Until the last few days, Matthew Whitaker was a full professor at Arizona State University and was the founding director of the school’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. But complaints from Whitaker’s fellow academics and an anonymous blog forced the school to investigate one of his textbooks, “Peace Be Still: Modern Black America From World War II to Barack Obama”. The investigation discovered “significant issues” with the book, such as major passages ripped from other books or even websites like Infoplease.
It's soooooo easy to plagiarize. My first semester teaching I was stunned to find plagiarism in a student paper. Said student cut and paste from several websites and submitted the work as his own. The topic was Edmund Burke.
One semester I had a major outbreak of plagiarism with half a dozen students being caught. After a particularly blatant example I made the entire class put their heads on their desks and those who had plagiarized were forced to raise their hands. I had at least seven, when only three raised their hands I insisted there were more examples. Nine hands went up.
Since then my policy has been automatic zero, humiliation before the entire class, and inclusion of plagiarizer's name in list of plagiarizers I give at the beginning of each semester.
Still they think they can get away with it.
Academic plagiarism of the kind committed by Professor Whitaker baffles me. When one's stuff is widely read (mine is) sooner or later someone will recognized a lifted paragraph. Once the suspicion is raised one's academic malfeasance is only a crowd sourcing effort away from being discovered.
Of course, there but for the grace of god go I.
I have never lifted something and passed it off as my own, not in my professional career, not in school. Is there something I have written upon which suspicion could be cast, a paragraph not restated well enough, maybe a sentence that I thought was a note I made but in reality had been copied verbatim? I guess.
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