Minnesota, in 1984, and he was defeated in every state but his own and the District of Columbia.
But lately, politicians seem to have lost the most essential element of the art of governing—meaningful compromise. In its pure form, compromise means mutual sacrifice. On Capitol Hill, there is only getting: politicians will vote for a bill if they get something, like a tax cut for an interest group or a pork-barrel project for their district. But they are not willing to give up anything. This is especially true where the other party is concerned. Partisanship has never been worse. It was not always this way. Read Robert Caro's Master of the Senate, about the way Lyndon Johnson, Senate majority leader in the late 1950s, bullied and horse-traded to craft majorities for civil rights out of both parties and all sections of the country.
Leadership requires a willingness to make the hard and sometimes un-pleasant choice.

Last week an article in The New York Times depicted some U.S. Marines watching in dismay as an Afghan Army officer demanded to have an enlisted man's drink—and then drained it with a laugh. In the U.S. Marine Corps and Army, the commanding officer always eats last, after his or her troops have been fed and cared for. The reason is simple, honorable—and practical. A leader will have a better chance of getting followers to make sacrifices if he or she shows a willingness to suffer greater hardships. (In the military, it is no accident that second lieutenants—platoon commanders—have the highest casualty rates.)
Politicians are not military commanders and shouldn't be expected to behave that way.

Still, to get something you have to give up something. That is the true test of compromise. In a poignant op-ed piece in the Times, Sen. Evan Bayh explained why he is not seeking reelection. While acknowledging that it would be a mistake to romanticize "the Senate of yore" inhabited by his father, former senator Birch Bayh, he recalled the more human and humane world of his father, when senators from different parties would socialize together—and offer to help with each other's campaigns, even if that meant jeopardizing their party's majority. "This is unimaginable today," wrote Bayh.

It's unfair to put the onus solely on President Obama to compromise. He has made some attempts, only to be stonewalled by the Republicans. But is there anything more he could do—anything immediate and concrete—to cut through the Gordian knot tying up health care?
Actually, there is. Obama is well in-formed enough to know that sky-high malpractice-insurance rates and defensive medicine drive up health costs. There is debate over how much, but any doctor will attest to the costly fear of a lawsuit. Almost all objective medical experts agree that something should be done to cut back the vast jury verdicts won by clever trial lawyers in medical-malpractice cases. But the Democrats have declined to even try. Why? Because trial lawyers are among the biggest campaign contributors to the Democratic Party.
If Obama were to come out squarely for medical-malpractice reform—in a real way—he would be making an important political statement: that as president he is willing to risk the political fortunes of his own party for the greater good. It would give him the moral standing, and the leverage, to call on the Republicans to match him by sacrificing their own political interests—by, for instance, supporting tax increases to help pay down the debt. At last week's summit, Obama said Republicans were overstating the costs of medical malpractice, but suggested that some remedies might be pursued at the state level. He'll have to do more than that to break through the partisan paralysis. But, as young Marines and soldiers understand, real leadership requires risks.

AMDG

Social Darwinism & Healthcare

Herbert Spencer, a 19th century philosopher, promoted the idea of Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism is an application of the theory of natural selection to social, political, and economic issues. In its simplest form, Social Darwinism follows the mantra of "the strong survive," including human issues. This theory was used to promote the idea that the white European race was superior to others, and therefore, destined to rule over them.

At the time that Spencer began to promote Social Darwinism, the technology, economy, and government of the "White European" was advanced in comparison to that of other cultures. Looking at this apparent advantage, as well as the economic and military structures, some argued that natural selection was playing out, and that the race more suited to survival was winning. Some even extended this philosophy into a micro-economic issue, claiming that social welfare programs that helped the poor and disadvantaged were contrary to nature itself. Those who reject any and all forms of charity or governmental welfare often use arguments rooted in Social Darwinism.

http://www.allaboutscience.org/what-is-social-darwinism-faq.htm

After the President’s recent six hour meeting with representatives from both parties from the Congress to try to get some bipartisan agreement on health care reform, most commentators concluded that there were clear ideological differences between the two parties. Duh! The problem is that these differences extend to the whole nation as well and the split is pretty close to 50-50. The Democrats see health care as a right while the Republicans see it as a privilege. The latter political party represents a large portion of this nation who truly believe that they do not have an obligation to take care of the basic need of their fellow citizens to survive. Thus, Social Darwinism. It’s based on the first rule of true capitalism Those businesses who make the most profits survive and prosper. Those who fail, go bankrupt, close up shop and fall to the wayside. That is what competition is all about. Winners and losers. Thus, those fellow citizens who are not smart enough, assertive enough or fortunate enough to provide for their own physical well being are bankrupt losers who have no right to drain the resources of the country in order to thrive. Let them go “cap in hand” to philanthropists to ask for what they need.

Finally, Finally!!!!!!! Anthony Weiner from New York speaks truth to powerl

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBqtyvn7OVw

Take a gander at this a new exciting state of the art approach to therapy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYLMTvxOaeE

Bill Moyers, the famous journalist. sums up the bottom line in this nation very well on his recent show on PBS. View it for yourself.

WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE

• Who are these people? Where did they come from? Did they go to the same American churches and schools as I did? Did they truly listen to the sermons on Christian charity or the read the Talmud’s mandate to do good works? Did they study American history and world history in high school or college? They are the sons and daughters of immigrants who despise and ridicule any other new immigrants to this country. They rail against government control and creeping socialism but come from families that were literally rescued from starvation by the big federal social programs initiated by FDR during the Depression. They warn against “government welfare” but readily accept their Social Security check each month and are not hesitant to flash their Medicare cards at the Doctor’s office.
• Who are these people? They live in middle class homes just like I do, eat at the same restaurants and root for the same sports teams as I do. Yet they support political lightweights who preach America first and do everything they can to sabotage any attempts to protect our American environment. At the same that their self righteous calls for “family values’ leaves their lips, they hold the airplane tickets for South America to meet their mistress.
• Who are these people? They proudly belong to the business class but they are engaged in what Dorothy Thompson once called “doubling”. Thompson used the term to describe the Nazi concentration camp officers, who join with neighbors and their children in singing Christmas carols at night and go on to gas Jews during the day. In the Godfather movie, Tessio tells Tom Hagen “tell Michael it was only business” to explain why he set Michael up for assassination. Each day these business professionals leave their suburban homes or urban coops in the morning for work, kiss their wife and children and wave “hello” to their neighbors. They are respected and gracious members of their community who will readily help a neighbor in distress. Then they go to business where an entirely antithetical set of values prevail. They cheat their partners, they steal sublegally, they gamble with other people’s money and they accept unconditional bonuses from their buddies. Then they go home and dress up for church.
• Who are these people? They work hard all of their life in blue collar jobs and often subsist on the margins of poverty. They are like my father and uncles who paid too much for their health care and got themselves into debt to send their children to college. Yet, they continuously vote against their own interests. They stand by quietly in denial while their political heroes decimate their unions and systematically lower taxes for the rich from a 90% rate in 1954 to a 33 % rate under Bush in 2002. They are so easily seduced by the so called American promise of prosperity, while their odds of ever becoming rich are about the same odds as hitting the lottery.
• Who are these people? In this terrible recession, they have jobs, homes, medical insurance and children in college. Yet they refuse to pay even a small increase in taxes in their state and towns to provide for those who have lost all of these to the recession. They compromise their own local educational systems by failing to support a budget that will prevent the hiring or cause the firing of good teachers. By doing this they foolishly lower their own real estate values by living in a state or town that has a poor reputation for its schools. They replay the classic Shakespearean tragedy over and over. They cause their own downfall.
• Who are these people? They come from ethnic groups that in earlier generations were vilified as Greaseballs, Micks and Huns. Some even come from a race that was almost wiped out during World War II in Germany just for being who they are. Yet they resent and despise the African American man in the White House and carry around graphic posters with lipstick smeared photos of him painted as Lucifer or Hitler. They listen to demagogues on the radio who call him “uppity” and politicians who euphemistically call him “arrogant”.
• Who are these people? They call themselves Christians and carry their bibles proudly to church where they join with others to hear “the word of God”. I guess they never turned to the many, many different times and different ways Jesus preached that we are our brother’s keepers. They skim past account of where he got so angry that he physically chased the money changers out of the temple. And how about “render unto Caesar,etc” which set the foundation for the separation of Church and State. And how about the beatitudes---“Blessed are the merciful etc” How about those beatitudes. And BTW, where are their ministers, priests and rabbis who don’t have the courage to confront their own congregations about social justice.
• Who really are these people who can sit by silently while thousands of children in their own affluent country die from semi-starvation or inadequate healthcare? What do they do with their conscience when they see photos of children in Appalachia, Newark or Native American Reservations living in dire poverty? How can they fight against universal healthcare when they see those long lines of their fellow citizens waiting in the bitter cold outside of those free health clinics?
• While we are on the Bible “He who is without sin, cast the first stone” Who the hell am I to lecture on this and go on like one of those street corner preachers. Who am I? I’m flawed and selfish and self absorbed like everyone else. I’m certainly not in the mold of St. Francis of Assisi who took the clothes off his back to give to the poor. I didn’t rush off to Haiti to work with the earthquake victims I don’t give to charities nor go to church nearly enough. I walk by the homeless poor in Grand Central Station like everyone else and am often in denial about my own part in all of this. But I realize this one thing ----when I do look at them, I realize “There for the Grace of God go I”---and the ones I love.
  
  JVP