Anyone who works as a professor or researcher should know what it means to plagiarize. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, like the two other federal research councils, clearly defines the notion in its Framework for Responsible Conduct in Research. Plagiarism consists of: “the use of the published or unpublished work of another person […] as if it were his without making the appropriate mentions and, where applicable, without permission”.
The key words are obviously: “as if it were his” and “without making the appropriate mentions”. If we leave aside the borderline cases where it is alleged that two or three banal sentences are identical, we must admit that uncovering plagiarism in a text is not a very difficult exercise.
Unfortunately, many university professors are often imaginative in trying to deny or circumvent the obvious. The same is true of university managers who are experts in the language of wood. Having served on various disciplinary committees, I will present some arguments often heard from people who seek to excuse confirmed plagiarists.
Different Defense Classes
We can distinguish different main classes of defense.
A first classic defense of the plagiarist and his defenders consists in highlighting the otherwise irreproachable ethics of the plagiarist, who would have had no desire to steal the work of others. We will therefore try to emphasize that his “error” was made in “good faith”. However, this line of defense tends to be weakened when more than one instance (sometimes dozens) is discovered where passages have been fraudulently copied, reproduced without quotation marks.
Another defense calls into question, conversely, the “malicious” intentions of the person who denounced the plagiarism. We will say that she is jealous or wants to settle accounts for various reasons. The fallacy here consists in confusing the do plagiarism and the reasons that can lead a person to report it. It is however obvious on the epistemological level that the veracity of a fact does not depend on the reasons which lead to its discovery.
The other major class of defense seeks to minimize the offending act. We will then say that these are only a few lines in a work of hundreds of pages. Or we will affirm that the plagiarized works are in the bibliography, a fact that does not change anything about plagiarism. We can even think that strategist plagiarists think they can get out of it precisely by putting the plagiarized text in the bibliography, as if that were “proof” that the text was not plagiarized.
The last major class of defense attempts to shift blame. In the case of a work with several authors, this is possible and may even be true. I remember an old case where one of the authors of a partly plagiarized work admitted to being solely responsible and thus exonerated his co-author. If the author is alone, he can shift the blame to his editor, who would then have made the “editorial choice” not to multiply quotation marks and footnotes. We can even go so far as to try to make believe that, to facilitate reading and make it more pleasant and more accessible, the publisher has decided to limit the use of quotation marks.
Plagiarists and “social death”
It is interesting to consult the cases of plagiarism involving university professors who have found themselves before various courts, since arbitrators and judges often insist on recalling that “plagiarism cannot be tolerated on the part of a teacher. It cannot be tolerated that the holders of this function themselves indulge in abuses of this nature or others which are prohibited to students” (https://canlii.ca/t/gkf4x). Referees and judges recall that it is about the respect that the widest public must have for the university institution.
Indeed, the academic world works above all for the accumulation of symbolic capital. However, the specificity of symbolic capital is that it is based on credibility. The fact that symbolic capital is difficult and time-consuming to acquire, but very easy to lose, moreover largely explains the rhetorical energy of negation and diversion that plagiarists are generally ready to expend in an attempt to save face.
If their scientific reputation seems tarnished forever, they always have the possibility of migrating to another social field, whose standards are different. Because in the academic world, it is well known that the loss of confidence, credibility and therefore symbolic capital most often constitutes a social death, even when the person does not lose his job.
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