This is a wonderful editorial written by people at KU, which I strongly recommend. They address the increasingly serious problem of the privatization of research, with the result that the public and scholars are getting priced out of having access to the very research they help finance and produce. This issue of open access is one where KU finds itself at the forefront. (It’s nice to read articles that pair Harvard and KU as two institutional trailblazers for open access, kind of like the mock-NCAA bracket that appeared this week based on athletes’ academic performance, where KU barely squeezes by the Harvard team to win the championship.) The editorial calls for passage of a bill before Congress that would force institutions that receive more than $100 million in federal funds to make the results of their research available on the internet. The KU team points out that with private companies now controlling 60% of all journals, prices have skyrocketed during a time when libraries budgets have remained flat at best. This is not a sustainable model, and something needs to change. Although humanities journals are not really where the problem is (prices of humanities journal subscriptions, on the whole, remain reasonable), the price explosion for subscriptions to scientific journals has caused libraries to cut everywhere they can, including curtailing expenditures on humanities journals and books. We have been relatively fortunate at KU, where budgets have remained fairly robust, but if the current trend of overpriced scientific journals continues, the libraries will be forced to take more draconian measures.
This is quite an interesting and provocative article by Rob Jenkins about plagiarism from awhile back. Most articles you read today about plagiarism invoke a lot of hand wringing and get us worked up with a lot of talk about what a huge, unprecedented crisis we face. Jenkins takes a rather different approach to the problem. First, he teases academics for being such pedants, obsessing over details that normal people would not consider worth their time. What I like here is how he sets out some pretty straightforward strategies for dealing with plagiarism:
1. Keep your priorities straight. What he means by this is that teachers should not become so preoccupied with fighting plagiarism that it negatively impacts their teaching. While one should take it seriously, efforts on this front should not eclipse other areas of teaching that are actually more important; 2. State your policy in your syllabus. This is very straightforward, but quite important when you find yourself having to deal with a plagiarism case; 3. Talk about it openly. I have found this to be my most effective tool in dealing with plagiarism. After I had a class in which half the students plagiarized to one degree or another on a research paper, I realized that ignorance was a big part of the problem, that people who were well intentioned were doing it because they weren’t fully aware of what constitutes plagiarism. Since then, I have been more vocal about it and tried to explain it in greater detail before having students turn in assignments. The problems I had previously encountered dropped precipitously after I took the time to explain plagiarism better; 4. Make plagiarism difficult. One idea he has that I’ve decided to implement in my classes is to have students do an in-class writing assignment first that I can then compare to out-of-class writing assignments they do later so I have a baseline to compare it to; 5. Don’t penalize the non-plagiarists. I very much like this point and share his attitude: I always work off the assumption that students are honest and not trying to cheat. Like Jenkins, I would never limit writing assignments to the in-class variety, because I think that serious writing takes time and I don’t want to use up a lot of class time on such activities simply because I’m afraid people will cheat if they don’t do their work in class; 6. What about the software? He doesn’t like software like Turnitin, for a variety of reasons. This is not a problem for me, since students in my classes write in French and there is no equivalent French software; 7. Let it go. As he remarks, “Either you can be a teacher or you can be the plagiarism police.” I’m not sure if I’m capable of being as aloof about it as he is, but he does make a good point: when I find myself fixating excessively on borderline cases, it negatively affects me and my teaching, as well as my relationship with my students. Sometimes, I should just chill. As a student once said to me, “Hé prof ! Soyez zen !” Overall, I very much enjoyed a refreshing counterpoint to the typical sorts of articles one reads about plagiarism. I have just finished reading a few articles about higher education in the New York Times. To avoid being overly political, I’m not going to blog about Paul Krugman’s piece, although it’s hard for me not to agree with what he says about attacks from the right against higher education. This opinion piece by Professor Andrew Delbanco, who is in American Studies at Columbia, addresses the issue of smugness and snobbery at schools like the Ivy League. He points out that this is one of the main reasons why people outside the academy (and even within the academy) have such a visceral reaction against elitist schools. He makes an important point about how SAT scores, a big factor in admission decisions for schools like Harvard and Princeton, rise in direct proportion to household income. Only 3% of students in the top 150 schools in the US come from families from the lower income quartile. That’s a pretty sobering statistic in a country that claims to provide opportunities for all. Delbanco reminds readers that schools like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were founded by stern Protestants who felt the mission of these schools should be to teach humility and charity. This has been lost, replaced by a feeling of entitlement, as students who arrive at these schools are constantly congratulated for being so bright, for being “a cut above the rest.” Delbanco says schools like these should return to a secular version of some old-time religion. If graduates from top universities cultivated humility and charity instead of smugness and feelings of superiority, it would go a long ways towards diffusing negative attitudes towards such institutions. His vision is probably far too utopian, but I do think it’s a nice idea.
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AuthorI am an associate professor of French literature and culture at the University of Kansas. The opinions expressed here are my own. They do not in any way, shape, or form represent the views of my department or university. Archives
September 2015
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