Editors’ Introduction
5 editors
It is a pleasure to bring you the third edition of Aegis, Otterbein’s Humanities journal. We have enjoyed providing a forum that embraces a wide spectrum of ideas in which our peers can share. Academic work cannot exist within a vacuum; we need to share our theories and research, and in turn draw on others, so that our work is well-rounded and relevant to this increasingly interdisciplinary world. One of the underlying themes in every scholarly field, is the intellectual honesty of one’s work. The scholarship involved in the humanities is especially dependent on academic honesty, because of the volume and breadth of sources that one can find, and usurp, as one’s own. An individual might be tempted to say there is a problem with students and faculty plagiarizing the work of others, but that far from being pervasive, this is just a problem confined to academia and to scholarship; it is not one indicative or carried over into other aspects of life. But this claim would be wrong. Intellectual dishonesty is not only a major problem in academia, but is rampant in politics, in governmental and private bureaucracies, in corporations, and in just about every other aspect of life. The theft and use of others ideas, along with adamant denials about the falsity of one’s ideas and work is indicative of a disease, like cancer, that starts at one point (scholarship, perhaps, though we would find this point of origin debatable) and then races through the cultural bloodstream, permeating all major parts until it has become the norm, and not the exception, to be dishonest. Like many societal problems, the beginnings of intellectual dishonesty seem innocuous, almost innocent. In academia, both as a student and as a professor, there is pressure to produce (or, perhaps on the part of many students, there is a view of the college experience as a means to an end – the degree in this case being merely a credential). It is this drive to be unique and to get ahead (careerism) that leads to small slips in academic integrity. It might begin with cutting and pasting sentences from journals, or online sources without a citation – after all, it is only one sentence. From there, it is easy to fabricate a source of information – after all, the professor wants too many sources, and there are other classes that need attention. It is these seemingly small things in conjunction with the pressure and exploitation of our entrepreneurial culture that leads to essay sites on the web, the buying and selling of academic work, or going so far as to hiring someone to write a specific paper for you (at ten dollars per page). In fact, there have been moves made by professors and universities to curb this trend, by creating web sites that are, essentially, large student databases that can check a particular paper against thousands of other documents, papers, journals, etc. And this movement has led to student bodies using their Senate to invalidate that practice. As Chantal Brushett, president of the students union at Nova Scotia University, states: “Students go to university for a higher education. They don’t go to be involved in a culture of mistrust, a culture of guilt.”1 While this problem addresses student intellectual dishonesty, it does not address the issue of how professors are being monitored. We can see that the problem has jumped from being widely perceived as a “student-only” problem, to infecting professional academics (as evidenced by plagiarism in works by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lawrence Tribe, and Stephen Ambrose) and our society as a whole(see Jayson Blair’s work for the New York Times, or James Frye’s
aegis 2006
Michelle Yost and J.T. Craig
