One of the most critical and complex applications of Westminster's Honor System has to do with the problem of plagiarism. Because we wish to do all that we can to clarify this issue, we have developed the following explanation.
Customs and norms of behavior differ from culture to culture and sometimes significant differences exist even within the same culture. It is important both to recognize the diversity and to understand the norms and expectations of the society within which, at a given point in time, one is living. This becomes particularly critical when the matter of academic expectations is involved.
Since ideas and their communication are one of the most important ingredients in an academic institution like Westminster, it is most important that we, as a community, make abundantly clear our expectations with regard to the sharing and transmission of ideas. We think it essential that no one ever present as his own the academic achievements of another. Certainly the intellectual contributions of others may be utilized, but whenever they are, full credit must be given to the one whose ideas they are. In a word, plagiarism must be avoided at all costs.
But the exact definition of plagiarism varies from society to society and from context to context within any given society. Therefore, we have provided below an extensive description of what plagiarism is and what it is not. With plagiarism understood in the manner defined by this statement, the policy of the seminary in dealing with cases of plagiarism will be as follows:
Plagiarism is a serious infraction of the law of God and is punishable by measures determined by the faculty up to and including expulsion from the seminary.
The following discussion of plagiarism is taken from Prose Style: A Handbook for Writers, pp. 253-258, by Wilfred Stone and J. G. Hill (Copyright, 1968, 1972, by McGraw-Hill, Inc.). It is used with permission of McGraw-Hill Book Company.
Plagiarism is literary burglary. At its worst it involves an outright intent to deceive, to pass off another's work as one's own. More often, it is the result of carelessness or ignorance. But whether intentional or unintentional (the distinction is often hard to draw), plagiarism is always an error, and a serious one.
Whenever you borrow another writer's words or ideas, you must acknowledge the borrowing. The only exceptions are information in the public domain (Columbus landed in America in 1492; oxygen was originally called phlogiston; oranges grow on trees) and opinions within anyone's range (Hamlet is a great play; time flies). Many undergraduates have trouble with this problem. Some react with an overnice conscience and footnote even dictionary definitions. Others change two or three words in a quotation and feel that they have somehow made it their own. The first practice is irritating, the second unethical. The right course is a generous and intelligent consideration of both the reader you are addressing (he will take 1492 on faith) and the writers you are using. When you use their words, their ideas, even their organization or sequence of ideas, say so--in a footnote or in the text. Claim as your own only what properly is your own.
The following examples may help to clarify the difference between legitimate and illegitimate borrowing. Here is a part of the paragraph on Thoreau from Vernon Louis Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought.
At Walden Pond and on the Merrimac River Thoreau's mind was serene as the open spaces; but this Greek serenity was rudely disturbed when he returned to Concord village and found his neighbors drilling for the Mexican War, and when authority in the person of the constable came to him with the demand that he pay a due share to the public funds. The war to him was a hateful thing, stupid and unjust, waged for the extension of the obscene system of Negro slavery; and Thoreau was brought sharply to consider his relations to the state that presumed to demand his allegiance, willing or unwilling to its acts. Under the stress of such an emergency the transcendentalist was driven to examine the whole theory of the relation of the individual to the state.
The following examples will demonstrate some representative ways in which this passage, or parts of it, might be misused. (For simplicity we omit footnotes from the following discussion. A truly adequate acknowledgement to Parrington would of course include a footnote giving his name in full, the title of his book, the city and date of publication and the numbers of pages from which the writer's information is drawn.)
Inadequate Acknowledgement: Outright Theft
When Thoreau was at Walden Pond or on the Merrimac River he knew considerable peace of mind, but when he returned to Concord this peace of mind was rudely disturbed. He came back to find his neighbors drilling for the Mexican War, a war he thought wrong, and when the constable came to him and demanded that he pay taxes to support the war, he balked. The war to him was a hateful thing, stupid, and unjust, waged for the extension of the obscene system of Negro slavery; and Thoreau was brought sharply to consider his relations to the political state that presumed to demand his allegiance. In such an emergency just how did the individual relate to the state?
In this example the writer has rephrased Parrington's first and last sentences, using some of his own words and some of Parrington's. He has made enough other minor modifications so that no full sentence of the original remains intact. But these trivial exceptions apart, he has copied the original word for word. His intent to deceive is clear, the more so from his inept camouflaging of the first and last sentences. Had the writer put the directly quoted portion in quotation marks (or made it a single-spaced insert quotation) and footnoted it, he would not be guilty of plagiarism. He would have made it clear that he was contributing nothing of his own to the discussion, but was simply inviting us to listen to Parrington. As it is, however, he is passing off Parrington's words as his own, pretending to a knowledge (and style) he doesn't have. This is an inexcusable moral error.
Inadequate Acknowledgement: Paraphrase
At Walden Pond and on the Merrimac River Thoreau's mind was calm as the open spaces; but this serenity was rudely disrupted when he returned to Concord and discovered his neighbors drilling for the Mexican War, and when the constable, representing authority, came to him and demanded that he pay his share of taxes for the war. He regarded the war as hateful, stupid, and unjust and waged to extend the slave system, which he opposed. This experience caused Thoreau to reconsider sharply the whole question of the relation between the individual and the state.
This example represents only a negligible improvement on the last. The writer has made more changes in wording than the outright plagiarist, but has contributed no more of his own thinking or wording. Every idea in his paragraph and most of the words and phrases are taken directly from Parrington without acknowledgement. Though the writer has avoided copying whole clauses word for word, he is plainly guilty of plagiarism.
But what is a writer to do in such a case? Clearly it is impossible to enclose a paragraph in quotation marks, for quotation marks may be used only where an author's words are reproduced exactly and completely. How then can plagiarism be avoided here? The best way is running acknowledgements in the text, as in the following example.
Adequate Acknowledgement: Paraphrase
According to Vernon L. Parrington, the "Greek serenity" of Thoreau's mind at Walden Pond and on the Merrimac River was rudely disturbed when he returned to Concord and found his neighbors drilling for the Mexican War, and when the town constable, representing authority, came to him asking that he pay his share of taxes for the war. Thoreau regarded the war as stupid, unjust, and designed to extend its effects, says Parrington, caused Thoreau to reconsider the whole question of the relation between the individual and the state.
In the two sentences in which Parrington's name appears, it is clear that the ideas are his. But what about the other sentence? Has the writer slipped in something of Parrington's as his own? An argument can be made either way; but since in general the writer is being straightforward about his debt, there can be little difficulty about giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Decisions like this are not always easy, since too many phrases like "Parrington says" or "Parrington goes on to point out" make writing graceless. If the claims of honesty and grace conflict, be honest first, but try also to be as graceful as you can. Every last comma need not be acknowledged. In the passage above, for example, only one phrase was placed in quotation marks even though other words--among them stupid and unjust--were used by Parrington. Since it was inconvenient to quote stupid and unjust in the one set of quotations marks and unjust in another, the writer decided that honesty was adequately served by his two general acknowledgements to Parrington. We think he was right.
Inadequate Acknowledgement: Forgetfulness
When Thoreau returned to Concord, he was shocked to find his neighbors drilling for the Mexican War. It was still worse when the government asked him to pay taxes for a war he didn't believe in, a war he considered hateful, stupid, and obscene. At Walden and on the Merrimac his thoughts had taken on an almost Greek serenity; now he was confronted with the dilemmas of real life. He did not hesitate. Putting aside his transcendental notions, he plunged into an examination of what the individual may legitimately be said to owe the state.
This writer has clearly mastered his material and knows what he wants to say. He has abandoned Parrington's sequence of ideas; he has added his own emphases; and his phrasing is largely his own. But in questions of acknowledgement, "largely" is not enough. Three bits of undigested Parrington remain: "his neighbors drilling for the Mexican War," "hateful, stupid and obscene," and "Greek serenity." The first of these phrases is neutral enough to make its borrowing forgivable. The other two, and especially "Greek serenity," are not.
Given the writer's general performance, it seems likely that he has unconsciously drawn on his memory for the words in question, or perhaps that he has worked from slovenly note cards. He is nonetheless guilty of dishonest borrowing. At the very least, he should have put "Greek serenity" in quotation marks and acknowledged a general indebtedness to Parrington.
Adequate Acknowledgement: Mature Borrowing
There was a time when writers paid no attention to plagiarism. Chaucer and Shakespeare, for example, borrowed incessantly from other writers without acknowledgement, and never gave the matter a thought. But in the last century or so Western writers have taken an increasingly proprietary attitude toward their own work, and it is now considered common decency to give a writer credit for the use of his ideas, his words, or even the sequence in which his ideas are presented.
Many people who do not write much themselves feel that there is something natural or inevitable in a writer's sequence of ideas--they might feel that Parrington, for example, starting with Walden Pond and ending with the state, was simply recording the sequence established by history. But of course he was doing no such thing. History is written by historians; the shape of past events is the shape of the minds that set down these events. And so it is with the Parrington passage: what makes it useful is not so much its individual ideas and phrases as Parrington's general authority and intelligence.
If, therefore, you begin with Walden Pond and end with the individual and the state - no matter what words you use in between - you must make a bow to Parrington somewhere along the line and thank him for his help. This is not only elementary honesty, but elementary courtesy. Here is such a passage:
Vernon Parrington pictures Thoreau at Walden as knowing a kind of "Greek serenity" that was rudely shaken when he returned to Concord and found his neighbors drilling for the Mexican war. Yet the more one studies Thoreau, the more one wonders whether this contrast between the serene recluse and the embattled citizen is a valid one. We are increasingly knowledgeable these days about the hostility implicit in an act, any act of withdrawal. Parrington implies that Thoreau was driven by events to take a political position, and in a sense he is right. But was there no political content in his move to Walden?
Here the writer has used Parrington, but not exploited him; Parrington has helped him, and he admits as much in the very act of taking issue with one of Parrington's ideas. Such a writer doesn't want to steal and doesn't have to. The words of others are not some sort of mask or false identity that he puts on to deceive the world; they are elements in his search for truth. Why not honor those who have gone before and done good work? We need all the help we can get. In the search for truth we have too few ideas, not too many; if we are honest men, we should let the world know what lights we are following and who lit them.
