Plagiarism: Alchemy and Remedy in Higher Education (review)

The descriptive remarks on the back cover of Marsh’s book seem to focus on only the final chapter, a highlight of the book in its indictments of plagiarism technology services. That chapter should be required reading for academic managers, teachers, and students, particularly as concerns Turnitin.com, one of the most successful outsource companies for processing student writing on behalf of client universities. As Marsh points out, “the Turnitin service socializes student writers toward traditional notions of normality, docility, originality, and ‘uniqueness’” (136) while absorbing student writing into its database, thus gathering strength as a database comparison tool from the very sources it is evaluating: “Turnitin.com manages the threats of student plagiarism, in part, by inverting traditional author positions and assuming ownership of a converted text product later sold back (as an ‘exact’ duplicate) to the client” (140–41).

Marsh’s incisive critique of plagiarism technology services joins a critique of the rise of composition norms in U.S. universities. Those norms rise up from Western histories of right reading and educational elitism, as Marsh points out. Those histories, some of which Marsh traces, join other topics of intellectual property law, originality myths, and literary norms, so that Marsh produces sentences such as: “Antiplagiarism remedies function in a way like the universal requirement of introductory writing, representing an ‘ethical technology’ ([Sharon] Crowley 217) grounded in both intellectual property law and time-honored literary conventions” (57).

This mixed bag of historical formations and ongoing consequences is a laudable and problematic feature of Marsh’s book. It is laudable because the cultural fields to which Marsh refers—with the possible exception of alchemy—are all quite relevant to the book’s interest in the power of the concept of plagiarism. It is problematic because, in this fairly brief monograph, these fields end up under-explored and often only gesturally connected. As a fan of the gestural and of the concise monograph, I still say that this particular book doesn’t on balance yield its finest fruits with such an approach.

Marsh has taken on a great deal, and it’s crucial to be ambitious in the face of such important material and the powerful institutions that won’t be happy with his mostly courteously phrased polemics. But I wish he had let fly with his opinions, since they are at the heart of the book and are often muffled by Marsh’s expressed wish for “non-partial observation” (5). Another way of putting it is that what resonates in my reading is how contemporary plagiarism is not the same, conceptually, as various older versions of plagiarism. The interpretive struggle that originates in right readings of scripture, in both pre-modern and post-Reformation senses, is now—in the technological landscape of copyright, plagiarism, and education—a sometimes unconscious, sometimes cannily wielded, prop for the policing of culture (maintaining disciplinary, social, and institutional boundaries) and money (property laws). Marx, anyone? Or at least Eagleton?

Perhaps because “right reading” is so based in scriptural interpretation, I find Marsh’s comparison of advanced literacy baptism with alchemical initiation too fuzzy to work well. Alchemy was always suspect, in church opinion. If Marsh had developed an argument about the rise of alchemy’s stature as concurrent with the Reformation and its contested push for individuated will, spiritual responsibility, and scriptural interpretation, and if he had shown alchemy at work in the development of Western education, then perhaps alchemy would have shed serious light on his plagiarism context. Some of the seeds for such argument are variously perceivable in the book, but as it stands, Marsh’s alchemy has only a kind of arbitrary aptness. For Marsh, the mysteries of alchemical transmutation mirror the putative mysteries of authorial transmutation (“good” composition trumps “bad” plagiarism, for the initiated). His alchemy-as-metaphor explanations distract from the more pertinent social histories that are his primary focus.

Because he goes in multiple directions, it is understandable that Marsh comes to say midway through that the book is focused...