Next Steps

Frequent dialogue about academic integrity coupled with a consistent message that academic misconduct will be met with “strong disapproval” at the university are crucial to creating ethical campus communities (McCabe 228-231). Ideally, this happens in part at the institutional level (honor codes, academic integrity sessions at orientation, mandatory online tutorials, Web sites like this one). But individual faculty members must guide and reinforce this conversation, too. That said, beyond clear policy and carefully customized assignments, how can faculty build students’ intellectual investment in “academic integrity”?

Ideas for helping students see their voices as meaningful in academic contexts are here. And below are strategies for leading worthwhile class conversations about the meaning and value of academic integrity.

(1) Use this Web site 

Ask students to read, say, two profiles in the “Integrity in Action” gallery and complete the Integrity Quiz: ask what surprised or interested them. Ask them to contribute a question of their own. Make the term “academic integrity” come alive by talking about an incident in which it mattered to you or, say, a high-profile case in your field. UO Professor of History Lisa Wolverton offers an example: she asks her students to read online resources about integrity and write very short essays defining the term in their own words and through the lenses of their experiences, then sign and hand in these pieces early in the term.

(2) Put pressure on simple, instrumentalist approaches to the class

Consider actively working against the inclination of some students to see the course only in terms of a final grade and a requirement met. If you enumerate course goals on your syllabus, consider explicitly naming some that extend far beyond the end of the term (like this from UMass Amherst’s Dr. Julie Caswell: “As a General Education course, our goal is to address fundamental questions, ideas, and methods of analysis in the social sciences; apply these methods of analysis to the real-world problem of hunger; and stretch our minds.”)

Ask students to write about their own goals for the course on day one, then to return to and revise those documents in a final commentary that cites their own archive of papers, online posts, and other contributions to the course. Did they meet their goals? How will they keep working toward them? Were their goals the right ones?

Invite a panel of excellent former students back from a previous year to speak to the class about persistent echoes of the content and questions from your course as they’ve moved forward, and how they’ve continued to pursue the goals they wrote about—how is their writing, thinking, numeracy, activism, precision, open-mindedness, appreciation for history, awareness of subtext, etc. growing and changing from the seeds they planted in your course? In what concrete ways have they pursued these goals? Activities like these might jumpstart students’ thinking about why they’re at the university and place positive demands on them to be active and self-directed in the pursuit of desirable knowledge, skills, and habits of mind.

(3) Raise ‘originality’ as an intellectual issue

Consider giving students intellectual space to find value in “academic integrity” for themselves. How are notions of sole authorship, intellectual property as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, originality, even individual “genius” productive for society? On the other hand, are they in any way anachronistic or counterproductive in the students’ views? How do these notions shape UO academic culture and students’ academic work?

Perhaps try reading a short text that puts these ideas into question:

• Two defenses of “creative borrowing” are Jonathan Lethem’s 2007 Harper’s article “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” itself a patchwork of lifted quotations. (The keys at the end are especially interesting.) Malcolm Gladwell takes a similarly sunny view of creative borrowing when his own words are filched for a stage play in “Something Borrowed: Should a Charge of Plagiarism Ruin Your Life?” What do students think? Is there a such thing as “originality?” What defines it? How can we ever draw the lines between “my” idea and “yours”? Is it important to try?

• National Public Radio’s Morning Edition Spring 2013 segment on the density of pop cultural references in public discourse—and how it’s impossible to “get” them all thanks to an increasingly “fragmented cultureverse.”

One might ask students listen to the story and ask them to think about the personal and pop cultural references that pepper their everyday chat with friends, even to transcribe and attempt to footnote an allusion-filled conversation. They’re probably already weaving citations and original content skillfully, seamlessly in their everyday lives. What function do these references serve? How does academe’s insistence on making this citationality in our own work entirely visible gesture toward the inclusivity of knowledge?

• Edward White’s 1993 Chronicle of Higher Education piece “Too Many Campuses Ignore Student Plagiarism.”

White insists that plagiarism “denies the self and the very possibility of learning,” and he holds faculty members and institutions responsible for doing a better job convincing students that individual intellectual effort matters. What do students think of the blatant examples of plagiarism White mentions and his closing argument about the problem of education as “gamesmanship?” Does his argument still feel timely 20 years later?

(4) Get into the mechanics not just of how to cite, but of how citation functions.

Purdue’s Shirley K. Rose identifies a range relationships between citing and cited texts: as writers, we might places the work of others in coordinate, opposite, generative, consequential, apposite, exemplary, sequential, and iterative relationships to our own, she writes.

She explains that in a “coordinate”—an “and”—citation, we use make a community of thinkers and a category of thought visible across texts (“Smith, Lue, and Jennings all think X”). We might cite a text to distinguish our own ideas from its (opposite); or to serve as an example of an idea (“Miller exemplifies this turn toward the historical”); or to show how the lineage of an idea—how a cited text has invited or necessitated subsequent responses…

Ask students to make their own “citation taxonomy.” As they read a short, secondary source, they should note each time the writer cites another text. Can the students create a list of reasons the writer cites (to bolster his credibility, to distinguish herself, to seem in touch with recent research, to seem in touch with a body of research over time, etc.) and count the frequency of examples of each type of occurrence? Challenge students to try to incorporate several types on their next paper.