Collective Thoughts

A few months ago, someone told me a story about his neighbor. This neighbor had installed solar panels on his home. My acquaintance told me he had long recognized the potential of solar energy capture in Benin, where sunshine is free and plentiful more than half of the year. But he hadn’t known, until he saw his neighbor’s house, that the technology had progressed to the point where it was now affordable to attach solar panels to single-family homes.

He approached his neighbor. They had a lively conversation about the changing world, the preservation of the environment, the price of the solar panels, the investment in efficient energy. My acquaintance asked his neighbor for the name and contact information of the company that had installed the solar panels. His neighbor apologized; he had left the business card at the office. They set another date to talk in greater detail and parted ways. When my acquaintance arrived at his neighbor’s house at the appointed time, the neighbor wasn’t there. Since that time, the neighbor has refused calls and visits from his friend. My acquaintance sighed; he said he knew that would happen.

“But why?” I interjected. He shrugged. The solar panels were his neighbor’s idea, not his own. His neighbor wants to be the only one with solar panels, for others to commend his for his good idea, to be revered for his idea. He wants to ensure he gets the respect he’s owed, my acquaintance said. Sharing the idea would dilute – if not the sunshine – the real reason he installed the panels: to be envied by his neighbors.

At the time, I took the story with a grain of salt. I figured this neighbor had some issues, and I left it at that.

Fast forward.

This week, my classmates and I turned in our 30-page partner papers on democratic transitions. My partner and I met, discussed our theme, did considerable research, agreed on an outline and split the work. He took the first half; I wrote the second. The day before the paper was due, we met to put the parts together. I scanned his half, he scanned mine, and we printed the paper. Later that evening, I read over his section again, in order to prepare myself for our eventual presentation. I realized, after this more careful reading, that it was plagiarized. Not one sentence, or one paragraph, but all fifteen pages, from the first word to the last. Not from the same source, mind you, but a copy-and-paste here and there to glue together the thoughts of various authors. Furthermore, if he had taken a paragraph from Author A, who cited Author B, he inserted a footnote for B (as A had done), but included no reference for A himself. I was chagrined – my name was on the paper! It was, at this point, due in eight hours. I have a lot of confidence in my ability to meet deadlines, but even I can’t rewrite fifteen pages in a foreign language without sources or a computer in a single night. I went to sleep in trepidation.

The next morning, fortunately, after providing some guidance on the subject, the professor gave us another month to correct our work and turn in a final version. I gently approached my partner. I pointed out various passages (tactfully avoiding saying “you plagiarized everything you wrote”). I told him that for me, in my culture, plagiarism is very, very serious, especially for a journalist or a lawyer, and I couldn’t turn in this work. I told him firmly that we would have to redo his section. He listened respectfully, and at the end, he told me that he didn’t quite understand what I meant, but he agreed that work could always be better and he was ready to help me make the work meet my standards.

Then I popped my head in the office of the administrator. “What are the rules about citations here?” I asked casually. “I don’t think I’m quite familiar with them.”

She looked at me, annoyed. “Didn’t you have a class on research methodology?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Well, if you use someone’s words, you use a footnote. Didn’t your professor tell you that?”

“Yes, but it happens so often with my classmates that I didn’t know if I’d understood correctly.”

“Well,” she said. “Work can always be improved.”

So I’ve realized, finally, that “forgetting” a reference, or fifteen pages of references, is viewed like poor writing, misspellings, or incomplete research. It’s just a typo.

My program is counted among the most prestigious in West Africa. It’s where the current Beninese minister of justice earned his master’s degree. The current president of the Constitutional Court is one of our avid supporters. Its establishment was underwritten by UNESCO, and NGOs from Germany and Italy, and a Danish governmental commission, provide its operational budget and small living stipends for the students. More than 250 students apply every year; around thirty are accepted.

I’m not saying that every student plagiarizes. But I’ve been confronted with this problem in four of my five group projects; this 15 pages just happened to be the most flagrant violation of copyright.

So why does it happen?

When you combine a culture of collectivity, a culture that insists that young people their ideas are worthless, a culture colonized (which tells everyone that their ideas are worthless), with a lack of research training, an inability to use the Internet, a library that doesn’t loan books or permit photocopies; when you take my partner, who had two exams the Sunday before our paper was due for classes rescheduled from the year before, this is the recipe for plagiarism.

Back to the solar panels.

Now I can understand the neighbor. I sympathize with him. If everything you say or do or wear or eat or build becomes communal property, for others to criticize or praise or claim as their own, it’s no wonder he wanted to keep the solar panels to himself. It might be the only idea he’s ever gotten credit for.

If a culture agrees that ideas are collective and references superfluous, that’s fine. A lack of credit, though alien to our conception of research, is not a problem in itself. Rather, if you don’t cite, it becomes easy to hid the fact the you are contributing nothing, that you are moving sideways at best in a given field, that you are at best compiling (and badly) the ideas of others. It’s difficult to move forward. But when that’s all that’s expected, or even desired, of you, by professors who did the same thing throughout their education (and look how they turned out; they’re doing well enough for themselves), it’s hard for student or professor to even recognize the problem, much less recognize or welcome a new idea. That is, students are not taught to think. I always dismissed as empty that “critical thinking” prong in the high school and college graduation requirements. But now I know it’s possible to have classes, even at a high level, that pretend to impart real knowledge, without incorporating critical thinking skills. It’s like how I used to play school in the basement with a hand-me-down chalkboard.

Add families that get impatient when their 20-something-year-old isn’t supporting himself, a closed university faculty, a closed Bar, a closed diplomatic corps. The incredible amount of will, confidence, ambition, intelligence, diplomacy, faith, juggling it takes for a Beninese man to even graduate, much less find a job (less than 10 percent of Abomey-Calavi graduates work in a career related to their field of study) is incredible, even incomprehensible for Americans. And to become a leader in the community? To change the system that you just fought tooth and nail to beat? The chances are one in a million, and half that for women.

The saddest thing is that these students are very smart. I’ve had conversations with my plagiarizing friends about philosophy, the rule of law, international relations, sociology… These are the students who have pressured their families to let them stay in school, who scraped together their nickels to make photocopies of textbooks, who read Rousseau and Montesquieu in their spare time, who earned scholarships from foreign NGOs, who each landed one of the 30 coveted spots in this program, and who are studying not accounting or business, but human rights. They want things to change. If they were just given a slip of a chance, they could turn their communities right side up.