I studied for a while in an Ivy League college and found the standard to be pitiful. You went to the bookshop at the beginning of term and bought the books you needed. Then you were told to read a few pages before each class. To pass you needed to write a short essay and sit a very short exam. Each course unless it was built on a predecessor assumed absolutely no knowledge whatsoever. So, if you studied physics it was right from the beginning. There was no assumption that you had studied anything at school. You then studied a weird and wonderful set of subjects each of which took you to the same mediocre level and spent the rest of your time playing sports, dating and getting drunk at fraternities. But still there was no problem with plagiarism.
In all the time that I studied I never once came across
plagiarism. It was mentioned every now and again, but it wasn’t dwelled on.
Everyone everywhere I studied was good enough to study there, so there was no need
to plagiarise anyone else. In America it wasn’t that the students lacked
talent, it was simply that harder courses awaited them in graduate school.
Their studies were merely delayed by the lack of national school leaving exams.
I doubt very much that anyone checked my sources when
I was writing. It wasn’t necessary. You can tell instantly just by talking to
someone if they understand their subject and are capable of having original thoughts
about it.
Citing sources has become in the past decades the most
important thing indeed the only thing, but it didn’t use to be that way. If you
read some of the great scholars of the nineteenth century and earlier you will
find lots of text, very few references and a tiny bibliography.
So too when Ludwig Wittgenstein submitted his thesis
he wrote
Indeed what I have here
written makes no claim to novelty in points of detail; and therefore I give no
sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has
already been thought before me by another.
There was no need for him to cite any sources because
his examiners immediately recognised that although they did not understand all of
it Wittgenstein had written a work of genius. No one questioned that the work
was his, not least because no one else in the world was capable of writing it.
Times moved on in Cambridge and it became necessary to
play the game a bit, but I could still write without any sources and only put
them when I’d finished. Again, citing sources and writing a bibliography was
necessary, but no one made a big deal about it, because what mattered was that
what you wrote was original and showed understanding of the subject. Given this
it could be assumed that you were not plagiarising, because you didn’t need to.
It is this that has changed in the years since. People
who ought to have left education at school have gone on like the former president
of Harvard to obtain a degree and then a higher degree and then a job that
should require a high level of intelligence while all the time lacking that
intelligence.
This is a process that has been going on since at
least the nineteenth century. By the mid twentieth century anyone with ability
even if he was from a poor background could study at Cambridge. It meant that
the standard of the courses was very high indeed. It wasn’t so much that you
were taught, but that you were expected to write and argue your point not just
with your peers but with some of the best minds in the country. You simply couldn’t reach the end point
without being talented. There was no point plagiarising because you weren’t
being judged on your citations, but on your thought and ability to argue.
This all began to change with expansion. People who would
have been incapable of studying at the level up to this point were admitted.
Naturally they had to pass. It might be possible to fail a few, but if you
failed more than a handful you would go out of business. So, the courses had to
be made easier.
You cannot go from 5% of the population passing
something to 50% passing and expect the standard to remain the same.
Worse what became important ceased to be intellect. When
anyone with an average IQ or even below that could pass, you need to find
something other than intellect to distinguish between one and the other.
Whereas previously politics had been a completely nonissue
in most subjects to the extent that you might know someone for years and not
know how they voted, gradually it became not merely part of each subject but
really the whole subject.
Instead of judging intellect what mattered was
conformity to a set of rules and opinions.
Issues like race, transgender, homosexuality, feminism
and also to an extent leftwing economics, which were at best peripheral
previously became the only issues. These became the equivalent of what previously
had been footnotes.
It is not just the former president of Harvard who was
judged not on her ability to cite sources, nor indeed on her intellect, it was
everyone else too.
Critical race theory tells us that black people can’t
be racist. Only white people can be racist. It argues that the reason for differences
in socio economic status and indeed any ability between black people and white
people must be the result of racism not merely now but in history. A black
student requires affirmative action in order to get into Harvard. Equality isn’t
enough. He needs preferential treatment, because he suffered racism and his
ancestors suffered from slavery.
So, it has to be made easier for Claudine Gay to get
into Harvard or a similar college. If she struggles with the course, she has to
be marked more leniently to make up for the racism she has suffered. When she
goes on to study for her Ph.D., we mustn’t check her sources too carefully and
if we do spot any examples of plagiarism, we need to ignore them, even if we
wouldn’t do the same for someone else who had not suffered from racism.
You begin to perhaps see the problem that has
developed. The problem is not so much the plagiarism, it that you have so
lowered the standard of what you are doing that it really doesn’t matter if
they cite sources correctly or not.
Previously you were judged on your intellect. Can you
think? Can you learn? Can you write? Can you argue? Politics didn’t come into it.
Now you are not judged on your intellect, but on your identity
and how closely you conform to a set of dogmas no one has proved either experimentally
or with reason.
When someone with a mediocre intellect can reach the
top of Harvard not because she is intelligent or original or an interesting
mind, but simply because of her identity and her willingness to conform to
dogma, then we can assume that the education provided at Harvard is essentially
worthless. If it worthless there it is similarly worthless everywhere. It’s
merely a matter of degree and catching up with this worthlessness.
The problem is not plagiarism. The problem is not
citing or footnotes. The problem is that we have essentially destroyed
education.
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