Roger was really angry. And when Roger Fulton gets really angry, he can be pretty fearsome.
Even when he's not angry, Roger always looks a bit like the state trooper that he was, leaning down to your window with the rain dripping off his Stetson and asking, "Is there a particular reason you're driving so fast this evening?"
Now he was boiling, so angry that he bit through his tongue. At the front of the room, chunks of his book, Common Sense Supervision, were appearing, one after another on overhead slides. That was bad enough. Then he heard the instructor tell the class not to worry about copying down the key points, because she'd just run off copies of the entire book for everyone.
Training, self-discipline, and years of waiting for the right moment helped Roger wait, tasting his own blood in his mouth. At the end of the session he walked to the front of the room, picked up one of the illegal copies of his book and waited for the last of the students to leave.
He greeted the instructor with a hard smile and harder eyes, "Let me introduce myself, I'm Roger Fulton." She went white and her knees buckled.
Not every case of intellectual deceit is this blatant. Then again, not every author, musician, or photographer who's had their work stolen gets this kind of satisfaction, either.
Somehow, I guess that taking someone else's intellectual property doesn't seem as bad as picking up a knick-knack in their living room and dropping it in your pocket.
In recent months two popular historians have been called to account for passages in their works that came directly from the works of others, without proper attribution. A major television journalist has been caught falsifying a story. An Episcopal Vicar produced great sermons and stimulating newsletter pieces. The only problem was that they weren't his.
The world has always been full of forgers, plagiarists, and hucksters. Forgers produce a work and want you to think that it's someone else's. Plagiarists take someone else's work and want you to think it's theirs. Hucksters carefully choose and craft the "evidence" they show you and want you to go along with their scheme. While that sort of thing has always been around, it seems to be on the rise now and digital tools seem to be making it easier than ever to give in to our baser nature.
Digital technology makes it easier to copy things, and change things, and present things in a different light than ever before. The woman who copied every page of Roger Fulton's book by standing at a copying machine and running off masters and then copying complete sets wouldn't have to work as hard today. Today a scanner would let her sweep all of that material into digital files that she could re-shape and re-make and re-format to look like her own. And text is only part of the story. Digital technology makes it easier to trick you with other things, like pictures and music, and even experience.
Back in 1982 the National Geographic magazine wasn't too pleased with a picture they had that they wanted to use for a cover. It was a picture of the pyramids and it was taken in horizontal format. No amount of cropping would make it work the way they wanted, so they moved the pyramids closer together in the picture. In the digital World that's not only easy to do, it's devilishly hard to spot.
National Geographic never actually admitted that they did anything wrong. Instead they resorted to linguistic mumbo-jumbo. They described their actions as "retroactive repositioning of the photographer."
You may not think this is a big deal, but it's the top of the very slippery slope. In the years since then altering images digitally has become common. Sports Illustrated removed a player from a cover photograph, probably to make it look better. Modern-day movie characters are inserted into historical settings. One recent advertisement for a communications company shows the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. giving what is arguably one of the finest speeches in the English language to a large empty space in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
Time Magazine darkened the photograph of O. J. Simpson that it used on its cover. The only reason we know that is Newsweek ran the same picture on its cover the same week, without alteration. How many times has an image been changed to tell a different story or convey a different impression? We simply don't know.
Visit Lubbock, Texas and watch the news on KTJV television. You'll notice that they've got a very sophisticated set. It's much more than you'd expect from a small TV station. It's also doesn't exist, at least not in the physical world.
The sets are actually computer projections. They're done using the same technology that lets viewers see a weather map behind a television meteorologist. The meteorologist is actually standing in front of a plain, blue wall. KTJV and other stations use a more powerful and sophisticated version of the same technology, to make it appear that their studios are more impressive than they really are.
What if you're in Boise, Idaho, listening to radio station KSAS-FM? There's that personality on the air, talking about his visit to a local nightclub the previous weekend, making reference to local events and talking to guests who are stopping by after skiing on nearby slopes. All very impressive. None of it's real.
The radio personality is actually over a thousand miles away. The show was taped earlier. The personalities who stop by after skiing may have gone skiing, but they didn't visit Boise, and they didn't physically visit the personality who did the interview. What about those references to local events and supposed trips to local nightclubs? They're all made up too, based on information provided by a local contact.
We've gone through the looking glass into a world where the truth doesn't matter anymore. We've heard a U. S. President say that he never used marijuana and then finally admit that he puffed, but didn't inhale. That same president claimed that he never demonstrated against U. S. troops. Then a film clip surfaced showing him in a crowd at a demonstration. He said he wasn't actually demonstrating. Later, he echoed that same process when he said, "I did not have sex with that woman . . ." followed shortly thereafter by, "It depends on what you mean by sex."
Digital technologies, and especially the Net, magnify the effect of trends. It seems to be doing that with plagiarism and dishonest representation.
Even back when I was in college, just after the Pleistocene Era, there were places you could go to get your term paper done. Today, that's gone high tech. There are Web sites out there that will do just about any academic heavy lifting that you want, offering up term papers and research for a fee.
The techies are on the side of the angels, too. Teachers use Web sites and software to identify the plagiarists and bring them to justice.
The most popular of these is a service called Turnitin based in Oakland, California. That service will scan student papers for patterns and compare them to term papers available on the Internet. They send their findings to the teacher involved. Then the teacher makes the decision about whether it's actually plagiarism , and if so, what the penalty should be. That's what Christine Pelton did. Christine used to be a teacher. She used to teach at Piper High School in the Kansas City area. She used to teach Biology.
Piper High School's Student Handbook clearly states that the first offense of cheating will result in no credit for the assignment. Pelton reinforced that with her own instructions.
At the beginning of her Biology class she told students that they would be expected to do a report on leaves. She told them that if they cheated or plagiarized, they would get a zero for the assignment. She followed that up with written instructions.
When the students started turning in their work, some of it looked far too sophisticated for the students who were claiming it as their own. Some blocks of text were exactly the same in different papers. Out of 118 students, 28 had copied all or part of their report from Internet sources and without attribution. Christine Pelton did what she promised. She failed them.
Up until then the lesson looked like it would be pretty clear. If you cheat we'll try to catch you, and if we do, there will be consequences. But the lesson actually turned out to be something very different.
The parents of failed students went to the principal and then to the school superintendent. They complained that the standards were too rigid and plagiarism wasn't serious. They wanted leniency for their children. The principal and the superintendent stood fast.
The parents went to the School Board. Like most school board members, these were elected. Like most. they don't have any kind of Civil Service or union contract protection. This group didn't appear to have any professional standards, either.
The School Board didn't even talk to Christine Pelton. They debated the issue behind closed doors, in violation of the Kansas Open Meetings Law.
They decided, despite the school policy and the clearly stated policy of the teacher, that there would be partial credit for the assignment. They also decided that the assignment would count for less overall, so that no one would fail the course because they hadn't actually done the work and misrepresented other people's work as their own.
Technology is not the problem here. Nor is it the answer. Plagiarism and fraud will happen with or without technology. When it does, it takes a human being and a certain amount of moral courage to confront the cheats. How we support the people who confront the cheats says a lot about our own moral values.
And Christine Pelton? She's not teaching Biology anymore. Instead, she's working in daycare.
This feature appeared on 8 April 2002
