In one of the more interesting turns of the worm in the week’s ethics news, two students at a Virginia high school have filed a $900,000 lawsuit against Turnitin, a commercial service that some schools and universities use to detect plagiarism.

Turnitin works by requiring students to submit their work through the company’s website link, which then computes a “similarity index” and provides links to possibly plagiarized sources. According to BusinessWeek, the service has about 9,000 subscribing institutions, which pay about 80 cents per student per year.

The plaintiffs charge that the service violates copyright law by archiving student papers, creating a huge database that can be searched for similarities among student papers, Internet material, and collected articles.

The students who filed the suit say they object to the archiving of their papers without their consent. In addition, they say they don’t like the forced imposition of a service that presumes guilt. The parents of one of the plaintiffs told the Washington Post, “You can’t take a person’s work and run it through a computer and make an honest person out of them. My son’s major objection is that he does not cheat, and this assumes he does.”

Does Turnitin, in an effort to prevent an unethical act, commit a breach of ethics? If so, can we excuse small breaches, such as the unauthorized archiving of a student’s paper, or small erosions in the climate of trust between student and teacher if they produce a “greater good” — minimizing cheating?

Let me preface the rest of this column by noting that as a journalist, author, and college professor, I detest plagiarism both professionally and personally. I regard plagiarism as theft of property. This is more than an abstract view: A few years ago I was involved in a lawsuit against a firm that produced course reading packets by copying, without permission or payment, entire chapters out of various books. In my case, the “theft” amounted to three chapters of a media textbook I’d written. I had records of my working time and was able to document that those three chapters amounted to about two months of self-torture for seven evenings a week in my basement office, pounding away at the keyboard.

I recall the same sense of outrage over a quote from an elusive politician, which I snagged after waiting in the rain for an entire afternoon. That quote worked its way into several publications without attribution to the original source — an act that was, in my view, theft of my patient work over six soggy hours.

To make matters worse, Internet-enabled plagiarism now has substantially changed the dynamic of teaching. Many professors no longer assign traditional essays because they are confected so easily via computer cut-and-paste. Relatively plagiarism-proof assignments now may include oral exams, in-class written tests, and presentations — surely valuable activities, but no substitute for the linear learning that takes place when sources are gathered and woven together to produce a cohesive, coherent argument.

Having said that, I don’t use Turnitin and don’t plan to.

First, I believe there is something to the argument that it’s wrong to make commercial use out of archived student papers when the student has no choice in the matter. As an intellectual property lawyer interviewed by the Post noted, “fair use” is difficult to define, but generally means that you are allowed to use reasonable amounts of material for educational purposes, scholarship, or news. Turnitin is a commercial service that makes money from archived student papers, and it only works by having the papers stored in its database.

Second, I’m reluctant to turn over too much human judgment to machines. I can’t say whether the “similarity index” is accurate or not, but some press reports have recounted incidents where “similarities” flagged by the service were doubtful, or in which clear cases of plagiarism — done intentionally to test the service — were missed. Yes, I’ll use Internet search engines to check for plagiarism if I’m suspicious, but judging from the accuracy of computer-generated files used by insurance companies and credit bureaus — replete with errors that they cannot seem to fix — I think I’ll rely on my instincts to alert me when a student might be a plagiarist. Such a suspicion changes my thinking about a student, subtly and perhaps at a level I can’t control, and I’d rather not have that alarm come from a computer-generated false positive.

The third problem is the trickiest and reads just like a dilemma from a philosophy text. I know that neither I nor a computer database can detect all instances of plagiarism. With this in mind, I begin each semester with a discussion of plagiarism, why it hurts me, the students, and the system. I tell students that I will be honest with them and that I expect honesty in return. I don’t have a formal ethics pledge — on the theory that dishonest people would sign it anyway — and I don’t have a complete honor system because I will check sources with a search engine if my suspicions are aroused.

But in general, it is an honor system since only a shared value of honesty can make the classroom transaction work. But can I say “you’re on your honor” and “submit your work through this cheating-detection system” in the same breath? In my judgment, no. Turnitin? I think I’ll turn it off.

I could be off base, and if you think I’m wrong — or if you agree with my view for the same or other reasons — I’d like to hear from you. If we receive enough responses I may be able to compile them for a future column.

©2007 Institute for Global Ethics

“What seemed to be the operating measure here is that Small was raising lots of money, so the board was prepared to turn a blind eye to questionable expenditures.”

– Rick Cohen, former executive director of the Center for Responsive Philanthropy, talking to the New York Times last week about the resignation of Lawrence Small, who headed the renowned Smithsonian, the world’s largest museum complex, since January 2000.

Small, who was recognized widely for his fund-raising skills, resigned under sharp criticism and growing scrutiny into his lucrative pay — more than $900,000 — and lavish spending habits, which included reimbursement for lap pool maintenance and chandelier cleaning.

WASHINGTON
President Bush last week continued to support U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales, whose honesty was questioned last week following congressional testimony from his former chief of staff into the firings of eight U.S. attorneys.

Gonzales has been at the center of an ethics storm following the firings, which critics claim were politically motivated. The controversy escalated after the Justice Department repeatedly changed its statements about why the attorneys were fired and which Bush administration officials were involved.

The case has whipped up a firestorm in Congress and prompted calls for Gonzales’s resignation from a handful of Democrats and Republicans, reports the Reuters news agency.

Bush called Gonzales “an honorable and honest man” who retains the president’s “full confidence,” according to Reuters.

Gonzales’s credibility was buffeted earlier in the week when his former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, testified before the Senate and contradicted some of his former boss’s earlier claims that he played only a minimal role in the firings, Bloomberg reports.

Several lawmakers, chafing because Gonzales is not scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill until April 17, said he needed to explain himself more quickly or risk grave damage to the reputation of the Justice Department, reports the Associated Press.

Adding to the controversy, Gonzales’s senior counsel last week refused to testify about the firings and officials involved, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Monica Goodling, who also serves as the Justice Department’s liaison to the White House, has taken an indefinite leave of absence, reports the Washington Post.

OTTAWA
A parliamentary committee last week heard what the CBC characterizes as “stunning allegations of fraud, abuse, and a cover-up at senior levels” in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).

According to the CBC, several serving and retired RCMP officers claimed that there has been a pattern of fraud and abuse involving the Mounties’ pension funds.

One of the Mounties who stepped forward to testify, sergeant Steve Walker, told the panel that “every core value and rule of ethical conduct that I held to be true and dear as a rank-and-file member of the RCMP has been decimated and defiled by employees at the highest levels of the RCMP,” according to the Globe & Mail.

The CTV Network reports that the Mounties who testified claim that pension funds were used for golf trips and that nepotism was widespread in the pensions division.

According to the Free Press of London, Ontario, prime minister Stephen Harper has ordered a government probe of the allegations, but opposition leaders want a wider investigation with additional public hearings.

Canadian lawmakers may summon former RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli and others to testify about the charges. Zaccardelli resigned under a cloud of scandal after it was revealed that a Canadian citizen was deported to Syria, where he was tortured, based on faulty intelligence provided to U.S. authorities by the RCMP.

LONDON
The top job facing Gordon Brown, the presumed successor to British prime minister Tony Blair, is likely to be restoring the public’s faith in politicians, according to press reports.

In an analysis published last week, BBC political correspondent Nick Assinder writes: “[I]n the wake of alleged Tory sleaze in the 1990s and Tony Blair’s 1997 promise to be whiter than white — and claims his government has failed to live up to that pledge — there is a negative perception about politics and politicians which, it is often claimed, is corrosive to democracy.”

The issue was brought to a head when Britain’s outgoing Standards in Public Life committee chair, Sir Alistair Graham, issued some blistering criticisms of Blair last week, saying his greatest personal regret was his “apparent failure to persuade the government to place high ethical standards at the heart of its thinking and, most importantly, behavior,” according to the U.K. Guardian.

Graham is concluding his three-year term as head of the committee, a post sometimes referred to in the United Kingdom as the “sleaze watchdog.”

The Yorkshire Post reports that Graham urged the next prime minister to set a “new tone of seriousness about ethical standards” by making fundamental changes to the ministerial code of conduct, including giving an independent agency the responsibility for deciding whether a full investigation is necessary if charges of ministerial misconduct are raised.

According to the Glasgow Daily Record, Graham and Blair fell out after Blair refused to launch a probe into a deputy’s links with a British tycoon.

Blair’s government was beset by a series of scandals, including a probe into allegations that seats in the House of Lords were given in exchange for political loans.

NEW YORK
In a case that the Associated Press says “escalates the animosity that has already been building between two of the world’s largest business software makers,” Oracle last week sued SAP, accusing the rival firm of hacking into its computers to steal product information.

SAP did not immediately comment on the suit, other than to say it will aggressively fight the charges.

Oracle, based in Redwood City, California, accused German firm SAP of masterminding a scheme in which the logins of former Oracle customers were used to gain access to the system, reports the San Jose Mercury News.

The reason, according to the suit: an SAP subsidiary offered support services for Oracle products, but lacked the technical know-how to do it. The complaint alleges that SAP stole information such as bug fixes, technical documents, and software code in order to provide the support services, according to the Mercury News.

Both Oracle and SAP have attracted industry attention in the past for their aggressive campaigns to woo each other’s customers, reports the International Herald Tribune.

The English-language version of the German publication Spiegel Online reports that analysts speculate that the suit, even if disproved, could tarnish the reputation of SAP.

One observer, industry consultant David Mitchell, claims that customers take ethics questions into account when making purchasing decisions, and whether the case will damage SAP’s market share comes “down to how SAP plays the game from now on…. If they handle it appropriately, we can get back to business as normal.”

Another analyst quoted in the Spiegel report suggests that SAP might follow the lead of Hewlett-Packard, apologizing for alleged impropriety if the claim proves legitimate, saying it was out of character for the firm, and returning to business as usual.

VARIOUS DATELINES
Stories related to the ethics implications of scientific research made world headlines last week. Among the top stories:

• Chinese scientists have agreed to unite in an effort to fight scientific fraud and misconduct, according to a report from Xinhua, the official government news agency. Universities and research departments will formulate ethics guides and strengthen “moral education.” China has been hit recently with a wave of high-profile cases of academic fraud and plagiarism.
• What once was one of the world’s most distinguished research teams — until being rocked by revelations of academic fraud — made its first tentative steps back into the spotlight last week. Korean scientists who were part of a group led by Hwang Woo-suk, the disgraced scientist fired for allegedly faking some of his stem-cell research, announced last week that they have successfully cloned wolves, according to the Seoul-based Yonhap News Agency. An article describing the project will be published in a scientific journal, but only after the journal took extraordinary measures to verify all of the data, reports the Times of London. The article will list Hwang as a coauthor, with collaborators noting that some of his findings were legitimate.
• The U.S. government may further tighten restrictions on relationships between researchers and drug companies. Forbes reports that Daniel Levinson, inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services, plans to widen conflict-of-interest reviews to include not only researchers employed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) but also scientists who receive government funding for their research, such as professors at universities, who currently are governed by their universities’ ethics rules, not the NIH’s. Watchdog groups claim that NIH-funded academic researchers have arrangements with drug companies that may color their research, according to the Forbes report. In 2005, the NIH banned its direct employees from consulting for drug companies.

MIAMI
Burger King last week confirmed that it will begin buying more eggs and pork from producers who do not keep animals in cages or crates.

The move by the Miami-based fast-food giant garnered praise from animal rights groups.

“We view this as a meaningful step in the right direction to end the most cruel and inhumane factory-farming industry practices,” Paul Shapiro, director of factory farming for the Humane Society of the United States, told the Miami Herald. “Burger King’s competitors ought to follow.”

Burger King Corp. had been in negotiations with another group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), over supplier practices. A PETA spokesman quoted in the Chicago Sun-Times says the group anticipates a ripple effect through the fast-food industry.

Burger King’s decision, which covers its operations in Canada, Europe, and the United States, sets a target of buying 2 percent of eggs from suppliers who use noncaged birds and 10 percent of pork from farms that allow pigs to roam freely, the BBC reports.

In a related development, Burger King also announced that it will give preference to chicken suppliers who kill their birds in gas chambers. The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Kentucky, reports that the move may put pressure on Louisville-based KFC Corp., which operates the Kentucky Fried Chicken chain, to discourage the methods used by its suppliers, in which chickens are hung upside down and stunned with electricity before being fed into a throat-cutting machine. Critics charge that the electrical stunning is sometimes ineffective.

WASHINGTON
Businesses that use a publicly available list of suspected terrorists and drug traffickers, supplied by the U.S. Treasury Department, may be denying services to innocent people, according to a report prepared by a civil rights group.

The San Francisco Chronicle and Associated Press report that the 350-page list of some 6,000 names is posted on a Treasury website used by credit bureaus, health insurers, employers, and landlords, according to a report from a group called the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area.

According to a summary of the report in the Christian Science Monitor, few U.S. residents actually are on the list, but because many entries are common Muslim or Latino names, users of the list assume many false positives.

The report documents a case in which a man was denied the services of a mortgage broker because his middle name is Hassan, an alias used by one of the sons of Saddam Hussein, although the spellings were different and there was a wide discrepancy in their dates of birth.

The report claims to document at least a dozen cases in which consumers were denied services because of a partial match with the list, according to a report from the Washington Post News Service.

Part of the problem stems from the fact that anyone who does business with a person or group on the list faces penalties of up to $10 million and 10 to 30 years in prison, notes the Washington Post, and the law is so broad and its application so vague that some firms would rather deny services than risk the consequences.

The U.S. Treasury Department has issued a statement saying there are several measures to help ensure accurate reporting, including workshops for banks and businesses on how to use the list, and a tutorial on the website explaining how to handle a potential match, according to a report from National Public Radio.

CHICAGO
Wal-Mart, known by outsiders for its aggressive business practices, is regarded by employees as a bare-knuckled enforcer of ethics rules, according to a report from the New York Times.

Reporter Michael Barbaro writes: “Over the last five years, Wal-Mart has assembled a team of former officials from the C.I.A., F.B.I., and Justice Department whose elaborate, at times globetrotting, investigations have led to the ouster of a high-profile board member who used company funds to buy hunting equipment, two senior advertising executives who took expensive gifts from a potential supplier and a computer technician who taped a reporter’s telephone calls.”

Barbaro writes that while many firms police the behavior of their employees, few companies are “as prickly — or unforgiving — about its employees’ wayward behavior,” an apparent legacy of founder Sam Walton, who felt misconduct translated to higher costs.

Wal-Mart has about 400 employees who investigate misconduct, guard executives, and prepare for security emergencies.

But some employees have protested that the high-powered investigative unit is used to intimidate employees who challenge authority or raise uncomfortable issues. In an interview with the Times and in court papers filed in a wrongful-termination suit, one former employee claimed that he was targeted for improper fraternization with a female subordinate not because of ethical issues but in retaliation for criticism of working conditions in factories he inspected.

Wal-Mart denied it acted improperly in the case.

From the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press:

“Increased public support for the social safety net, signs of growing public concern about income inequality, and a diminished appetite for assertive national security policies have improved the political landscape for the Democrats as the 2008 presidential campaign gets underway.

“At the same time, many of the key trends that nurtured the Republican resurgence in the mid-1990s have moderated, according to Pew’s longitudinal measures of the public’s basic political, social and economic values. The proportion of Americans who support traditional social values has edged downward since 1994, while the proportion of Americans expressing strong personal religious commitment also has declined modestly.

“Even more striking than the changes in some core political and social values is the dramatic shift in party identification that has occurred during the past five years. In 2002, the country was equally divided along partisan lines: 43% identified with the Republican Party or leaned to the GOP, while an identical proportion said they were Democrats. Today, half of the public (50%) either identifies as a Democrat or says they lean to the Democratic Party, compared with 35% who align with the GOP.

“Yet the Democrats’ growing advantage in party identification is tempered by the fact that the Democratic Party’s overall standing with the public is no better than it was when President Bush was first inaugurated in 2001. Instead, it is the Republican Party that has rapidly lost public support, particularly among political independents….

“The study of the public’s political values and attitudes by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press — the most recent in a series of such reports dating back to 1987 — finds a pattern of rising support since the mid-1990s for government action to help disadvantaged Americans. More Americans believe that the government has a responsibility to take care of people who cannot take care of themselves, and that it should help more needy people even if it means going deeper into debt….

“Despite these favorable shifts in support for more government help for the poor, 69% agree that ‘poor people have become too dependent on government assistance programs.’ Still, the number in agreement has been declining over the past decade.

“More broadly, the poll finds that money worries are rising. More than four-in-ten (44%) say they ‘don’t have enough money to make ends meet,’ up from 35% in 2002. While a majority continues to say they are ‘pretty well satisfied’ with their personal financial situation, that number is lower than it has been in more than a decade.

“In addition, an increasing number of Americans subscribe to the sentiment ‘today it’s really true that the rich just get richer while the poor get poorer.’ Currently, 73% concur with that sentiment, up from 65% five years ago….

“Even as Americans express greater commitment to solving domestic problems, they voice more hesitancy about global engagement. They also are less disposed than five years ago to favor a strong military as the best way to ensure peace….

“The latest values survey, conducted Dec. 12, 2006-Jan. 9, 2007, finds a reversal of increased religiosity observed in the mid-1990s. While most Americans remain religious in both belief and practice, the percentage expressing strong religious beliefs has edged down since the 1990s….

“At the same time, the survey records further declines in traditional social attitudes. The poll finds greater public acceptance of homosexuality and less desire for women to play traditional roles in society. Both represent a continuation of trends that have been apparent over the past 20 years, and have occurred mostly among older people. The younger generations have changed the least, as they have consistently expressed more accepting points of view over the past 20 years….

“Among other key findings from the wide-ranging survey:

• “…Americans are worried more that businesses rather than government are snooping into their lives. About three-in-four (74%) say they are concerned that business corporations are collecting too much personal information while 58% express the same concern about the government.
• “The public is losing confidence in itself. A dwindling majority (57%) say they have a good deal of confidence in the wisdom of the American people when it comes to making political decisions. Similarly, the proportion who agrees that Americans ‘can always find a way to solve our problems’ has dropped 16 points in the past five years.
• “Americans feel increasingly estranged from their government. Barely a third (34%) agree with the statement, ‘most elected officials care what people like me think,’ nearly matching the 20-year low of 33% recorded in 1994 and a 10-point drop since 2002.
• “…Interpersonal racial attitudes continue to moderate. More than eight-in-ten (83%) agree that ‘it’s all right for blacks and whites to date,’ up six percentage points since 2003 and 13 points from a Pew survey conducted 10 years ago.
• “Republicans are increasingly divided over the cultural impact of immigrants. Nearly seven-in-ten (68%) conservative Republicans say immigrants threaten American customs, compared with 43% of GOP moderates and liberals. Democrats have long been divided along ideological lines, but the GOP previously had not been.”

“It is better to be nobly remembered than nobly born.”

– John Ruskin (English writer, critic, and reformer, 1819-1900)