T hat summer night, at a dinner table surrounded by writing teachers, the plagiarism stories were hard to stop. There was the freshman who, given the writing prompt “Why Do I Procrastinate?,” pasted in Yahoo Answers. I told about the senior who turned in an essay paraphrasing a scholarly article synonym by synonym, word by word. The winning story was the student who asked permission to study a novel written by his professor and then turned in an essay that copied text from the book jacket, including a line from the author bio: “She lives in Chicago with her two sons and their cat.”
There was one I didn’t tell. It’s not a dinner-table story. It might not even be a story about plagiarism. For a while, every time I talked about it, I had to begin by saying, “I’m glad I’m not the kind of person who could feel responsible for something like this.” What I meant was that people who believe the death of someone else could be their own fault are usually deluding themselves into a sense of omnipotence. “I’m glad I’m not the kind of person who could feel responsible,” I repeated to myself. I needed that to be true.
My student — I’ll call her “Susan” — dressed well. Big sweaters she’d tuck a knee into. Long hair, pale face, pretty. Twice that September, she had stayed after class to discuss the recommended reading — she’d actually done the recommended reading. When she was sick, she emailed: “Hello Professor! … My residence hall is currently experiencing ‘the flu’ epidemic and just my luck I believe I have it now.” She was a freshman, keen to succeed: “Do you think I should soldier through the sickness and come to class anyway? … I’ve never been sick in college before and your class happens to be the only mandatory one I must attend.”
It wasn’t just the flu that was spreading that semester — so was the plagiarism. One weekend I plowed through 36 first drafts, and Susan’s was not the first or the last to be of sketchy origin in that stack. “Why are there so many smokers on campus?,” her paper began — innocently enough. Then she turned to the topic of e-cigarettes, citing numbers and statistics without quote marks or attribution. None of it was in answer to the actual assignment. And it didn’t take long to find the sources she’d copied.
That F is a reminder that the next time a student hides her thinking behind someone else’s, what I’d like to do is not fail her, but try to help her not fail.
Susan had already missed several classes because of illness, and sent me countless emails — messages with subject lines that shouted “Hospital” and “Emergency Please Read.” “Just focus on getting better,” I would respond. “Don’t worry about the class.” In another email she mentioned she had been “diagnosed with anxiety” recently and was on a “low dose of anxiety medication.” She was absent again on the day I handed back the drafts and gave a speech about plagiarism for the benefit of the six or eight students I had caught. Caught — the word betrays how I sat hunched over those essays, feeling hunted even as I hunted.
My stern warning surprised students. Some didn’t realize the word “plagiarism” — with its trill of alarm — might describe what they’d done. Some didn’t know plagiarism would “count” in a draft. I didn’t report any of those students to the administration, but I did deduct points — proportionate to the level of plagiarism in each case — that would reduce the students’ final grade. All they had to do to avoid further trouble was not plagiarize the final paper.
Shortly after, I got an inquiry from the dean’s office about Susan, identifying her by her student number. She’d apparently been having difficulties in other classes as well: Had I noticed any problems? I mentioned the plagiarism incident and noted that she was coming to class again yet performing erratically. The dean’s office advised me to “follow protocol” — make sure that she understood what she had done wrong and that she did not repeat it.
But Susan did repeat it. She had thanked me for being so “tolerant, considerate, and kindhearted” after the first incident but when she turned in her final paper, I was stunned to find that it, too, was plagiarized. I sent Susan a message expressing my dismay and telling her that I would have to both fail the essay and submit a report on her plagiarism to the administration.
It’s too easy, as a teacher, to let plagiarism propel you toward protocol, that means of moving forward without thinking. It’s too easy to feel that you must turn the tables, prevent the student from pulling one over or getting away with it — all of those terrible clichés that hide the reality of how plagiarism, to a teacher, is the rare instance in which the student seizes power.
After emailing Susan, I met with a colleague to seek his advice. Once the door was closed, he told me not to bother with protocol or with reporting the student. It won’t be worth the trouble, he said — not worth the onerousness of photocopying, scanning, providing evidence, and navigating the bureaucratic near-legalese.
I was still deciding whether to follow his advice when Susan emailed a long, dense reply: “I will not be dragged down because one single professor does not like me. … How can I respect a teacher that has done nothing but bully me and find any loophole to make me fail? … I DO NOT DESERVE THIS PUNISHMENT.” And: “I will use every ounce of my power to set this straight.”
I read it again and again. At dinner with friends that night, I described the email and quoted its subject line: “This Has Gone Far Enough.”
“She’s crazy,” someone said. I had no way of knowing if that was the case. How can you tell if a student is just stressed or out-of-control? But the truth was: I did feel like I’d been pressuring Susan — with my feverish photocopying, my petty collection of evidence, and now this ha-ha dinnertime story. “Report the plagiarism,” my friends insisted. “Follow protocol. Cover your ass.”
We all want to write about the times we succeed in the classroom. But what about the times we teach poorly? What about the times we fail?
After she died, her essay — with the big green F in my handwriting circled and my comments scrawled across its cover page — sat on a chair in my house for weeks. One day I flipped it over. Eventually I moved it under the chair, then under a table. I’m not supposed to keep student work. Nor am I supposed to throw it away. Nor am I supposed to show it to Susan’s parents without her permission. Nor would I ever, ever return this essay to them, with its angry-scrawled F.
A week later, I received the news of her death in an email from the university, with the words “deceased student,” followed by her student ID number. (Protocol.) Then came another email from the colleague I had consulted for advice: “Thank God you didn’t report her and don’t have that now on your conscience.”
Except, as far as Susan knew, I had reported her. The notice didn’t tell me how she died. It explained that she withdrew from college the day after she’d emailed me, and passed away six days after that. Her death seemed to confirm my worst suspicions of myself: that I am heartless, overly bound by some cockeyed ideal of fairness, not in touch enough with my students’ human selves. I trembled when I had to tell a room of 18-year-olds that their classmate had died, but I wasn’t sure whether that was because I feared I would cry, or because I feared I wouldn’t.
Three weeks later, the semester ended. The Internet had informed us that Susan died from an overdose of an illegal recreational drug, though I had little idea what to do with that information, what it might mean. The class shared a moment of silence in her memory. And then, after everyone else had left, one student approached my desk. “I can’t stop thinking about Susan,” he confessed. “I feel so guilty. She asked me where to buy pot and I told her.”
I saw then that, in her wake, Susan had left behind a whole universe of people who felt responsible for her death. “It’s not your fault,” I said with as much conviction as I could muster — hoping to persuade both the young man and myself that it was egotistical to believe any of us have that much power.
But we long for such power. I see the longing in my tendency to experience plagiarism as personal — about me or my class. I see it in my nervousness when faced with a student’s power to deceive — even though plagiarism is, more than anything, an expression of a student’s powerlessness.
Plagiarism is a gag on the voice, a paper bag over the face. So what if — the next time our students plagiarize — we tried harder to actually see them? What if we could understand plagiarism as an expression of exhaustion, of distress, maybe even a plea for help?
The thing that haunts me, after all, is not Susan’s rage in her last message to me, but my own rage in my last message to her. The angrily scrawled F is a guilty conscience I don’t want to forget. I didn’t kill Susan — I don’t have that kind of power. But I did have the power to fail her. And that F is a reminder that the next time a student hides her thinking behind someone else’s, what I’d like to do is not fail her, but try to help her not fail.
