Note: I’ve somewhat revised this rather overstated post in response to Kelly Ritter’s generous comment, although I’ve left what I originally wrote intact and visible for honesty’s sake, since I think it’d be unethical for me to here do any retroactive erasing of my mistakes.
Clancy points to a new article on online paper mills from Kelly Ritter, an article that covers much of the same ground and invokes much of the same ideologies as Ritter’s original CCC article. I was intrigued by Ritter’s first article because of the way in which its use of the term “economics” stands as usefully characteristic of composition’s conception of economic concerns: for Ritter, and for most scholars in composition, economy is discursively equated to cash-based market commerce.
(A wonderful exception to this is Amy Robillard’s brilliant January 2006 College English piece, which I hope to have more to say about soon, particularly in terms of the ways it draws together notions of affectual immaterial labor with theories of economy and class.)
Ritter proposes that “the advent of digital technologies that allow access to completed papers… has created valid concern among faculty, especially among those involved in the teaching of writing” (25), constructing digital reproducibility as the lightning to Walter Benjamin’s Dr. Frankenstein, with the monster being Plagiarism Itself. The problem, however, lies not merely with the technology: rather, “student patronage of [online] paper mills is reinforced… by students’ disengagement from academic definitions of authorship” and by “their overreliance on consumerist notions of ownership, especially in Internet commerce” (26). For Ritter, the brain of Frankenstein’s Monster, and its destructive potential, is embodied in the “consumerist” economic ideologies of today’s students.
But what are “students’ definitions of authorship”? Are today’s first-year composition students, in their literate practices, as venal and avaricious as Ritter makes them out to be?
I don’t think so. Look at (as Danielle Nicole DeVoss has done) the hundreds of revisions of the Star Wars Kid video; look at (as Casey Burton has done) collaboratively-authored fanfic and commons-based peer icon creation; look at, again, Robillard’s recent examination of Young Scholars. As much as I admire the rigor of Ritter’s work, it seems immediately apparent to me — particularly given her prominent citation of Bartholomae — that she has no desire or intent to inhabit the emerging perspective of today’s student. (Added after her comment — see below: Kelly does, in fact, clearly seek to understand the emerging perspective of today’s student, such being the purpose of the assignment she proposes.
In fact, Kelly Ritter, you’ve been generation-gapped. Today’s information economies of individuated production and consumption, and their constituent students as economic agents, have left you fulminating without a target in their wake. (Added after her comment — see below: OK, that direct address really came across as being in full-on attack mode. And it’s unfortunately vague, as well.)
For Ritter, the student’s values must bend to the will of the academy, and the academy can apparently never shift to accomodate alterations in societal values brought about by technological and economic change: the culture of the academy always drives change in the culture of the student, and never the other way around. This, in itself, is an ideology of mass capitalism; a superannuated ideology — and is it any wonder that the students Ritter writes about so wholly reject an ideology that makes no attempt whatsoever to engage their (Lessig, Barbrook, Benkler) values?
In fact, Ritter’s repeated assertions that first-year composition lacks a subject might surprise teachers and scholars in nationally-recognized writing programs who have long argued with force and rigor that the subject of the first-year composition course is, in fact, writing. But perhaps that is illustrative of the values Ritter brings to her pedagogy — which is, after all, the subject of her essay. I might suggest that a teacher who thinks her course doesn’t have a subject will likely send a strong message to students about the value of the work in that course. (Added after her comment — see below: I stand corrected.)
But what is the value of that course? What’s it for? Ritter describes “the highly valued commodity of academic agency that academia seeks to bestow on students and employers” (47), and makes the problem quite clear: she constructs academic agency as a commodity for exchange, rather than seeing students as literate agents already critically producing culture. Ritter’s economic ideology — that the only value for the product of the labor of writing is its exchange value — is, in fact, precisely the thing that creates the problem she seeks to critique. When she argues that “Our task as writing faculty is to strike a balance between helping students to become literate professionals and shaping their writing consciousness in ways still palatable to our own ethics” (32), she presumes that students have no ethical agency of their own. (Added after her comment — see below: OK, I overstated that some, although it still seems to me that there’s an opposition being drawn, with the old-school ethical stance of faculty being privileged over students’ emerging ethics of the remix culture and the economy of individuated production and consumption.)
Wrong answer.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: students are political, economic, and ethical beings, and they don’t shed that status when they cross the transom into the classroom.
Kelly Ritter would do well to recognize that. (Added after her comment — see below: she does recognize it, and in fact she suggests that it’s strongly implied by her argument.)
Dear Mike:
I’m struck by how I feel you are misreading my work (at least this essay, about which you have more concerns than the C’s piece). My intent was to actually highlight how we as writing teachers are largely disconnected from students’ intentions, and to call for instructors to try to bridge that gap. So it seems a bit ironic, at least to me, that you say I’m trying to distance myself from students. And wow–you say that I characterize students as “venal and avaricious.” Do I really come across as that anti-student? These labels about students, stuck to my work, really concern me. I remember when we (you and I) corresponded shortly after the Cs piece and I tried to express these ideas over e-mail at that time. So your reading here surprises me.
I realize that I don’t understand economic theory in the ways that you do–that’s not my expertise–but I am trying to say, in these two articles (that do cover similar ground; one is the more theoretical overview, the second is the pedagogical application), that students should see a subject matter to composition, that they should see composition as a site to grow as authors. I do, in fact, wish that the academy *would* bend to students’ needs more–above you say that I want students to always bend to the academy. Not so. I hope that I was clear that the whole point of these articles is to get faculty to see students’ perspectives and how they often conflict with ours. I guess if I wanted students to bend to the academy, I’d be spending my time on turnitin.com instead of trying to figure out how students feel about authorship.
Also, my composition courses are typically “themed” around the subject of education, so I would probably be the last person to say that composition, for me, has no subject. But I think you have to recognize how the academy constructs the subject–how it hires its teachers, how it shuttles students through its required courses. I cite Bartholomae because I do believe he has some good things to say. I don’t know if he would agree with me, but I am trying to say precisely what you say above: that students are “political, economic, and ethical beings.” When we ignore how and why they utilize the paper mills, we treat them as beings without any of those attributes–completely the opposite of what I’m trying to say. I want teachers to engage in conversations with their students about writing, academic honesty and yes, economic realities. I would love to believe that students are not concerned about the more “practical” attributes of college, but my experience with first-generation college students who are terrified of being unemployed tells me that those concerns are real.
So, rather than blame the student in a blanket fashion for turning to these sites, I’m trying to understand why and how she got there, and what we can do to help make authorship more viable, interesting, and less of a means to a job-centered end (i.e. completing this required course).
So, I’m not sure if my article just isn’t written clearly enough or if you were unintentionally misreading it. And I do respect your reading, and your clearly more intricate knowledge of economic theory–but I think what you detail above really mischaracterizes what I’m trying to say. I hope my response does not seem defensive–though I grant that any response is a reaction of its own. Maybe others can weigh in; I’d like to hear other perspectives.
Kelly
Kelly, thank you for replying. In retrospect, my tone could have used considerably less bombast (“Wrong answer”? Talk about embarassingly over-the top), so I hope I didn’t come across as disrespectful — I valued that correspondence we had after your Cs piece came out. (Part of it may have been that I’d also just visited John Lesko’s site, which I really do find problematically shrill.)
Did I misread you? I don’t know. It seems to me the implicit opposition you’re setting up between faculty (and the academy) and students, as when you describe students’ “disengagement” and consumerism, and “shaping their writing consciousness in ways still palatable to our own ethics,” suggests that the values held by students, as a group, are radically different from the values held by faculty — and that the values of students need to change. Is that a fair characterization? That’s where my (again, rhetorically over-the-top) translation of consumerism into avarice came from.
I agree that “students should see composition as a site to grow as authors,” but what I was suggesting with my references to DeVoss, Burton, and Robillard was that many of the things students are doing on their own (i.e., the 75+ remixes of the Star Wars Kid video) are, in fact, radically reshaping our own conceptions of authorship and intellectual property. (I talk a little more about this here.) This is why I mentioned your citation of Bartholomae: while I share much of the social-epistemic approach to composition espoused by Bartholomae, Joseph Harris, Bruce Horner, and others, I also see the heart of Bartholomae’s argument in “Inventing” as deeply conservative, suggesting that the student must always adapt to the academy, rather than allowing that the academy might change to adapt to students’ emerging cultural practices and values. So I hear what you’re saying about getting faculty to examine students’ perspectives, but I wonder if the assignment you offer (it’s interesting, and I’m trying to figure out how I might arrange my syllabus this semester to incorporate it) might risk some students perceiving it as just an opportunity to tell the teacher what she or he wants to hear: plagiarism = bad / look how wicked and underhanded the rhetoric of these sites is. Still, I think it might be fun to ask students to compare the rhetoric of schoolsucks.com with the rhetoric at John Lesko’s famousplagiarists.com — what do you think their reactions would be? (I’d also be curious to hear what you make of two assignments I’ve developed that address issues of authorship, ownership and intellectual property.)
Of course, the thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet is the classroom practice that is perhaps most useful in moving students’ work away from commodity to be exchanged and more towards a labor theory of value: foregrounding the process by asking students to do lots of generative writing and revise that into a series of drafts. When one places primary importance upon the process, students are far less inclined to engage in the sort of whole-text plagiarism you describe.
But that may be another way in which you and I are talking past one another, since your focus is on that whole-text plagiarism, and my interest in students’ emerging “remix” cultural practices is, in its patchwork-assemblage nature, sort of the opposite. In between the wholly-plagiarized text and the essay Walter Benjamin said he wanted to compose entirely out of quotations is a wide spectrum of acts of textual appropriation and assemblage that I think is much, much more complicated to talk about. Given that circumstance, I’d also — like you — be quite curious to hear others’ perspectives, particularly since there seems to be so much discussion of these issues swirling around right now.
So — thanks again for the response. I certainly didn’t intend to mischaracterize your argument, and I hope you’ll let me know if I did, in fact, unintentionally misread you.
I did a presentation on blogging yesterday for faculty here at UHartford, and I showed this exchange to exemplify the power of blogging for true academic exchange. Thanks to you both for this dialogue.
Thanks likewise, Nels. Kelly’s comment evidenced more graciousness than my initial overstated post deserved, for which I’m grateful to her. I hope she might find the conversation worth continuing. As both she and I have noted, there seems to be a strong epistemological curiosity about intellectual property in composition; a curiosity that’s looking for a venue, a focus, and conversants. I’m glad to see people like Becky Howard and Clancy Ratliff shaping the emerging discussion, and I just wish that more people were talking about it. (And so I’m off to Google, in the hopes that Kelly has a weblog of her own to which I might link.)
Hi Mike and Nels:
I just wanted to stop in quickly to thank Mike for his response to my response–it’s a difficult subject to talk about, so I appreciate your subsequent analysis of both my posting and yours. I think the part of my article that’s the most poorly written (i.e. difficult to read without knowing intentions, which evidences some need for revision when this someday, hopefully, emerges in book form) is about “palatable” ethics. I meant to distance myself from those faculty who believe that students’ ethics are distasteful, but what it ended up sounding like was that I agreed that students should subscribe to more these “palatable” ethics on their own. So that’s a gaff in my own writing, but this is a good venue in which to clear it up.
Nels, your presentation sounds very interesting–I’d love to hear more about what faculty thought of blogs for scholarly discussion. I don’t have a blog of my own, partially because I just never got around to it and partially because I didn’t want the personal kind of blog (i.e. a journal) that many people have. But I’m learning from a couple of colleagues that blogs can be good for faculty-student intellectual exchange, especially as part of a course design. One of those colleagues, Scott Ellis, runs the blog for the journal Pedagogy (where this second article of mine appeared). If you both would like to continue a conversation there about these issues, that would be great and I know Scott would appreciate having your comments. Maybe you could pass the blog info on to your students and colleagues as well. The URL is http://www.pedagogyjournal.blogspot.com/.
Thanks,
Kelly