The strangest compliment
“How do you know what you know?”
I have a cough. Not in itself too big of a deal, but the fact that it’s the most violent and persistent cough I’ve ever had is especially inconvenient. For the last few days I’ve been having a half dozen or so little naps throughout the night instead of a solid chunk of sleep. And during my exams I had to leave the room more than a few times just to clear my throat and keep my lungs in my chest and off of my test paper. I’m quite confident I’ve diseased the entire Classics department at U of T, over which I might normally be regretful if it hadn’t been causing such trouble for me recently.
Yes, as if it weren’t bad enough that this has been the most execrable undergraduate semester I’ve yet had, the bloody thing still isn’t over. My term paper for Latin Prose Authors (in which we read the first four books of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and the first third of his Apologia) has set off the plagiarism alarms in my professor. Due to my inconsistent attendance and performance throughout his course, he doesn’t believe that I’m capable of the paper I wrote, claiming that it’s “too scholarly” and “suspiciously good,” and that the writing itself has a graduate student degree of confidence.
Naturally, I was flattered. While I’m not too crazy about the paper I wrote (most of it was fluff and I thought that my arguments were textual leaps of faith and insufficiently presented), it’s nice to be recognized as a talented writer. In fact it’s even quite ironic how he praises the confidence of my writing when I don’t view myself as a confident writer at all, such that I genuinely thought he wanted to speak with me about my paper because it was so bad and not because it was so good. I can’t decide whether or not this means I should stop writing my papers the night before they’re due with a bottle of scotch at hand.
At any rate, he had three major concerns, two of which were easily dispatched (how do I know so much about my topic, and how am I able to write so well?) while the third is causing my present troubles.
The subject of my essay is essentially a character comparison between a minor character in the Metamorphoses and a major character in the Aulularia (The Pot of Gold), a comedy by Plautus. I’ve taken courses on both Apuleius and ancient drama before and done rigourous studies of Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, and Terence. So while I do know more about the subject than most undergraduates/classicists, I agree that demonstrating such knowledge might be suspicious to a professor who is unfamiliar with my particular interests. Fair enough. I explained my history with such material and told him that I’m contemplating a focus on ancient drama and ancient comedy should I ever commit myself to graduate school.
As for my writing abilities, I explained my leisure pursuits as an amateur writer/journalist to him. Working and writing for campus media for more than three years, editing pieces and developing other writers, how my dedication to the newspaper directly interfered with his course when I’m up all night Wednesday helping to put out an issue which meant I’d show up to his Thursday morning class without having slept, etc. “Oh, so you’re a practised writer…” he said as if to renege on his earlier words of praise.
While these explanations seemed to have convinced him, he still had to bring this charge of academic misconduct to the attention of the department chair, the reason being that his academic integrity is also now involved. Whether or not I wrote the paper and know what I know about the topic is now not the major issue; it’s the third concern regarding the possibility of intellectual theft.
Unfortunately, my paper bears such similarity to another piece of scholarship (which I’m aware of and skimmed over in the most basic act of preliminary research) that, in the opinion of not just my professor and the department chair but also to any classicist who read that scholarship and my paper side by side, it would be “a colossal coincidence” for my paper not be a “synthesis” of the existing scholarship. This is the headache. After speaking with the department chair on Monday afternoon, coughing constantly and likely with the faint hint of soothing scotch masked by Altoid peppermints on my viral breath, I learn that the possible academic offence I committed was purloining the ideas of another and presenting them as my own; that my paper does not contain my ideas which I developed myself.
In short, I’m screwed. How the hell am I supposed to argue that my ideas are my own? How the hell can I be charged with stealing ideas, not through simple “copy/paste” but through cleverly insidious “synthesis”? It seems like my only hope is the realization that it would be impossible for them to prove what they’re accusing my of having done, as much as it would be impossible for me to disprove it. Which I don’t say to suggest that I’m admitting academic misconduct while reveling in how I got away with it, but rather that the legitimacy of my high calibre writing is being doubted on coincidence, “colossal” or otherwise. It’s my essay, dammit, and I developed the ideas I put forth! In fact I’m disgusted with myself for even considering that I should just say, “yeah, whatever, I did what you think I did, so give me an F and let’s save us all some time…” as if it’s somehow my fault that my good work on a meagre 10% assignment has created this much inconvenience.
And for what? Because I freely admit in the interest of full disclosure to having glanced at the article from which they think I stole? What about my other voluntary admissions that the impact of that scholarship was so minimal that I didn’t even pay attention to who wrote it until I was made aware of this charge and was compelled to retrace my browser clicks and have a look? Or that most of that scholarship wasn’t even available to me because it appeared as a Google Book result with most of the pages cut out; that the only reason I did this most cursory amount of research was so that I would feel confident in the knowledge that this is a topic worth pursuing if others have gone there before? Or that most significantly I obviously would’ve made mention of utilizing this scholarship in a bibliography had I felt that it made any contribution whatsoever to the development of my essay and ideas?
If in that essay I made use of ideas not my entirely my own, surely those ideas came from professors in past courses I took on the subject, courses which are responsible for my current knowledge yet from which professors I’m not being accused of intellectual theft. The ideas of those courses and professors were far more influential than that scholarship and likewise went unattributed in my essay, yet that’s not the charge.
This is infuriating. Regrettably nothing more can be done until January since the university is now closed for the holidays, and I was really rather hoping that it would all be over Monday afternoon. In the mean time, this academically miserable semester drags on.
Comments are closed.