中文學書寫學術規範

第一場書面稿
羅林、鍾榮富、江寶釵

Transcript of presentation by J. B. Rollins and conversations with workshop participants：

“Plagiarism--What Is It, What Should be Done about It?”

As you can see – I don’t know if you have this, but -- I’ve changed my title to “Plagiarism--What Is It, What Should be Done about It?” because I think the issue has become so complex. In fact,  you might, by looking at a title like that,“What is Plagiarism and What Should be done about it?” think that it's obvious what it is and it's obvious what should be done about it.  But actually my research on this issue and my experience on this issue has proven that it’s much, much more complex than that.  And it's actually very difficult right now and even rather confusing.  One of the reasons this is so important, and I realize that I’m an American and I understand that I’m approaching this from an American, Western point of view.  And in America there is a kind of plagiarism hysteria. There is especially a sense that plagiarism is rife, that the country is full of it, that the schools are full of it, that it is growing, that it is getting much worse, and something has to be done about it. I want to quote from an article – part of which I included in your reference material. I did not include the quotation that I’m going to read right now, which comes from the first page of this article:

“There would seem to be no ethical standard more obvious or generally accepted than the rule that one should not steal the written work of others.” This quotation is not actually in those materials. “Yet matters here seem far from clear, despite the frenzied efforts of self-appointed overseers. On the one hand, formal rules against plagiarism grow ever more abundant and ever more stringent （even if no more original）, and Op-Ed columnists wax furious in their condemnation of plagiarism by public officials. On the other hand, many Op-Ed columns are written by individuals other than the one whose name appears on the byline, and for that matter many newspaper stories are more-or-less verbatim versions of press releases sent out by political organizations, trade associations, or other interest groups. Hardly anyone believes that politicians write their own speeches anymore, and few among the cognoscenti in the legal community believe that Supreme Court justices author their own opinions in more than a supervisory sense.”[1]

So here we’ve got presidents, and Supreme Court judges giving speeches, signing their names, essentially as the authors, but we know they didn’t write it. So what happens to this plagiarism?

“Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that some individuals find the subject of plagiarism confusing.”[2] As I said, it has become a very confusing issue, and we have to be aware of the fact that it is confusing, not just for students, but for politicians as well. One of the reasons the hysteria in the United States has reached the crescendo that it has now is that we’ve had some very, very widely publicized cases in recent years that have been an enormous factor. I will specify three of them for you now. The first one is the case of Jayson Blair. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Jayson Blair. He was a New York Times reporter who, in 2003, was finally dismissed for egregious plagiarism. This was plagiarism that was so obvious, and had been there for quite a while, that the New York Times has never been able to live it down. Even today, that case has been used, especially by conservative political columnists and talk show hosts to discredit the New York Times, which is seen as a relatively liberal newspaper. It is still legally  the newspaper of record in the United States, but it has suffered enormously because of that case. So let me read just a little bit about that case to remind you of it:

（江寶釵）I am sorry. We gave the professor the wrong copies.

（羅  林）Actually, I’m going to talk about a lot of what he does have. I have a few things that are really short that he doesn’t have, so I’ll just speak slowly…

（鍾榮富）A prefix to the main text.

（羅  林）So Jayson Blair. “On April 28^th, 2003, Blair received a call from Times national editor Jim Roberts, asking him about similarities between a story he had written two days earlier and one written by San Antonio Express-News reporter Macarena Hernandez on April 18. Hernandez had had a summer internship at The Times years earlier, and had worked alongside Blair. She contacted The Times after details and quotes in Blair's story appeared exactly the same as in hers.

Blair's plagiarism of Hernandez's article was so blatant that it led to further pressing by Times editors, who asked him to prove that he had, in fact, traveled to Texas and interviewed the woman in his article. After being unable to provide proof, Blair resigned.” Now this of course was caught onto by reporters of the Washington Post, the New York Times'  rival. And they basically forced the editors of the New York Times to make an explanation. It turned out to be an enormous problem for them, because once they started checking Jayson Blair's work over seven years they found there were many cases of blatant plagiarism from other reporters, and, in some cases, just plain fabrication. He would write a story as if it was based on fact, and it was just pure fiction. But he had become very good at making it seem like a good news story and the Times editors had been allowing them to be published, obviously without checking the sources. And so this has had an enormously negative effect on the reputation of the New York Times. And basically everybody in America who pays attention to the news knows about this case.

（鍾榮富）But did they agree to publish fiction?（08”26”）

（羅  林）Well they didn’t know it was fiction. That’s the problem. They thought that his work was straight forward news reportage. He had presented them as reports.

（江寶釵）（08”47”）Did he do anything that was related to plagiarism?

（羅  林）（08”50”）Well, in some cases he had simply taken whole paragraphs from somebody else’s story, usually from fairly obscure newspapers, where he could assume that most people hadn’t read them, and just considered them his own stories. When he was faced with that – I mean we would have an entire paragraph that was word –for-word – so it was obvious plagiarism. And the critics said, “Well, why wasn’t this caught a lot sooner? And why wasn’t he fired a lot sooner? And how did he get to have such a high position at the newspaper anyway, since he was a relatively unknown man?” And this is where the race issue comes in, because he was black. And the Times was eventually forced to admit that this had been in part because they had been trying so hard to achieve racial diversity. Well, this brought back to mind another case which has been enormously influential and bothersome. That’s the case of Martin Luther King. In the 1980s, some researchers had discovered that large parts of Martin Luther King’s Ph. D. dissertation done at the University of Boston were largely plagiarized.

（鍾榮富）Really?

（羅  林）Yes. Now a lot of people don’t know that, because this has sort of been pushed under the table to a large extent. So I’m going to…

（鍾榮富）How did they catch him?

（羅  林）They didn’t catch him.

（鍾榮富）Really.

（羅  林）Remember, he was assassinated in 1964, so he had been dead for about twenty years before this was found. Now it’s very likely that somebody must have guessed this, or known this, but it was never brought out until people at Stanford started to edit the Martin Luther King papers. So let me read to you, just a little bit about what they said. This is not in your materials, but I thought it was interesting, so I'll read just a little bit of it:

“Beginning in the 1980s, questions have been raised regarding the authorship of King's dissertation, other papers, and his speeches. （Though not widely known during his lifetime, most of his published writings during his civil rights career were ghostwritten, or at least heavily adapted from his speeches）. Concerns about his doctoral dissertation at Boston University led to a formal inquiry by university officials, which concluded that approximately a third of it had been plagiarized from a paper written by an earlier graduate student.”[3] So about one third of his Ph. D. dissertation was flat-out, obvious plagiarism. “But, it was decided not to revoke his degree, as the paper still "makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship." Such uncredited "textual appropriation," as King scholar Clayborne Carson has labeled it, was apparently a habit of King's begun earlier in his academic career.” So there is other evidence that all through his university days he was doing this, and apparently he didn’t’ think there was anything wrong with it. So apparently it was something that a lot of other people were doing, too. So you can imagine what the white supremacists wanted to do with this. So the editors at Stanford in the 1980s were looking at his papers and working out an edition and realized that they had to deal with this. So here is what they said:

“Our discovery of extensive plagiaries in King's academic papers affected every aspect of our work by raising new questions about the biographical and historical significance of many of the documents we had selected for inclusion. Should the existence of such plagiaries be selected for inclusion in King's papers?”

Now here is a man who is considered to be one of the greatest of all Americans. We have a national holiday for him, just like we do for George Washington. And so these people, most of whom were white, of course, at Stanford, faced an enormous cultural problem. “How should we convey to readers of our edition the intellectual provenance of papers containing plagiarized passages? Should we indicate every instance of textual appropriation and attempt to determine which instances constituted plagiarism? Answering these questions required not only judgments about proper scholarly practices but also about our research capabilities and the expectations of the edition's potential readers, both scholarly and lay.”  And of course they knew that by using the term plagiarism with someone who is considered to be almost a god by a huge proportion of the American population, they were under enormous pressure. So here is how it worked out:

“Even his ability to appropriate texts to express his opinions was a benefit as he drafted public statements that would not require citations. His characteristic compositional method contributed to the rhetorical skills that became widely admired when King was called unexpectedly to national leadership. His appropriations of major scholarly texts satisfied his teachers and advanced his personal ambitions; his use of political, philosophical, and literary texts-particularly those expressing the nation's democratic ideas-inspired and mobilized many Americans, thereby advancing the cause of social justice. His use, as a student and as a leader, of hegemonic or canonized cultural materials enabled him to create a transracial identity that served his own needs and those of African Americans.”

So what are they saying? They are saying, OK, he plagiarized, a lot, if you use these narrow definitions of plagiarism, that have been developed by organizations like the MLA. But, if you consider the effect of his writing and his speeches, you can’t throw these out.

（鍾榮富）They’ve been quite influential.

（羅  林）Yes, they’ve been so influential as a part of American history and culture that you can’t say they are invalidated by plagiarism. So this raises very strong questions about what plagiarism is, when it's bad, when it is wrong and when it should be published. And the university decided not to revoke his Ph. D. because of these considerations.

（鍾榮富）....

（羅  林）....  Exactly, and basically, for me, this harkens back to the ideas that I’ll talk about a little bit later:  what you might call non-Western attitudes towards scholarship. And you might mention that you memorize all these things and they become a part of your consciousness and they become a part of your writing. You may be quoting, but are not even thinking about the fact that you are quoting because you are such a good student that you memorized them all. So that is one of the reasons that we have scholars who agreed with this assessment by the editors at Stanford. We’ve got to redefine plagiarism. We’ve got to refine our ideas about this, so that we're not saying that as soon as you get a string of words that are the same, somebody is going to be considered immoral.

Now, one more case. The case of Joseph Biden in1988. Joseph Biden, of course,  is a very famous senator from Pennsylvania. And that year he was running for the presidential nomination. And in one of his speeches he used a number of phrases from a speech given by Neil Kinnock, who was a very famous liberal politician in England. But he didn’t mention it. So his enemies, of course,  immediately jumped on this and accused him of plagiarism and said, "Well, he's dishonest. He can’t be president. He’s dishonest. He plagiarized."  So of course  Joseph Biden said, “What? We all do this. The president doesn’t write his own speeches,” and this kind of thing. But it became such a problem for him that he had to withdraw from the presidential race, because people who insisted on using the narrow definitions of plagiarism were saying he should have given Neil Kinnock credit for those phrases.  So this is another case that became very widely known and very widely discussed in the United States and there were really a large range of opinions on this, but essentially people were saying that Joseph Biden shouldn’t be blamed anymore than Martin Luther King was. And in fact he plagiarized a heck of a lot less than Martin Luther King did.  And people said, “No, no. This is flat-out lying. This is dishonest. Therefore, he dropped out of the race for President.  It didn’t keep him from winning the senate, but it had a pretty devastating effect on his desire to become President. And even now he may never win the presidency, because that will always be a factor. So it raises this question again of how careful we have to be about what we call plagiarism and how we deal with it. And, especially if we are professionals, how we avoid being accused of it.

（鍾榮富）Right. Right. That is very important. 

（羅  林）And actually in that case Biden did make a mistake, because at first he denied that it was Neil Kinnock’s material. I guess because he knew that people were going to be really puritanical and narrow about this, and then people pointed out that there are entire sentences that were exactly the same. So he said, “Of course I knew that speech. And I guess it just came out. I didn’t mean to do it.” But there was so much of it, that didn’t sound entirely true. If he had just come right out and said, “Well, yeah, sure. I just assumed everybody knew that.” If he had done something like that, maybe he wouldn’t have suffered quite so much about this case of plagiarism, as it has been called.

Another couple of points to make about this plagiarism hysteria in the United States come from a website called Plagiarism.org. It's a website, a web service dedicated to helping professors to detect plagiarism in their students papers.

（江寶釵）Oh, sorry. He has been waiting for a while.

（林正弘）I got lost. I got lost. Sorry.

（鍾榮富）I think it's impossible to get lost on this campus.

（林正弘）I asked somebody. Nobody knows there is a meeting here. Sorry.

（羅  林）Well, I’m glad you were able to get here.

（江寶釵）Professor Rollins, this is Professor Lin.

（羅  林）We had just started talking about my presentation which is based on ideas about plagiarism, what it is, and what should be done about it. And people say it's very simple. Of course, it's not simple at all. Recent developments in the West, particularly in America, concerning how to define plagiarism and how to deal with it have changed enormously over the past twenty or so years, and so I have cited the case of Jayson Blair of the New York Times, and especially Martin Luther King’s case. And you may remember in Martin Luther King’s case it was determined that about one third of his dissertation was flat-out plagiarism. He had just copied it. This wasn’t really known until about twenty years after his death.

（林正弘）I didn’t know that.

（羅  林）Well, it was somewhat soft-pedaled because King was so enormously famous we even have a national holiday for him, but the editors of the King papers at Stanford had to determine how they were going to deal with the fact that he had simply copied another graduate student’s work for about one third of his dissertation. And they eventually came to the conclusion that, in a way, it was acceptable, because he had still produced scholarship and eventually political and social ideas that were significant to American culture. So, in essence, they were saying that yes, he plagiarized, if you use current academic definitions of plagiarism, but we’re not going to punish him for it. Boston University looked into this and they decided not to revoke his Ph. D. because, even though it was obviously plagiarized in a sense, it was OK. Now this raised questions, especially for professors. So if I have a student who comes in with a paper that is mostly plagiarized, he can say this is OK.  Martin Luther King did it. Why can’t I? So we’ve had a lot of people talking about how we are in trouble when it comes to plagiarism and how we deal with it. And then I mentioned the Joseph Biden case during the 1988 Presidential election, where he quoted some lines from a political speech written by Neil Kinnock of Britain, and he was accused of it and at first denied it. And then he said, “I knew the speech well and I didn’t mean to plagiarize it.” But according to academic definitions of plagiarism he did, so he was forced out of the election primaries. These are three of the most well-known plagiarism cases in America. And, along with what I’m going to mention now, created what I define as plagiarism hysteria. We’re in a position in America now, where the population at large, including a lot of lay people, not necessarily academics, feel that the country is going to Hell in a hand basket because students are plagiarizing more and more and they are not being disciplined for it. And one of the points I pointed out earlier is that the legal issues for professors are very complicated and dangerous because in America, if you accuse a student of plagiarism and the student gets a failing grade in this course, you can be sued. And if you cannot prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the plagiarism is there, you’re going to lose the case, and the university is going to lose the case. Universities have been trying to come up with definitions of plagiarism and proof that will protect the universities.

I want to read a little bit of an introduction to a website that has been created to help professors detect this: www.plagiarism.org.  Their point is that the Internet has made plagiarism so much easier because all you’ve got to do is cut and paste, basically what I did for this reference material – except here I prepared information so you can see where it all came from. You just go to the Internet; you find what you want; you copy it and place it into a Word document; and as far as anyone knows, it's your own work. This organization points out that an enormously profitable business has actually developed in America selling term papers to students, which I know to be true. We call these "term paper mills." By signing up as a member and paying a fee, students can get access to hundreds of thousands of papers on any imaginable academic topic written, usually, by graduate students at universities like Harvard. It’s a database really. And it’s a password-protected database. So if your professor, or anyone, were to check on this, you can’t find this on Google because Google can't get into it. In other words, if the student is not very sophisticated and just gets something from a Google webpage, you can easily find it yourself, right? You just do a Google search. But if the student is a little more sophisticated and willing to pay let's say a hundred dollars for a term paper, you can’t find it, unless you find the specific database, pay the fee, and get into the paper. And no professor has the time to do that. There are a number of Internet services that help universities deal with this. Of course there are fees. The university has to subscribe to these services in order for you to be able to use them. This is another part of the hysteria. Now how do the professors react? For the most part, they say, “If I’m going to get serious; And if the university isn’t going to make it clear how I’m going to deal with this problem; If it’s not obvious plagiarism to me, if I don’t recognize it, or if I can’t find it obvious,  then I can’t handle it.” It has become too difficult to get into all of the businesses that exist for the students that are cheating. One of the ways that people are dealing with this is by saying that we need to change our attitude towards plagiarism and how we deal with it. This is why I asked Patricia to give you a copy of the article by Lisa Samuels, “Relinquish Intellectual Property.”

（江寶釵）Can we give him ten minutes to say something about this topic?

（羅  林）Then let's do that now.

（鍾榮富）I don’t think I need to do that, because I think plagiarism is a big problem …we have a lot of cases…I think that the main difference is paraphrasing.....

（羅  林）27:45  Awhile ago I mentioned that when I first came to Taiwan… the first paper I got… It was obvious that a lot of it was plagiarized, and it was very easy to demonstrate. So I took a very American approach: “This is dishonest!” But then I started thinking – just a minute! Maybe imposing my American moralistic values here is not appropriate, partly because this was a very difficult assignment for a student whose native language was not English and who have got to come up with academic phrases in order to express the things they want to say. I could see that they had been terrorized by this assignment because they didn’t understand.  After a couple years of trying to deal with this, I realized I had to get away from the moral perspective and develop a scholarly perspective and say to the students: “The real problem is, if you include all this material and you don’t acknowledge it, you make yourself seem like a bad scholar because you haven’t shown awareness of your sources.” And that was much more effective.

（鍾榮富）For the students of modern American English, the problem lies in the English, in the culture as well as the language. They want to express themselves in a language which is foreign to them. It gives them an opportunity to use the so-called words of the model, hopefully...

（羅  林）Yes. In fact they have to, don’t they? I think that’s what Lisa Samuels is trying to make clear. We all do that. Where do we learn the language?

（鍾榮富）Right.  We learn the language when we ...  But for Taiwanese it is different, when we are talking about the daily language. Which means that we can use the right word in the right sentence, without much . . . . In that case students are not surprised because they just try to find the right word and the right sentence to express what they want to say.

（羅  林）One of the things I try to do in my English classes is to teach them to imitate, to imitate sentence structures and styles, diction, this sort of thing. And yet when I go next door to my literature class, all of a sudden I want them to be original.

（鍾榮富）You don’t want them to do…

（羅  林）I don’t want them to do what I told them to do in the language class. So I think we have a problem there, and much of the problem is with originality and what originality is. Who owns the language and who owns the words? And that’s why I like this article by Lisa Samuels so much. She is a poet by the way, who is becoming quite well known. But she is also an academic scholar, who has done a lot of research on this. And she is writing this from the point of view of both I think – a creative artist and an academic scholar. Essentially she is saying two things: First of all, no one owns the language, just as no one owns the culture. And she uses Deleuze and some other theoreticians' ideas as part of her reasoning. She is also saying that because we all learn from the same sources, they become a part of us and we become a part of them. So when we write, academically, or poetry, or anything else, it is impossible to do so without using the words that previous scholars and previous poets have used. And this obsession, in the West particularly, with dividing words according to who they belong to is actually negative because it is creating a paranoia. A paranoia that, especially among graduate students, is keeping them from being original, if it’s possible to be original. What I’d like you do now, is take a look at page 360 at the bottom. She gives an example of a dialogue on a list serve. This is a text on an Internet service, a sort of bulletin board, talking about plagiarism. First of all about being afraid of somebody stealing your words and publishing them before you do. And so if you are involved in a forum, a discussion forum on the Internet, how do you protect yourself? And the other thing is how can you avoid being accused? I think that is one of the things that this group will eventually want to talk about. If you are accused, especially formally, and especially if it gets on the news, what do you do? That’s why I brought up the Joseph Biden case. What he did is considered by a lot of people to be acceptable, in a sense. We all know that the President doesn’t write his own speeches, right? Yet he gets credit for them. And here is Joseph Biden, who was forced out of the Presidential primaries because he used somebody else’s words. So that’s why I found her article particularly interesting. She wrote it from the point of view of a poet and scholar. There are other people who have been writing their opinions about the way plagiarism has been dealt with from a more economic point of view. This is the one that I found most influential, or most interesting to us. So I asked this question in the introduction to my presentation: Should Taiwanese scholars just slavishly follow Western standards? My own opinion is, probably not because we are dealing with very different cultural issues here. There is quite a different attitude. One of the points that Ms. Samuels also points out is that this is a very Western idea. It is not shared in many of the corners of the world and particularly in the Orient and in the Middle East. In my own experience is that Taiwanese attitudes to plagiarism are very different, and I had to literally change my attitude toward it in my policies in my classes because, first of all, my students couldn’t understand what it was. In the Middle East this was especially true, where there was the Koranic tradition, in which they know as much as they can of the Koran and they use it in their writing just assuming that everybody knows that they’re quoting Mohammed.  And so when they write a scholarly paper they assume, of course the professor knows where all of this comes from. Why do I have to go through all of this stuff to show where it comes from? And that’s when I started developing the idea....

（鍾榮富）My question is …..they have to follow…

（羅  林）.....

[Professor Leaves]

（羅  林）Yes, but those are changing, and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to discuss this today. In fact, one of our difficulties in America is in cases of plagiarism against professors; the cases have been proceeding very differently. We’ve got kind of a hypocrisy. In other words, faculty members tend to be dealt with much more leniently, and I think this has partly to do with legal issues. I think the idea of what we call "fair use" and attributing sources is going to have to be refined. If you actually follow an idea all the way to…. You can’t… but if you did that, you’d end up putting a footnote for every word here. It gets to be so ridiculous. At what point do you stop? At what point is it OK to assume that everybody knows? I think her idea is that probably we’re going to have to accept a more lenient policy by which we assume that our audience knows a lot of things that we’re footnoting, and that we’re sort of ruining our style with too many footnotes, where we’re putting them in because we’re paranoid.  I think that’s a practical matter, but it’s very important, because, first of all, we’ve got to make sure that we follow the rules in order for our work to be accepted, .... especially if the case goes against us. So we’ve got to be very careful. Even if we take plagiarism as we're defining it here.

（林正弘）My students always ask me, if I express a mistake, ...

（羅  林）What I say to my students is it depends if you’re quoting.  I tell them that, from my point of view, the worst kind of plagiarism is when you quote absolutely verbatim, but you don’t’ use quotation marks. You’ve got to use those quotation marks and then you should say something like “According to,” or something like that. In other words you show your knowledge of what you're doing. This is different from what you're doing when you paraphrase. Now paraphrasing is the most difficult language skill of them all, and it’s harder for an American native English speaker to paraphrase well than to do anything else with the language, actually, so how can I expect Taiwanese students to be able to paraphrase something in English really well?  So what I tell them is, if you want to protect yourself from these charges, when you know you are using words that you didn’t know before and that you wouldn’t have used if you hadn't seen them in the source, just quote them. Even though your professor might say you are quoting too much, or your style is not very good, it's still better than being accused of plagiarism.

（林正弘）And how about the case where a student uses some words from the source ans some of his own words?

（羅  林）Then you can’t quote them because it's not the same. But there's still the question of origin.  You got the idea from someone, but, unless it's truly original,  where did your source get it?  That’s a philosophical question. And it seems  impossible to know who the original source was. I think that to simplify matters for students, I simply say, "If the words  are the same, quote. If they are not the same, just paraphrase and still give credit to your source. They should still put in a reference, and then at least they can’t be accused.

（林正弘）....

（羅  林）Well in America it’s a requirement in almost any university I know of for  the freshman teachers to teach that, so that after the freshman level, if the student doesn’t know any better, the student is considered guilty.  But this is problematic given how we've been defining plagiarism.  Even if they do have three or four words that are exactly the same as in a source, how does that prove beyond doubt that the student didn't think of them themself?

（林正弘）....

（羅  林）Well, if it’s well known enough. If it is common knowledge – we have common knowledge. If it's common knowledge then we don’t know who to say it belongs to. But if you are saying that this is a particular point of a particular speech on a particular day, then you do. Then it is not common knowledge. But you don’t need to quote. You could just give your own interpretation of it in a paraphrase, but you would still give the name of the person whom you were taking it from. You might not have to if it came from a particularly well-known speech…. That’s the way we do things in the States. But if you are using part of someone else’s ideas as part of your own argument, or as part of the support for your own argument, then how do you include it in your argument without making people feel that your argument is weak because you are using too much of someone else’s argument? This is what my graduate students are worried about. What I suggest is that you still say where you got the idea, so somebody is not going to accuse you of plagiarism. Then just develop your own angles to show that you own this argument too but you have used the ideas from somewhere else to help. There's nothing wrong with that. That's part of scholarship. Part of creating good scholarship is knowing where to find those ideas and knowing how to integrate them with your own. I think that's what we call the international standard for scholarly work. To show and acknowledge your sources – to show that you know what they are. Of course if you don’t, in the West it will become a moral issue, which I think is sometimes unfair. And I think, here, we are approaching this moral issue.

If you’ve got a student that takes an entire page from the Internet and gives it as his own– a couple of years ago I had a case of a student who handed in a paper on Robert Frost. Of course when I started reading it I knew there was no way he had written it because it was written in perfect critical English and was obviously written by a professor. I Googled it and found it immediately. He'd simply found the article on the Internet, copied the entire thing, he had not added one word, put his name on it and handed it in. I think that is dishonest, and that’s obviously not acceptable. I gave him a zero for the course and that was the end of that. But that was a very rare case. That has only happened once or twice in the time that I’ve been here. What students do is that they find a website where somebody is talking about Robert Frost and they take some of the sentences that say what they want to say and they don’t quote them and they don’t say where they got them. But they obviously don’t think there's anything wrong with that. What I tell them is that part of what I’m going to teach you about American culture is that we don’t do that. We don’t do it for moral reasons, but, more importantly, we don’t do it for scholarly reasons. We want our teachers to know that we know where the ideas came from. That’s part of our studies. That’s part of our job. And they accept that. 

（林正弘）...

（羅  林）Well, in the medieval period in Western culture that’s the way things were. This attitude towards plagiarism that we use now is relatively recent. That’s why I included this material on the history of plagiarism. On page two there's a kind of short history of plagiarism. It points out that in Western culture this idea of plagiarism didn’t really develop until the nineteenth century. In the medieval period, and especially in classical times, there were a lot of commentaries, especially under the influence of the Christian church, there were a lot of commentaries on the Bible. All learned people knew these. The society of learned people were very smart. They were supposed to be highly regarded. Whenever they wrote their commentaries they also included large portions of other people’s commentaries verbatim, word-for-word, but never acknowledged them because they knew that everybody else knew where they came from, especially if they were using Saint Augustus, or somebody like that. So they felt absolutely no need to quote or cite sources. All the way through the medieval period this attitude was accepted.  Even the neo-classicists didn’t think that originality was such a great thing. They thought that imitating the ancients and trying to write like them was far superior to doing your own thing. And so you were expected to use a lot of material from the ancients. You were expected to add something to it, but didn’t have to say where you got it. But then when we get to the romantics, and the development of the idea that the individual can have ideas that no individual has ever had before, the idea of originality that we have now, the idea of using words from someone else became a bigger moral issue. It became an issue of creativity, too. One of the most famous cases of plagiarism at the time had to do with Coleridge. His Biographia Literaria  used huge amounts of material from other writers. But what he was doing was following the practice of the previous age, of the neo-classicists and classicists. So, when people began to accuse him of plagiarism later on, in a sense it was anachronistic, because they were accusing him of not following the policies that were developed after he did his writing. According to this modern, romantic, nineteenth- century, and even later, attitude towards plagiarism, Coleridge was a dishonest man. But he was just doing what people before his time had been doing and he just assumed that people who read this book anyway were people who know those materials. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, and as the copyright laws began to be formed to protect author’s rights for commercial reasons, concepts of plagiarism became much narrower because for legal reasons they had to be narrower. For instance, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain were losing huge amounts of money because the Americans were pirating all of Charles Dickens's works and he wasn’t getting any money from the thousands and thousands of copies of his works that were sold in America. But then the British were doing the same thing with Mark Twain’s work. So both Dickens and Twain were very much involved in trying to get laws passed which would protect copyright. And the laws basically said that if you can show that so many words are the same, then you’ve stolen it. And that’s why they used the term "piracy." The term "plagiarism" also comes from the Latin term "to steal." So that’s why we have such a moralistic attitude towards plagiarism. This is one of the reasons why we have so many lawsuits, even in academia. Now we are faced with a situation in which we are trying to find a fusion between the traditional classical idea, where you can assume that your audience knows a lot of what you are doing, but at the same time you are going to protect yourself from accusations. To be honest, what I foresee for the foreseeable future is that the legal side is going to win because that is where the money is. And as Taiwanese scholars publish more and more internationally, as you've pointed out, there are going to be more concerns about actually following some of these really specific rules about attributions, citing and quoting, because if you don’t, you’ll be sued. And especially because the Chinese diaspora is spread out so much, and we have a lot of Chinese people in America writing in Chinese and they have American attitudes. The internationalization of scholarship and academics is going to force this issue.  Individual scholars will have to come to grips with it.  Nobody wants to be accused of plagiarism.

（江寶釵）They have regulations for cheating, but they don’t have any standard.

（羅  林）Yes.  As far as I know, there is no official policy. So that’s why it is impossible for the professors to punish a lot of cases because in the case of the student who just hands in somebody else's paper.... Nobody is going to doubt what has happened, but when I confronted him with it, he was like, “uh.” But what about the cases where a student doesn’t mean to plagiarize at all, and they don’t understand what plagiarism is because the university doesn’t have a clear policy.

（江寶釵）That’s why we are doing this now. We need to let our students know what plagiarism is.

（羅  林）And how to avoid it, how to avoid doing it.

（江寶釵）I can bring up a case that we had at Chung Cheng University. The professor applied for promotion using a paper edited by her, but she put her own name on it as the author. So she is going to lose her contract because some people have been very strict with her. They are very mean. I don’t know why there are always some people....

（羅  林）But on the other hand it might not be very clear.

（江寶釵）But it is very obvious.

（羅  林）But if the university doesn’t have a legally binding policy what are they actually going to be able to do with that faculty member?  In America it would be impossible for a university to fire her without very clearly defined policies.  So if you don’t have a legally binding policy....

（江寶釵）Nobody knows exactly what happened to this case.

（羅  林）That’s why I’ve given all of these definitions. These definitions are very typical ones, the ones that the vast majority of American academics would agree with.

（江寶釵）What do you think about this case?

（羅  林）Well, in that case, in America it would be an open and shut case, and the university wouldn’t have to worry about a lawsuit because the universities in America are very, very careful with lawyers to work out their plagiarism policies for things like this. There are problems in America come in what we call ‘border-line’ cases, where somebody either unknowingly plagiarizes, or plagiarized in a very, very small way and did it in such a way that it is hard to determine whether it was intentional plagiarism. Usually, to get somebody fired, in American law, you have to prove that the plagiarism was intentional. Intent is a huge part of American law.

（江寶釵）Yeah. She claimed that it was a kind of mistake, not her own fault, that she was not informed by the publishing company. Do you know…?

（林正弘）Yeah. Maybe I know the case. It was the editor’s error.

（江寶釵）Yeah. Exactly.

（林正弘）She had her article pulled, right?

（江寶釵）It is very hard to find now.

（羅  林）I expect that this case could be used to help establish a principle and a standard concerning plagiarism.

（林正弘）Do you think that in America ...

（羅  林）In the States she would lose the case because people would say, “If you are saying that that wasn’t her fault it wouldn't work because no competent scholar would ever make a mistake like that.

（江寶釵）It’s too big.

（羅  林）Yeah. It’s too big.

（江寶釵）It’s too obvious.

（羅  林）Yes. It’s too obvious. I think it would be an "open-and-shut case."  You wouldn't be able to defend yourself well.  So I would assume people here that are against her would want to adopt a similar attitude.  If you say that you didn’t mean to, then you are saying that you are incompetent. You are either lying or you are incompetent. That is the way that I think it should be done. That’s like the case of my student who took things off of the Internet, except that there the intent was clear. He had obviously intended for me to believe that that was his paper. In this case it seems like the university might still have to prove that she intended to deceive.

（林正弘）According to her, this book ... the publisher asked her to edit the book. Did you know that?

（江寶釵）I personally dealt with this case on the evaluation committee. I think it’s quite obvious. Her excuse was accepted by her department. It is stupid.

（林正弘）Is that true?

（江寶釵）Nobody admitted it.

（羅  林）So the department doesn’t admit that they…

（江寶釵）No.

（羅  林）So who is at fault?

（江寶釵）She says it was a former ...

（江寶釵）According to the department – well, here is the facts – they requested that she do that, but they did not ask her to put her name on it. You see? There is a kind of gap in the conversation between her and her department.

（羅  林）Yes, because she can’t be so naïve as to think that everybody wouldn’t know. That’s just amazingly naïve.

（江寶釵）It sounds stupid, quite stupid. So, now we have a case?

（林正弘）No…  They will privately send me a copy….

（江寶釵）Why? Why did they send that?

（林正弘）Because it was my student, my former student.

（江寶釵）Oh, I see.

（林正弘）They are asking my opinion and I have to reply very carefully. I have to give them advice.

（江寶釵）I am quite sympathetic. The only way to get her out of this case is what Professor Rollins said: we need a clear, some kind of binding policy.... It’s very dangerous for her.

（林正弘）....

（江寶釵）She lost?

（林正弘）Yeah.

（江寶釵）It’s too obvious. Nobody will take it. I am quite familiar with that…

（林正弘）So you say the department asked her to leave?

（江寶釵）No. The university.

（羅  林）It’s a sad situation really, because she must have simply had a moment of doubt. It’s hard to imagine that she would have done that. It would have been too stupid.  She must have somehow thought that she had been asked to do it.

（江寶釵）The department denied that.

（羅  林）But it would be a disaster for the department to do that anyway, because that would be so unofficial for the department to do that. I mean, if you are going to follow these international requirements, that would be considered extremely unacademic and unscholarly.

（江寶釵）When we edit… I think that all the young professors should deserve the same chance since we don’t really know what plagiarism is, and even the university doesn’t have any policies in place. How can you punish someone before you teach them?

（羅  林）The way that most universities in the States deal with this, is they have an official and legally-binding student handbook, which has a very clear definition of plagiarism, just like these definitions here. And we do the same thing with faculty members. They have guidelines concerning academic integrity and the things that make a professor liable to lose his position. And it is written as a legal document. It seems that probably since there are more and more university-related lawsuits they will be even more careful about this.

（江寶釵）It is not a good way to defend yourself.… That way she can say there is no...

（羅  林）…. in the United States.

（羅  林）Well, again it is going to be really obvious because somebody is going to say, "But you've got an advanced degree.  You're a professor and you don’t know this? I think a lot of people would say that this is just a matter of basic common sense, but still, legally, I think you are right.

（江寶釵）If she loses the case, she has to make an announcement in the newspaper.

（林正弘）Right.

（江寶釵）That is according to an old law. So she will not get any contract on the island.

（羅  林）So what about the MOE?

（江寶釵）They have a policy about punishment, but nothing else.

（羅  林）That’s a really big problem.

（江寶釵）She must have been confused. She is so young. Reality is cruel. People are sometimes very difficult about this. Actually more than two thirds （of the committee）accused her of plagiarism. It is really bad for her.

（羅  林）Well, from the university’s point of view you can understand it because the university doesn’t want people to be able to say they’ve got a professor at the university who has made that kind of a mistake, because it is so unprofessional.

（江寶釵）Sometimes we create lots of fights. I think that she might be forced to leave.

（羅  林）Is she involved in personal conflicts with her department and peers?

（江寶釵）Yeah, because someone turned her in.

（羅  林）In my department the personal conflicts are amazing.

（江寶釵）Yeah. You cannot make any mistakes.

（羅  林）And of course you can’t make any progress either because you can’t have a really professional discussion, even to try to make things better for the students because personal considerations and rivalries take over. But I’ve seen that in the States too. I was in a department in the States where the personal environment was so bad we had to have two sessions of every meeting because there were certain people who wouldn’t even go into the same room with each other. And this was quite a famous university.

（林正弘）....

（羅  林）Well, you know we’ve had people’s email and every professor in Taiwan and talking about our problems.

（江寶釵）We want you to take a rest, so you don’t need to pay attention to our conversation.