Freund Humanus

In the age of Enlightenment, European intellectuals had a dream which they termed encyclopaedic. It was to systematize worldly knowledge and present it in a form that was accessible to all educated citizens. For the first time in centuries, knowledge was to enter the public domain, where it would work communally for the advancement of humanity. If the encyclopaedists had been able to glance into the future, it is hard to say whether the Internet would have looked to them like a dream come true, or a grotesque perversion of their ideals. Here is a medium that allows the project of universal knowledge to be realized in ways scarcely conceivable to a group of scholars labouring for years to produce a meagre 20, 30, 40 volumes of printed text. And yet, the very accessibility of this medium starts to become a problem. Who exactly qualifies for taking part in this grand scheme of collecting and systematizing knowledge? What even is knowledge? What does it mean for knowledge to be freely distributed in public?

The intellectuals of the Enlightenment were certain that the expansion of the public sphere was a good thing, but they weren’t certain who should take part in it. Do women and the uneducated have the same access to knowledge as well-to-do men? Is knowledge advancing and perfecting its methods and outcomes, boldly led by European intellectuals, whose relationship to indigenous knowledge systems is yet to be specified? At the time, the answers to questions like these were far from clear. And today we seem to be equally uncertain what to do about the distribution and control of knowledge.

The controversy on the use and misuse of plagiarism-detecting software indicates that the concern of Enlightenment scholars regarding the systematization, control and restriction of knowledge is also our own concern. Today, perhaps for the first time, the encyclopaedist dream of truly universal knowledge is close, but only close. For the Internet shows dramatically that as information becomes increasingly universal and increasingly available, it becomes less and less like knowledge. Or would anyone claim that, collectively, the pages and pages of online text qualify as knowledge? There is probably consensus that the unprecedented expansion of information in the age of the Internet is a good thing, even if a spectacular proportion of this is garbage. Garbage is garbage, but as long as the storage capacity is there and the search software is good enough, who cares?

Added to this is the problem that the nature and value of information itself is increasingly uncertain. In 1936, Walter Benjamin wrote an essay Der Erzähler (The Storyteller), in which he put forward the proposition that the art of story-telling, inextricably bound as it was to the physical presence of the teller, had been suffering a gradual demise, spurred on by the rise of information. At that time, information for him meant the rise of the press, newspapers, the primary instrument of the bourgeoisie in high capitalism, as he put it. What is worth considering is the way information lays claim to validity, not through the authority of its speaker (as story-telling had done), but through its plausibility, the fact that it is “understandable in and for itself.” Everything that happened in his day seemed to happen to the benefit of information, not authoritative narration. Where knowledge as it had been understood for a long time was intimately connected to a certain kind of narrative authority (and this also applies to the natural sciences), information rests upon its novelty, which condemns it to its own obsolescence, almost as soon as it has staked its claim. Benjamin was perceptive enough to see the alliance of information technology (for that’s the correct term to use when describing the press), and capitalism, and it is this alliance that makes his comments relevant still today, even if for us information technology has taken on a whole range of new forms. And these forms have disseminated throughout institutions of learning, as becomes evident, for example, in the question of plagiarism and the university.

As frustrated professors and misunderstood students confront each other across essay pages of dubious origin, we are forced to ask what it is that the university intends to do with the expansion of information and its easy accessibility. And here we should be careful not to be led astray by the rise of so-called artificial intelligence. Thirty seconds interacting with automated voice responses on the phone should tell us that we are on the ground of information, not intelligence.

It should not surprise us that the university has emerged as the place where plagiarism is a crucial unsolved problem. In its medieval prototype, this institution was traditionally responsible for ensuring that the most intelligent young minds of the time did not cross the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate knowledge, and that their ideas remained within a closed and carefully regulated community of scholars.

In the age of the Internet, however, it seems impossible to entrust the regulation of worldly knowledge to a community of scholars, nor would most people today even think that this is desirable. And it is not only the Internet that casts doubt on the ability of this community to police knowledge. Knowledge today is fought over by two remarkable and unprecedented collectives. One the one hand an amorphous collection of counter-publics negotiating unruly technological media for the endless replication and distribution of texts, images, sounds; on the other hand the corporations that fund research and patent their findings.

And somewhere in between, there are the universities. What role are universities to play in this struggle? Even if no-one wants to see universities as ivory towers restricting access to knowledge, there seems to be a widespread awareness of the damage unchecked distribution of information is causing on a micro and macro level in the world today.The plagiarism debate in the university is forcing us to rethink the boundaries between information, which is freely and readily available, and knowledge, which must be acquired. Knowledge is power, and for this reason, the solutions we seek to the plagiarism problem will cut to the core of our ideas about how power is to be acquired and used. The plagiarism debate is about power and the access to knowledge. It is about information, corporations, institutions, and democracy.

The Internet makes it increasingly and painfully apparent that the free accessibility of information is in essence profoundly opposed to the idea of the university. For the university, traditionally, has been entrusted not with the unlimited dissemination of information, but with the guardianship of knowledge. And this is not a bad thing, for it is in the limitations placed on knowledge that we define it as knowledge – as the body of ideas and practices that are central to stability and change in society. And this knowledge can only be accessed after learning a particular specialist language, a set of intellectual skills – and above all a moral code and a sensitivity to society’s history and diversity. The task of the university is to produce and distribute knowledge, and to reflect critically on the use of knowledge. This is why every university worthy of the name places the humanities at its core.

And in the matter of plagiarism, the universities are failing. I believe we are failing because we are asking the wrong questions. We should not be asking how to identify and put an end to Internet cut-and-paste essay writing, or to the use of ChatGPT or mindy to do research. Instead, we need to ask what exactly we require students to do when we assign academic exercises, and what we are trying to do when we evaluate these exercises. If the task assigned can be completed more easily, quickly and accurately by Internet “plagiarism”, then the student has done the right thing by “plagiarizing”. The problem is not that students are plagiarizing, it is that professors are assigning the wrong kinds of projects. In the age of the Internet, if the project consists of quickly gathering and assembling information, then “plagiarism” is the only activity that makes sense. To live in the age of information is to live in the age of plagiarism, whether we are talking about the endless circulation and repetition of media-bites, sampling in music, or re-tweeting. The issue is the same – who owns information? But this is a different question from the question: what is knowledge? And it is this latter question that is proper to the university.

Clearly, the skills of cut-and-paste or using ChatGPT are not the primary skills we want to teach in university. Every school child knows how to use them. The Internet is creating a new class society, and one of its many and complex dividing lines separates the cut-and-paste act of plagiarism from the formulation of ideas. The information-age proletariat is one who is skilled at quick and effective cut-and-paste. But if the university is to remain a valid institution in the information age, it will have to find a mechanism for distinguishing this activity from true knowledge, from the development and expression of ideas. And if it is to remain a central institution in a modern democracy, it will have to ensure that the production and distribution of knowledge remains in the public domain. This means fair and free access to university education, and it means a fair distribution of the results of university research. For a democracy must promise its citizens equality not only before the law, but equality in the access to knowledge and power.

This brings us to turnitin.com. As a member of one of the many universities that pays for the services of iParadigms, based in Oakland, California, I need to register my strong reservations. The issue is not simply that the use of plagiarism detection software fosters distrust. Nor is it solely a question of intellectual property. It is a matter of the privatization of knowledge. Why do we in the universities need to pay a private company to do the gatekeeping of knowledge, simply because we have not yet learned how to negotiate the boundaries between information and knowledge? And the matter is more serious and more pressing still. Why do we pay a company for a “service” that puts it in a position of potentially unprecedented power – as the collecting place and storage house for the ideas of the world’s brightest young minds? This knowledge is not in the public domain. Students taking turnitin-sponsored courses must agree “that by taking this course all required papers may be subject to submission for textual similarity review to Turnitin.com for the detection of plagiarism.  All submitted papers will be included as source documents in the Turnitin.com reference database solely for the purpose of detecting plagiarism of such papers. The terms that apply to the University’s use of the Turnitin.com service are described on the Turnitin.com web site.”  (I cut and pasted this from the Turnitin website; am I guilty of plagiarism?).

We live in a time when the principles of democracy are under siege. One aspect of this is the increasing concentration of knowledge and power in just a few hands, where it is carefully guarded by corporate structures, and available only to the wealthy. At the same time, the knowledge-power-wealth elite puts huge amounts of time and money into the management of information. Once we look at it from this perspective, the plagiarism debate in universities is at the heart of the struggle for democracy. We professors need to decide whether we are going to face the challenges posed by the ready availability of information in the age of the internet; or whether we will simply be another uncritical channel in the widespread privatization of knowledge and power.