Crisis on Campus: Confronting Academic Misconduct

Reviewed by Michael Davis

The title Crisis on Campus suggests either a jeremiad in response to recent scandals or a trudging treatise on academic misconduct. Neither suggestion is right. Decoo devotes a few pages to academic misconduct generally (everything from the fabrication of data to the creative accounting of grant funds), and now and then laments what he sees as an overall decline in standards. But most of the book is about academic plagiarism and its near relatives, such as sloppy crediting. With the exception of the bibliography, the book lacks the sweep of a treatise. Crisis on Campus might more accurately be titled "Four Obscure Plagiarism Cases I Have Known." Yet the book is not to be skipped. Most of what makes the title misleading makes the book better reading and more likely to be useful. Carefully examined, a few new cases of everyday plagiarism can teach us more than any number of famous cases reprised once again.

Crisis on Campus seems to have begun as a report Decoo wrote for the administration of his own European university in his capacity as an outside referee for a dissertation submitted for a university prize. Decoo read the dissertation, was shocked by its incompetence, and reported accordingly. For him, plagiarism was only a secondary issue, a part of the incompetence. But "plagiarism" is a potent word in the academy today. Think, for example, of the criticism historian Stephen Ambrose has received for not using more quotation marks in his popular histories, or of historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s recent withdrawal from judging the 2002 Pulitzer Prizes after charges that her best-selling book, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, included several passages quite similar to passages in three other books.

Crisis on Campus is in part Decoo’s meditation on the long and complex plagiarism investigation his report initiated. The outcome was disappointing. The graduate student who committed the plagiarism—"X2," as Decoo calls him—was exonerated; his department awarded him the doctorate summa cum laude, and he is now a minor light in his field.

Meanwhile, Decoo became known as, in his words, a whistleblower. Colleagues asked him why he had made so much trouble over so little, administrators asked him to be more accommodating, and at least one government agency may have denied him a grant he would otherwise have received (because one of X2’s advisers was on the agency’s advisory committee).

In fact, Decoo did not fit the standard definition of a whistleblower because he did not report his suspicions outside regular channels or even report his suspicions on his own initiative. He simply did what his administration asked of him. He was no more a whistleblower than the messenger in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra who, upon returning to Egypt from Rome, truthfully answers the questions put by the jealous queen. Decoo was nonetheless as much a bearer of bad news as that messenger and, allowing for differences between Egypt’s royal court and a modern university, received much the same treatment.

This is a good story, but Decoo is not satisfied with simply telling it. He also wants to understand it. In the course of seeking understanding, he compares X2’s plagiarism with three other cases with which he was also involved, cases that had better conclusions.

In one case, a journal asked Decoo to review a book by "X1," an established scholar in his field. Decoo discovered long passages in the book that, though they seemed to derive from the work of other scholars, did not give proper credit. He consulted X1, who was not helpful, and then notified the review editor, an American who happened to work at X1’s university. The editor notified the university, and both the journal and the university undertook formal investigations. Both concluded that there had been plagiarism, and the journal published a full report, including X1’s confession.

Decoo describes two other cases, the stories of "X3" and "X4," much more briefly. When Decoo discovered that X3 had plagiarized some of Decoo’s own early work, he wrote a brief memo indicating that he had found some "interesting passages" in the book and asked whether X3 could supply a source. X3 was soon in Decoo’s office apologizing. X3’s case illustrates informal resolution.

In the last case, Decoo noticed that X4 had used, without acknowledg-ment or permission, a popular French textbook for learning language in order to produce a software program to teach language. Here plagiarism coincided with copyright infringement.

Decoo’s meditation on these cases leads to his division of the process of dealing with plagiarism, and indeed all academic misconduct, into five stages: detection, analysis, assessment, reporting, and subsequent handling. Anyone with something on her desk that looks like plagiarism should find much of what Decoo says helpful. Institutional rules, both official and informal, seem to change a good deal as one moves from detection to analysis, from analysis to assessment, and so on. To fail to adjust one’s conduct to the appropriate stage of the process is to risk a serious misstep.

Decoo writes for the practical academic. Every distinction he makes (for example, between absolute plagiarism and various sorts of partial plagiarism, including devices for disguising it) rests on the examination of texts. The original work is reproduced in one column and the plagiarism, drawn from the work of X1, X2, X3, or X4, in the next column. Decoo shares several practical tips. He tells readers about software for detecting plagiarism, and advises on how to approach a plagiarist, how to draw up a complaint, and how to deal with the common claim that "standards are different in my subfield." The book includes a number of nice lists. My favorite is the list of "usual excuses," but the most useful one is of ways to prevent plagiarism.

I found myself in serious disagreement with Decoo only once, during his brief discussion of "autoplagiarism." Since Decoo defines plagiarism as "the misuse of someone else’s words or ideas," autoplagiarism, like stealing from oneself, is an oxymoron. The term should therefore be avoided. Whether we should notify readers and publishers that what we offer in one place has already been wholly or partly published in another place is a separate question. We should, I think, give notice where the notice might be useful, but not otherwise. How tiresome to read the scholarly equivalent of "as I always say."

Decoo, a professor of philology, romance languages, and education, writes in an unexpectedly clear, quick English. He also offers an international perspective still rare in discussions of academic misconduct.

Michael Davis is a professor of philosophy at the Illinois Institute of Technology and senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Profession.

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