by Rushworth M. Kidder
Last week, when the flap over Sen. Barack Obama’s linguistic borrowing broke into the open, I was reminded of one of the saddest instances of plagiarism I’ve ever encountered.
It happened in the pre-computer age, when I was teaching freshman writing. At the semester’s end, a fellow faculty member showed me a term paper she had received from a less-than-stellar student. On the day it was due, he had shoved it breathlessly into her hand as he raced to meet another deadline.
That evening she started reading it, taking out the pages one by one from the pocket of its folder. After the first page, she was impressed. By page two she was suspicious. By page three, convinced it was plagiarized, she began wondering how to locate the original. And then she pulled out the last page. There, tucked into the pocket behind the paper and fatally forgotten, was an article clipped from Reader’s Digest. It matched his paper word for word with one exception: He’d crossed out “self-flagellation” in the original and penned in “self-condemnation,” avoiding a word she would have realized he didn’t know. Predictably, he failed the course.
How far we’ve come since those days — and how little has changed. To be sure, computers have brought us into the click-and-cheat world, where phrases, paragraphs, and whole papers are just a download away. But the underlying moral question remains: Why plagiarize?
Sometimes it’s sheer incompetence, an inability to communicate. Sometimes it’s mere haste, with deadlines crushing inward and no time to write. Sometimes it’s a jealous greed, welling up when someone else’s words seem more artistic or compelling than your own. And sometimes it’s an artistic borrowing — more common in jazz or painting than in literature — done to pay homage to the great masters through the flattery of imitation.
None of these, however, seems to fit last week’s kerfuffle over Obama’s borrowing of several sentences from his friend and supporter Deval Patrick, governor of Massachusetts. Despite Gov. Patrick’s insistence that he offered those words freely to Obama, Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign accused him of plagiarism. “If your candidacy is going to be about words,” she said, referring to his hallmark capacity for inspirational oratory, “then they should be your own words.”
Was Obama plagiarizing? If he was, it’s hard to see a motive. He’s hardly an incompetent communicator. Yes, he’s pressed for time, but that’s been true for months in this exhausting campaign, and he’s never run out of things to say. Jealousy? His own political oratory far outstrips that of his peers. Paying homage? That would work only if Deval Patrick were a household name and his words were widely recognizable.
So can we charge it up, instead, to the peculiar way language is used, reused, and recycled in the cyclotron of modern politics? Since most politicians employ speechwriters, it’s well understood that candidates’ sentences are not all of their own designing. What’s more, candidates regularly issue talking points — in the expectation that those very words will be repeated so earnestly and with such conviction that they will appear to have sprung right from the mind of the supporters who repeat them. Finally, they understand that language, like weaponry, is to be strategically employed to make things happen — and that, when it proves particularly effective, it shouldn’t be discarded but refined, repurposed, and used over and over.
Yet a stark fact remains: Had Obama handed in this speech to my colleague, he would have flunked her course.
That fact suggests a certain hypocrisy in our culture, which is that we say one thing to the young and do something else as adults. How will we persuade students to avoid plagiarism in the educational arena when we permit it in the political sphere? Our dilemma seems stark. On one hand, we could ban borrowing and send the speechwriters packing, which would create a level of public rhetoric even more drab and uninspired than we currently endure. On the other, we could shrug off plagiarism or even encourage it as we teach writing, which, by leaving only the most committed students to learn how to compose their own sentences, would create an oligarchy of the articulate overseeing frustrated hordes of those unable to say what they think.
But we don’t have to accept that dilemma. There’s a trilemma option here. Suppose the rule were that we always credit others, not only for direct quotes but for identifiable sequences of ideas. Suppose Obama’s sentence had begun, “My friend Deval Patrick made this point beautifully when he said….” The point still gets made, Obama is seen as a generous spirit, and his own excellence is enhanced by acknowledging brilliance in others.
Why does this matter? Because Obama’s phenomenal success so far rests in part on a public revulsion at a civic rhetoric that recently has grown so drab as to be almost inarticulate. There’s a hunger for inspiration — not only from ideas, but from language that uplifts and motivates. The saddest outcome would be for Obama inadvertently to telegraph to every student in the land that in order to reach true inspiration, a little plagiarism is okay.
Oh, and one more thing: That phrase I used earlier — “the flattery of imitation” — is an allusion to Charles Caleb Colton’s well-known dictum that “imitation is the sincerest flattery.” See how easy it is to attribute?
©2008 Institute for Global Ethics
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For more information, see: Related Newsline Commentary, Apr. 2, 2007 — Related Newsline Commentary, May 1, 2006 — Related Newsline Commentary, Jan. 16, 2006 — Related Newsline Commentary, June 24, 2002 — Related Newsline Commentary, Feb. 4, 2002.
