While cheating to get ahead is a grudgingly acceptable fare in professional wrestling, it can destroy careers in academia. Thus, when reports surfaced that Fareed Rafiq Zakaria, the author of such cult classics like The Future of Freedom and The Post-American World, has had been suspended as Time magazine’s editor-at-large and relieved from his duty as the anchor of GPS, his popular current affairs program on CNN, on the charge of plagiarism, it sent shockwaves through the media and academic circles.[break]
Later on the same day his plagiarism was uncovered, Zakaria made a noncommittal apology, though made “unreservedly”, saying that he had “made a terrible mistake” and “it is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault,” without clearly specifying his grave error of judgment.
But Zakaria’s apology made it perfectly clear that he knew exactly what he was up to when he lifted material, unsolicited, from the New Yorker magazine [ref: Jill Lepore, “Battleground America,” The New Yorker, April 23, 2012] for his TIME column. Perhaps he believed his learned readers had better things to do than pore over a routine column in a glossy.
In Zakaria’s case, he was fully aware of his offense, of plagiarism, defined as ‘stealing and passing off the ideas or words of another as one’s own…or without crediting the original source’ by the Merriam-Webster dictionary. But can someone unaware that picking up certain word sequences from a written work without any attribution to its original author constitutes a crime, be punished on the charge of plagiarism?
Illustration: Sworup Nhasiju
For even noted Nepali academics, seasoned journalists and ‘experts’ in various fields are unaware that the materials they are using need proper citation:
• Not long ago, a young man writing for a national English daily was found copying another person’s article, almost word for word. When the editors confronted him with his egregious offense, he expressed complete ignorance: His defense was that he didn’t know what he was doing was wrong.
• Then there was the case of a former Nepali diplomat, a holder of the highest academic credentials, who had lifted entire paragraphs off Wikipedia in one of the articles he had submitted to the same publication.
• In yet another instance, a top Maoist leader had not even bothered to remove the Wikipedia hyperlinks from the Word document.
Perhaps this kind of ignorance is to be expected in a country where most college and university-level exams are more a contest between good and bad cheaters than a true test of academic excellence; where parents bribe invigilators to pass on chits to their children in school-ending exams; where readymade Masters-level theses are openly advertised and sold inside university premises.
Plagiarists may argue that they are in good company, to boot. Among those accused of plagiarism have been figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., who was at the forefront of the American Civil Rights Movement and Barack Obama, the first Black American President.
There are many reasons people plagiarize: out of ignorance, laziness, lack of time, or the belief that they will never get caught. It is indeed very hard to resist the allure of the shortcut when the world is literally on our fingertips: Google and ye shall find!
Couldn’t Martin Luther King be forgiven a little leeway in his noble bid to give millions of Blacks in America their due rights? So what if his career-defining ‘I have a dream’ oratory was ‘inspired’ by another speech of another Black civil rights campaigner? And could Obama be judged harshly if during one of his back-to-back, no-sleep-constantly-on-the-go presidential primaries, he found his voice in the sermon of a fellow Democrat?
The danger here is that the thin line between original works and those ‘inspired’ by others may completely disappear if we start nitpicking between ‘forgivable’ offences of plagiarism and the absolutely ‘inexcusable’ ones.
Even in Nepal, more and more people are relying on the virtual network, and not just for pleasure and learning. The ease with which huge swathes of online information can be accessed tantalizes many aspirants to fame an easy way out of anonymity. Just ask the millions of Googling fans of the immortal lie-cheat-steal Eddie Guerrero spread across the world.
The writer is the op-ed editor at Republica.
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