Plagiarism policy plagiarized?

There's a Little Rascals short, Hook and Ladder (1932), in which the kids spot a fire in the firehouse. "Fire in the firehouse!" they shout.

If Southern Illinois University had a firehouse, it would be burning today. The committee developing a university-wide plagiarism policy appears to have plagiarized Indiana University's plagiarism policy.

Here's the relevant passage from Indiana:

Plagiarism is defined as presenting someone else's work, including the work of other students, as one's own. Any ideas or materials taken from another source for either written or oral use must be fully acknowledged, unless the information is common knowledge. What is considered "common knowledge" may differ from course to course.

a. A student must not adopt or reproduce ideas, opinions, theories, formulas, graphics, or pictures of another person without acknowledgment.

b. A student must give credit to the originality of others and acknowledge indebtedness whenever:

(1) directly quoting another person's actual words, whether oral or written;

(2) using another person's ideas, opinions, or theories;

(3) paraphrasing the words, ideas, opinions, or theories of others, whether oral or written;

(4) borrowing facts, statistics, or illustrative material; or

(5) offering materials assembled or collected by others in the form of projects or collections without acknowledgment.

And now behold the following passage from Southern's draft policy, offered without attribution:

Plagiarism is presenting another existing work, original ideas, or creative expressions as one's own without proper attribution. Any ideas or materials taken from another source, including one's own work, must be fully acknowledged unless the information is common knowledge. What is considered "common knowledge" may differ from subject to subject. To avoid plagiarizing, one must not adopt or reproduce material from existing work without acknowledging the original source. Existing work includes but is not limited to ideas, opinions, theories, formulas, graphics, and pictures. Examples of plagiarism, subject to interpretation, include but are not limited to directly quoting another's actual words, whether oral or written; using another's ideas, opinions, or theories; paraphrasing the words, ideas, opinions, or theories of others, whether oral or written; borrowing facts, statistics, or illustrative material; and offering materials assembled or collected by others in the form of projects or collections without acknowledgment.

Says Arthur M. "Lain" Adkins, chair of the SIU committee that created the draft policy, "It could be a coincidence."

Says SIU administrator David West, "We think this is a non-story. It hasn't become official yet. If there's a problem with the draft, we will correct it."

As a college prof, I'm familiar with student use of coincidence and draft defenses. They don't work. Words and phrases and sentences don't organize themselves into parallel series as a matter of coincidence. And when work is submitted for critical evaluation, it becomes something more than a draft. Saying that one hasn't yet added the necessary citation defies any measure of what's plausible. SIU's draft policy has been publicly available for download, as its creators sought comment from the university community. USA Today reports that SIU's trustees will be voting later this spring.

Read more:

SIU accused of copying plagiarism policy, with links to relevant documents as PDFs (The Daily Egyptian)
Southern Illinois' plagiarism policy appears plagiarized (USA Today)

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"Local Norms" and "'organic' attribution"

A few words from Harvey Pekar

One of my favorite moments in the film American Splendor (dir. Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, 2003) comes from Harvey Pekar's story "Alice Quinn" (words by Pekar, art by Sue Cavey). Pekar has been thinking about a college classmate and "all the decades of people" he has known:

The more I thought, the more I felt like crying. Life seemed so sweet and so sad, and so hard to let go of in the end. But hey, man, every day is a brand-new deal, right? Just keep on working and something's bound to turn up.

Leave Me Alone!, a jazz opera by Pekar and Dan Plonsey, streams from Oberlin College tomorrow night, 8:00 EST.

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Naming names

People mentioned by name in Rod Blagojevich's closing argument to the Illinois Senate:

Phil Bredesen : George W. Bush : John Cullerton : Jimmy DeLeo : Willie Delgado : Dick Durbin : David Ellis : Rahm Emanuel : John Glenn : William Holland : Ted Kennedy : John McCain : Bob Menendez : Barack Obama : Harry Reid : Bill Richardson : Elizabeth Taylor : John Warner

Yes, Elizabeth Taylor.

Homonym accident

From a Rural King circular.


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No job too small

Snowbound

(A house, in the village.)

MAN
    My little house must think it queer
    To watch my woods fill up with snow.

(He looks out his window, at his woods, distant, wistful. Curtain.)

Life imitating life

"Let me make this perfectly clear. Let me make this perfectly clear: I didn't do anything wrong. I'm not guilty of any criminal wrongdoing."

Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, on The View this morning, after declining an invitation to do his (reportedly great) Nixon impersonation

A cup, a cup, a cup, a cup, a cup!

In the news:

A team of Swedish and Danish researchers tracked coffee consumption in a group of 1,409 middle-age men and women for an average of 21 years. During that time, 61 participants developed dementia, 48 with Alzheimer’s disease.

After controlling for numerous socioeconomic and health factors, including high cholesterol and high blood pressure, the scientists found that the subjects who had reported drinking three to five cups of coffee daily were 65 percent less likely to have developed dementia, compared with those who drank two cups or less. People who drank more than five cups a day also were at reduced risk of dementia, the researchers said, but there were not enough people in this group to draw statistically significant conclusions.

Dr. Miia Kivipelto, an associate professor of neurology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and lead author of the study, does not as yet advocate drinking coffee as a preventive health measure.

Coffee Linked to Lower Dementia Risk (New York Times)

[Post title from the song "Jave Jive" (1940), words by Milton Drake, music by Ben Oakland.]

Hi (and Lois) tech

Last week, the Flagstons sat in their living room watching a wood-grained grey television set. On Inauguration Day, the living room held a flat-screen television. And now it's gone. Perhaps it was a rental?

In today's living room (whose curtains, by the way, have lost their spots), the television, tucked away in a corner, appears to be of a still-older design (as does Thirsty Thurston). Nothing too surprising here: the Flagstons have changed refrigerators twice in the past four months. (Thanks, Jai, for pointing out that second new fridge.)

Elsewhere in today's living room, Hi is talking on an LPhone, whose name derives not from Lois' telephone habits but from the L-shaped dock. Note that the keypad changes as you talk. Sweet.



The strangest bit of Hi (and Lois) tech in the room is that light switch, resembling no known light switch.

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Five pens

1
A Parker T-Ball Jotter: the first pen I remember using with pleasure, probably in the fourth grade. The pen was made of stainless steel and grey plastic. The neutral tones blended nicely with the graphite-smeary interior of the pencil case at the front of my loose-leaf. At some point the grey plastic developed a crack that filled with blue ink.

Ink: the Jotter's was gummy and sweetly fragrant. I wish that it were available to the nose as well as to memory.

This pen must have come from the OK Bookshop, the source of all school supplies, a corner paperbacks and stationery store on New Utrecht Avenue, Borough Park, Brooklyn, under the El tracks. The owner of the store sat at a desk in a small alcove. He used a device on his shoulder that allowed him to talk on the telephone hands-free. My mother once checked with him — or with someone else who worked there — about whether Man from U.N.C.L.E. novels were "appropriate" for readers my age. (They were.) Ian Fleming's work no doubt put that worrisome question in her head.

As a boy, I must have liked this pen's multi-sectioned name. "Hey, Mike, what kind of a pen is that?" "It's a Parker T-Ball Jotter." Like "United States of America" or "John Fitzgerald Kennedy."

2
A variety-store ball-point pen, transparent red plastic with a white push-button mechanism. Push the plunger down and the point appears. Press the little button on the side of the pen and the point retracts. I cannot remember writing with this pen, but I remember using it as a walkie-talkie one night while spying in a Robert Hall clothing store in Brooklyn. (The rest of the family was shopping.) Espionage and cryptography were major factors in my childhood, which drew considerable inspiration from U.N.C.L.E. and Clifford Hicks' novel Alvin's Secret Code.

[Lost years: a long blur of Bics, Flairs, and Pilot Razor Points.]

3
The Faber-Castell Uni-Ball: I wrote my dissertation with it, or them. Many Uni-Balls!

The Uni-Ball was part of a work routine that I remember as strangely pleasant. I wrote in longhand on legal-sized pads with a Boston University Law School imprint. These pads had an enormous left margin, great for endnotes and revision by accretion. (I've never seen such pads since, though I know they're still around.) Every weekday, I'd write, then type (first on an Olympia manual, later on a Panasonic electronic typewriter). In the afternoon I'd walk to a photocopy shop in the Coolidge Corner Arcade (Brookline, MA) and get my typescript copied before editing. I often added a trip to Beacon Stationery to buy envelopes, folders, and another Uni-Ball or two.

The matte black plastic, the flat clip, the funny notches at the top of the cap: all features of a simple, beautiful design. For a long time, the Uni-Ball meant "writing."

4
"Please don't get me a fountain pen": I remember telling my wife Elaine that while disserting. Yes, she was thinking about a present to celebrate the end. I'm not sure how it is that fountain pens were in the air. Elaine wrote with one — an inexpensive Geha with an incredibly smooth nib. I'm guessing that my pleasure in trying the Geha made a fountain pen an obvious choice.

The pen that Elaine gave me was a Montblanc of Uni-Ball-like simplicity, made of stainless steel, not "precious resin." It was, of course, just what I needed. I wrote with it through my first years of teaching and turned into a serious fountain-pen fan, switching early on from cartridges to bottled ink (the hard stuff). And then the grippers inside the slip-on cap began to lose their grip, and a shirt pocket turned black, and it was time to put the pen in its case and find another.

5
I had no idea how complicated finding another fountain pen would prove. I started with a Sheaffer that refused to dispense ink. (I knew nothing about cleaning a pen, nor did the people at the office-supply store, who just gave me a refund.) Getting a pen turned into getting pens, all relatively modest, before I found what has become my everyday writer, a Pelikan, purchased in the summer of 1998. This pen has green stripes, a fine nib, and takes bottled ink. It has never leaked or failed to write. Its maintenance has involved nothing more than an occasional flushing with water and — just twice — a dab of silicone paste to keep the piston moving freely.

My Pelikan has taught me to think about price in relation to use: this pen has turned out to be a much less expensive proposition than, say, a ten-year supply of Uni-Balls. Since 1998, virtually everything of any length that I've written, I've written with this pen (including the draft of this post).

Thank you, Elaine, for not listening to me, all the way back in Brookline.

Happy National Handwriting Day to all.

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On "American music"

Van Dyke Parks, in an interview concerning Song Cycle:

Aaron Copland (who'd given me an A in a collegiate test) was once asked, "What is American music?" He answered, “American music is music that was written in America.” I believe that explains the penchant that some music observers have for branding Song Cycle "American."

It appears that Song Cycle will be reissued in 5.1 sound later this year.

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