Matthiessen reminds me that “The true function of scholarship as a society is not to stake out claims on which others must not trespass, but to provide a community of knowledge in which others may share.”

I still need to cite. I still have to talk about plagiarism with my students. But I need also to remind them why we even bother inhabiting the community of knowledge.

Consider this in terms of a ‘body of knowledge’. In order for us to create movement and evolution in this kind of body, the same principles must be applied. Of course, a small amount of resistance (consider for instance, a few years of exclusive intellectual property – patent, copyright) serves to make the organism stronger. But too much resistance, and the whole body separates, and therefore dies. Let’s hope that we can bring society under the governance of these obvious, practical laws for the sake of our survival.

It seems the issue is one of semantics, of the definition of terms. To me, plagiarism is not about using the ideas of others, we all do that (and if we don’t then what are we doing in universities?). Plagiarism is about deception – deliberately and knowingly passing other’s ideas as our own. That, to me, is *not* what Matthiessen was talking about. Deliberate plagiarism is not about sharing in the community of knowledge but about gaining advantage (such as a pass, or a Degree) by deception. This is not assimilating the thoughts of others in the exploration of knowledge, but using their words and ideas for personal gain. Whether undergraduate, post-graduate, artistic, literary, commercial or political (yes, we have had plagiarising politicians in Australia), deception does matter.

My thinking has been influenced by my own reading as well as by my relationships with my teachers, peers and students for decades. I hope that I will continue to adapt and change my thoughts in relationship with them. I trust also that I will acknowledge those influences where I am aware of them. While a good idea doesn’t care who it belongs too, a good scholar does care about the development of those ideas. This is the scholarship part of “Plagiarism, Scholarship, and Community Knowledge”.

Or am I missing the point entirely?

Your suggestion that you could “care less if a student is influenced by what he reads” betrays your pedagogy, as that is almost all I care about, I want all of my students to be influenced by what they have read, otherwise why would I have them read.

I feel you are looking at the surface and limiting the quote’s potential only to what the lowest common denominator of lazy students will do with it.

As a student I hope to live up to that quote by assimilating so much knowledge from my instructors, peers and strangers in line at the grocery store that I become able to instinctively take their views into my self, mold them, advance them, apply them to something I’ve considered without prior progress, and return the new beast to the collective for the next mind to shape. If the conversation is so deeply embedded in my thoughts that I automatically pull from it, I’ve held up my end of the learner/educator bargain. Only through participating in the discussion, and using it to progress as well as defeat itself and our own arguments, can we advance knowledge. (And I’m sure I would never have felt that way had I not studied under some instructors who did.)

It’s a good kind of theft to which I hope to one day offer enough valuable information to fall victim.

I could care less if a student is influenced by what he reads and uses that as inspiration to write an essay or paper. But blatant ‘cut and paste’ or changing one word in a copied sentence without quotes is another matter, I hope you would agree.

We want students to write their own papers, not use someone else’s words. That’s a big part of scholarship.