Why I teach my students not to plagiarize
What Melania Trump’s convention speech says about her — and our culture
The girls always look more like adults than the boys. At the prestigious private school where I teach English, certain days on the calendar are “dress days”: when famous speakers arrive on campus or for ceremonies, male students must wear a coat and tie and female students must wear a dress or business-appropriate slacks and a blouse. The girls teeter on 4-inch heels, little fawns learning to walk the woman-walk that may become useful to them in their bright futures. They wear dresses I have passed on my way to the sales rack at chic boutiques, and they look, as one famous visiting writer whispered to me, “like they’re trying to be 40-year-old women.”
The boys wear suits the way boys wear suits: begrudgingly, loose around the edges, the sagging heels of their Sperrys offering a glimpse of their white athletic socks. Diligent mothers have taken their sons’ suits to the dry cleaners, but even moms can’t keep them from loosening their ties at the neck at the entrance to the Upper School or refusing to comb their hair. None of them are adults yet, but we ask them to play the part. That’s our job, prepping them for the university, the office, the various halls of influence and power. My school is the kind of school Donald Trump attended, and Hillary Clinton, too.
This week, as I watched Melania Trump deliver her speech at the Republican National Convention, I thought about my school. Ms. Trump certainly looked the part in her tailored white knee-length dress, and she’s beautiful, but she also looked a little like my students on dress day.
In the fall semester we can always count on one dress day: the day faculty, administration and students sign the school’s Honor Code. Like many college preparatory schools and like my own college, our school asks students to behave according to core values. We don’t have locks on our students’ lockers, for example, because two core tenets of the school’s character education are honesty and respect. The logic behind any honor code is the idea that an institution can better govern behavior by creating a common culture of trust than by relying on fear. This only works, of course, if everyone buys into the culture.
By formalizing the occasion, we’re hoping to elevate it to ritual, a sacrament of sorts. We convene as a whole school that day, and the signing is solemn and quiet; students file in rows to the stage, find their name on cardstock letterhead and sign in front of their peers and mentors. They witness their teachers and principals sign as well. For many tests and papers, they sign again: On my honor, I have not lied, cheated or stolen.
But children are children. Even when they want to be good — and teenagers, despite the bad rap they get, are inherently good creatures — they break rules, so when they do lie, cheat or steal, and get caught, they report to an Honor Council of elected peers. The council listens to the student’s story, as well as that of the aggrieved party, usually, but not always, a teacher. The council recommends an appropriate consequence if its members agree a violation has occurred, a consequence the Upper School principal can veto if necessary.
Plagiarism is a common honor code violation. This makes some sense: In a postmodern world, originality is a fuzzy concept — these students grew up, for example, on music by DJs who “sample” other artists’ music and on quick fixes to video streaming and copyright — and they suffer from severe achievement anxiety. They want the Ivy League, they want scholarships, and they want, like all children throughout history, to please their parents. The pressure to perform is pathological.
Students’ understanding of plagiarism often falls under my purview as a teacher. So I teach them what it means. We also include examples and explanations in our English Department Handbook, and every grade level has a day or two in advisory group where we emphasize honor. We ask them to imagine what they’d do in morally ambiguous situations and discuss options. We try, as much as possible, to guide them toward honorable instincts and to bolster their sense of empathy and fairness.
Then someone like Melania Trump plagiarizes, the spin machine finds a scapegoat, and a handy list of excuses speeds its way down information highways. She didn’t mean it. Her speechwriter did it. Ninety-three percent of the speech wasn’t plagiarized. Everyone else does it. On national television, the leaders of the very civic culture we’re attempting to promote and nurture undermine all our hard work as educators.
I once participated in an Honor Council case of plagiarism by a student that got really ugly. The student liked me, but he wasn’t really ready for an AP level class, and he probably felt overwhelmed by the degree of intellectual rigor I demanded. I knew he wasn’t a bad kid. But I signed that Honor Code, too, and I believe in its power and admire my school’s dedication to it. When I wrote his mother about the violation, she replied with a vile email accusing me of favoritism, ineptitude, and, oddly, a lack of patriotism. I mostly felt sad.
Students don’t plagiarize when they own their writing process, when they understand writing as a space of discovery rather than a platform for fixed opinions and when they recognize their words as tiny ambassadors of their inner life to the wider world. As signposts for their souls. Somehow my student hadn’t developed an intimate relationship with his own mind and heart, and he saw me as an authoritative threat to his future, as a person he could dupe or charm rather than as a fellow citizen of academia. Nor did he trust himself and his voice. As a school, we got him to sign on his honor, but we hadn’t empowered him into goodness. He thought of his writing as a means to an end, as an item on a checklist he needed to complete to pass a class, to graduate, to nab a college admission. To win an election.
I don’t think Melania Trump had any malicious intent when she delivered her speech or even a complete awareness of what she’d done, the code she violated. Nor did she understand the violent, historical symbolism of stealing words from a black woman. But there she was, on a stage at a convention where leaders endorse together the commonly held principles of their party, wearing the glossy accessories of adulthood and integrity.
I worry less about her intent than what her plagiarism suggests about the poor tools she has for understanding herself, and her estrangement from her own voice. And I worry about what her plagiarism reveals about the political culture that put her on that stage: a willful lack of interest in empowerment and honor.