COLUMN:Cheaters never prosper
Albert Einstein is rumored to have said that creativity’s secret lies in knowing how to hide your sources. And while this makes for excellent advice in a game of Go Fish, it is a terrible way to run an academic career.
It’s not that I’ve never been tempted to pass somebody else’s work off as my own. I think we all have daydreamed about borrowing a little to create a paper so good that our professor would have no choice but to post it on the Internet, frame it for their office and set in motion a string of events that could only end in our humble paper becoming a screenplay.
I have this dream a lot. It is usually tempered, however, by another dream involving that same professor and their associates lighting candles and wearing hoods while holding secret trials for plagiarizers.
Never mind the inevitable box office failure of a movie drawing its inspiration from a 14-page discussion of ethnoreligious identity in Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth.” The fear of being summoned to one of these hooded tribunals is reason enough to keep me writing my own mediocre work.
Teachers aren’t fooled by cheating. I learned this in the first grade when I paid Jessica Trivett a dollar to make my paper snowflake for me. I thought I was being called to the teacher’s desk to receive a coveted sticker for my excellent work. Instead she safety-pinned a note to my shirt intended to inform my parents of my ill-conceived attempt to outsource my in-class work for the day.
But the whole ordeal taught me some things. First, good capitalism doesn’t make for good academics. This lesson would later explain my inexplicable desire to pay upwards of $2,000 a semester to listen to my elders rant about President Bush, gas prices and budget cutbacks. Second, I learned why no one had yet taken the time to show me how safety pins worked. But more importantly, it also taught me that, while cheating may have its place, school is not that place.
A quick survey of the landscape tells us that cheating isn’t completely anathema in America. Our national pastime, baseball, is full of cheaters. And a quick look into Enron’s board room and the White House suggests that cheating is about as widespread as breathing. It is everywhere we look. And while it’s completely unacceptable in an academic setting – thank you Ms. Pollei and my paper snowflake for that lesson – it does seem to make sense sometimes.
Our ability to cheat is, I think, one of only a few things that separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom. There is no real cheating in the wild. The savannahs of Africa are all about fairness and equality. The cheetah chases the gazelle. The faster one wins. Crocodiles never paint themselves like zebras and the cheetah never tells the gazelle he just wants to talk. It’s all very straightforward and honest.
This is fine until you become a human and have no real skills outside of your ability to shave every day and only cut yourself once, maybe twice, a week. Early man’s success can be largely attributed to his ability to cheat. When you don’t have claws, big teeth or the capacity to run down a gazelle on the open plain, being able to hide a card in your sleeve and lie with a straight face suddenly becomes a little more attractive.
And this – card playing – is probably where cheating should begin and end. If it goes much past that, you’re probably going to be better at it than I am. And then we’re going to have some hard feelings … and some secret trials with hoods and candles.