Unlearning Malpractice: Institutional Responses to Plagiarism in Academic Writing

This chapter examines institutional responses to malpractice in academic writing, taking as its starting point a number of high-profile cases of plagiarism, including recent cases in Germany, the UK and Russia. It then examines a form of academic malpractice consisting of computer-generated papers, which arguably counts as plagiarism as the authors seek to pass the articles off as their own work although they were generated using a form of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Since the intent to deceive is still present, they should be considered to be a form of plagiarism, although clearly an outlier in relation to traditional copy-and-paste techniques. The examination of institutional responses then continues with an overview of the study of academic malpractice as an emerging discipline. It is then argued that the roots of plagiarism at the undergraduate and postgraduate level can be traced back to malpractice deeply ingrained in high school, as a result of teachers encouraging students to copy and paste in an indiscriminate and unscrupulous manner, a practice which they – misleadingly – dignify with the term “research”. The title of Sir Isaiah Berlin’s study, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (1991), a phrase coined by Kant, comes to mind in this connection, but the chapter concludes by arguing that plagiarism can be dealt with effectively as long as the academic community is prepared to take a firm stand against it by providing specific guidance. The chapter proceeds as follows. First it considers high-profile cases in Germany, the UK and Russia, and then examines forms of plagiarism that rely on AI to produce computer-generated content. Next it provides an outline of academic malpractice studies as an emerging discipline, and then seeks to identify the roots of malpractice in the methods inculcated in high schools, while proposing an antidote to such malpractice.