Copycats

From day one of our education, administrators and instructors have engraved into our eager little minds that we must strive to produce good work of which we can be proud. Of course, there’s one little catch that most of us in academia understand – we can claim responsibility for a work only if it is a result of our own labor. Madonna G. Constantine, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, didn’t seem to get this memo. Or she simply chose to ignore it. College officials announced last week they had found Constantine guilty of plagiarizing several academic works during the past five years. But that’s not the most shocking part. She wasn’t fired. A release from the college said Constantine received a punishment, but the university declined to specify what it was. \nOf course, we’re not going to sit on our pedestal and claim to know what is the best punishment for said crime, although that is what you are probably used to – and we know you love it – from the IDS Editorial Board. We understand there are factors in Constantine’s situation that make it difficult to decide if firing her is really the just punishment. She claimed she might have been “targeted” because of her position as one of only two tenured black female professors on staff, and the fact that a noose was hung on her office door last fall adds to this suspicion.\nYes, an 18-month investigation found evidence of “numerous instances in which (Constantine) used others’ work without attribution in papers she published in academic journals.” But while we need to be sensitive to the external circumstances involved in these particular situations, we cannot fail to recognize the larger scope of this issue. \nPlagiarism – well, cheating in general – has become a bigger and bigger problem, especially because in today’s world, it’s easy to “borrow” information found on the Internet. And those in leadership positions need to be practicing what the academy is preaching. Not only that, but they must be held accountable when not doing so.\nA recent study by Rutgers’ Management Education Center in New Jersey found about two-thirds of high school students admit to “serious” cheating on school work. \nDonald McCabe, founding president of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University, has seen a growing trend of admitted cheating in schools, and he is concerned by it. He said while it “has always gone on, it’s never been this high.” He also said that 200 years ago, “there was more shame associated with cheating.”\nIf IU students are caught plagiarizing, they could lose credit for that assignment, fail the course or even face expulsion. But when we see educators plagiarize and seemingly get nothing more than a slap on the wrist, it isn’t hard to see why young students are sometimes hesitant to take academic morality and ethics seriously.