Plagiarism: The plague of pilferage

The academic spectrum across several Pakistani universities is infected with the deadly plague of plagiarism. Academic integrity seems to have melted in the heat of churning out research papers to receive more grants, promotions and other benefits. Nothing is sacrosanct in this high greed for money and status, no matter what illegal or unethical measures are adopted.

Recent public records show many major universities being hit by massive episodes of plagiarism. For instance, two months ago, the Higher Education Commission (HEC) announced the disqualification of 45 faculty members from a dozen universities over plagiarism charges. This huge academic theft was allegedly committed by these members while they were affiliated with Benazir University, Karachi University, People’s Women University and the University of Sindh, among others. In the same month, the University of the Punjab became the focus of attention when the wife of the vice-chancellor, herself the principal of the University Law College, was accused of plagiarism. Ironically, she was a member of the University’s Standing Committee on Plagiarism. A few years earlier, five faculty members from the University’s Centre for High Energy Physics, including its director, were forced to retire on plagiarism charges.

Last year, a faculty member at COMSATS Institute of Information Technology put a cunning twist to fraudulent publishing. Knowing well the value of peer review in editorial decision-making, he produced fake peer reviews by providing false information about the reviewers. Elsevier, the Dutch journal publishing giant, was compelled to retract 16 research articles from its three journals ‘authored’ by him.

If fake peer reviews were diabolical, wait till you get to meet academic cannibalism. The victim, a female student from the University of Karachi, lost her entire PhD thesis to the rapacity of her supervisor who published it in her own name in a bid to win a $7,000 research grant from the Pakistan Scientific Research Council! While the University of Karachi scholar stands little chance of redeeming her own research work, some other victims are not luckless. They are chasing the thieves and making them pay for their heinous intellectual crime. Enter Bruce Schneier, a Fellow of Harvard University’s Berkman Center. Recounting a personal experience of academic kidnapping (plagiarism has the Latin root plagiarius, meaning kidnapping and theft), he exposes the dirty tactics of the three plagiarist professors from the International Islamic University, Islamabad. One of his papers, co-authored in 1997, on encryption was plagiarised by them in 2004 for which they made a public apology. As if this was not enough, the same culprits struck again and plagiarised papers by the French cryptographer Serge Vaudenay and others.

An apology becomes redundant if legal and other loopholes are resorted to for exonerating oneself from intellectual felony. Take, for instance, the putative plagiarism involving the vice-chancellor of the University of Peshawar where, as an act of obstinacy, a legal restraint was sought against the HEC policy on plagiarism. Similarly, the vice-chancellor of Quaid-e-Azam University is reported to have defended a suspect thesis in a pseudoscience, chromotherapy, even after it was designated as “nonsense” by two Nobel Laureates.

According to two reliable insiders, recently at a small private university in Lahore, deliberate condoning of blatantly massive plagiarism and subsequent administrative action in support of over a dozen plagiarists submitting their 1,000-word outlines for English teaching courses, highlighted a total loss of ethical consideration in academic conduct. The unintelligent copy-paste frenzy that swept through the group was admitted by each individual. At the next sunrise, under political pressure, and appeasement to counter the fear of administrative reprisals, they turned their own admission of guilt into personal slurs against the two supervisors. The funniest bit was that most of these plagiarist teachers faithfully reproduced the original anti-plagiarism notices from the websites from where they themselves had stolen. What a grand hypocrisy in telling their students not to steal!

The oft-familiar statement on motivation to steal intellectual property is that our teachers and students face language problems. It is claimed that they fail to compose their thoughts in a foreign language. You must be kidding! What about that herd of English-language lecturers who feasted on English language material from websites and were unscrupulous in putting their own names on the stolen property? How these plagiarising lecturers could become teachers of English in the first place is unfathomable. At least one academic sage, Professor Fateh Mohammad Malik, is reported to have made a sane observation that “theft of intellectual property should not be overlooked and the student or teacher involved in plagiarism should be sentenced with imprisonment”.

Thieves have a way to outsmart technology. The similarity index of plagiarism detection software, such as Turnitin, can hardly catch any aggressively rephrased text. That is how smart thieves are getting away with impunity. No change in software algorithm will deter these academic criminals. Beyond the Googlised copy-paste world, there are other factors that impact upon this practice of thievery. There is, for instance, the unethical behaviour of teachers who coerce students to transfer their research work in their name; nepotism; political arm-twisting; fake data; data tampering; legal acrobats; addition of unrelated authors; and an alarming lack of awareness and concern about safeguarding intellectual property rights.

Plagiarism is not a software issue. It is at once a moral and ethical issue. It is a matter of academic integrity. It is a question of values. We should wake up to the reality that a growing number of disingenuous individuals in our academia are not only stealing our written word, they are stealing our values. They must be stopped.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 2^nd, 2015.

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