In debates about plagiarism, we tend to consider mostly the moral and 
legal dimension of what is involved. It is true that there is 
something to be condemned on ethical grounds and something that may 
be a real nuisance for the person whose text was transcribed without 
references, but whether we agree or not on this point, we should more 
seriously consider also the poor and pitiful intellectual dimension 
of such an act. In fact, authors of plagiarism are frequently unaware 
of the reprehensible character of their action; for many, writing 
consists in nothing more than putting together (without references) 
sentences taken here and there. One of my students once borrowed from 
me a text that I had recently written and, in a dissertation that I 
had to mark, she (for sure, many male did the same) freely used 
without any references many sentences of the document that I had lent 
her. Obviously, the marking was "failure", but soon after she called 
the director of department to complain about this marking, arguing, 
that after all, writing consists in reusing previously written texts 
in the way she did, and arguing much more sensibly that if she had in 
mind to be dishonest, she would surely not have used a text written 
by the person who had to mark her dissertation!

In any case, from our own academic point of view, such an 
intellectual unawareness of the problem raised by plagiarism is still 
more serious than the moral problem, because our role as higher 
education professors is not to produce honest people (we can only 
hope for such a happy result), it is to produce intellectually well 
articulated fellows. But nothing is more frustrating than a 
meaningless intellectual activity, and indulging in plagiarism is 
downgrading what is nonetheless presented as an intellectual 
activity. If the sources of such "writers" were quoted, readers could 
check the original and engage in fruitful discussions; but when 
facing a more or less naive rewriting of other people's sentences 
recopied without references, readers are just losing precious time. 
Academic writing is too important an activity to have people 
downgrade it in this way. Scholars should not tolerate such a way of 
"working" by their students if their aim is to help them to become 
productive intellectual workers. And if plagiarists are colleagues 
publishing in journals, there is still less reason to tolerate what 
would be a sad symptom of a serious credibility problem in the academic world.


Maurice Lagueux