Recently, a new adjunct I hired to teach a popular Journalism course this semester reported that she had discovered two cases of plagiarism. What now, she asked? What now, indeed, I thought?  The cases were unrelated. By that I mean the students were not in cahoots. The assignment was to interview someone and turn in the interview. One student turned in an interview with a starlet she could not possibly have spoken with. The other pulled a paragraph worth of quotes from a website.

I have served on the university’s Academic Integrity Committee and I come from a business where this sort of thing costs people their jobs. Say what we will about content being free, blah, blah, blah, theft, that’s what plagiarism is, after all, is still a mortal sin in most reputable newsrooms. I find that reporters are attached to their bylines, just as book authors are attached to their names on that dust jacket. All that sweat and pain means something, something all writers want to protect. I mulled over the situation and directed the adjunct to the university’s academic integrity policy, including the form she, the students in question and either myself, as program director, or the dean, or both, would ultimately have to sign and send up the line. Then I asked how she planned to proceed.

Though her syllabus calls for flunking any student who commits plagiarism, she chose instead to flunk both students on the assignment as these were first offenses. She contacted each student by email to say that they needed to discuss a matter of academic integrity and to schedule a meeting. One student responded immediately. The instructor met with the student, who freely admitted she had done wrong. She said she’d panicked as deadline approached and her interview subject did not respond to requests to schedule their talk. Instead of asking for an extension, however, she made what is an incomprehensible decision, at least to me. She chose to pass off an interview with someone famous and clearly out of reach as her own work (not that passing off an less famous person’s interview would be any better. Presumably, though, it wouldn’t be so easily detected).

The second student didn’t respond until days later and then became irate, even shouting after the instructor as she left class. I suggested to the adjunct that she might want me to sit in on their talk once it was scheduled. We met this morning in my office. The student freely admitted doing wrong, signed the form and then proceeded to attack the instructor’s teaching. Later, the student returned to my office to continue making her case, going so far as to suggest that I should not re-hire this adjunct.  Who should she write to, she wanted to know, to be sure “no one else” would have to go through what she’d been through.  The list of grievances and complaints was long, random and apparently agreed to, “by almost everyone” in the class. I told the student to put her observations in the end-of-course evaluation, assured her I took these seriously and made it clear that her complaints about the course had nothing to do with her decision to plagiarize. For that, she would have to truly accept responsibility. I am doubtful, quite honestly, that she ever will.

Perhaps she should take a lesson from http://www.pakistan.com.pk

When I alerted these folks via their Facebook page today that they had violated copyright by stripping the byline off of a Hilltop Views story and posting it without attribution to either its author or original publication, I got this response: “I sorry. Can you tell me which section has that story or subject matter? I can fix it. Thanks.”