Fred Khumalo At the age of 14, Milkota was too old to be in Std 2. But in the
mid to late-1970s, it wasn't uncommon to have teenagers in the first grade.
Caught Out
Chippy Shaik was stripped of his doctorate degree last year
'The point of writing something is to add your unique voice, your
authoritative deduction from what you have read'
Apart from his age, another remarkable thing about Milkota was that his fists
were as big as sledgehammers, and his arms as thick as pillars - at least in the
minds of his younger classmates. And he used his fists quite liberally.
It was therefore advisable to be in his good books. But to be in his good books
also meant that, in class, you had to allow him to copy from you with impunity.
Nothing could be more galling.
My friend Cosmas Gumbi, who sat next to Milkota, told me that he was going to
tell our class teacher that he was tired of Milkota copying from him by force.
Having been on the receiving end of Milkota's ferocious punches on more than one
occasion, I advised Cosmas against it.
Cosmas respected my counsel. But he had another card up his sleeve: when we
wrote a test one day, he made a point of writing all the wrong answers in his
book, which the ignorant and lazy Milkota copied with alacrity.
When the teacher announced the test results a few days later, Milkota and Cosmas
were the laughing stock, as they had each scored zero out of 10!
After school, Cosmas got a few klaps from Milkota, who wanted to know how he had
managed to get all the answers wrong.
In case you were wondering, in those days it wasn't kosher to tell parents about
the school bully. Some fathers would eat you for breakfast for allowing yourself
to be humiliated by another boy.
The story of Milkota came back to me with blinding clarity this week when I
found myself participating in a debate held at the Durban University of
Technology about plagiarism at our universities.
I was shocked to learn that plagiarism was so prevalent at universities that the
DUT had decided to draw up its own policy on plagiarism, which is compulsory
reading for both students and lecturers.
Bookmarks have also been developed, which feature key points of the university's
plagiarism policy. They are circulated freely on campus, as a reminder to
students.
During the debate, it emerged that plagiarism is not a straightforward
phenomenon - there are shades of grey in the minds of many students and teachers
as to what constitutes plagiarism.
One of the teachers said that when some students were confronted with this
charge, they did acknowledge that they had culled material from various sources.
The students claim that their dilemma is that the authors of original,
recognised texts "put it so well and so authoritatively" that it would be futile
to change it - and undermine the original texts!
It's an infantile argument, I know. But what comes across, in this instance, is
that plagiarism is accidental, a result of ignorance and innocence.
Therefore, the challenge lies with lecturers to empower their students with the
necessary skills to take chunks of information and synthesise them - in their
own style and voice.
Acknowledging the original sources is only the beginning. The point of writing
something is to add your unique voice, your authoritative deduction or
conclusion from what you have read from the original sources.
When we enter a learning academy we are there not only to learn, but also to try
to challenge and debunk some accepted theories.
There is another level of plagiarism, which I call plagiarism by arrogance. It's
when writers consciously and deliberately steal huge chunks from a text and put
their own name to it, in the hope that they will never be caught out.
Some of the culprits are, sadly, professional writers and journalists. Darrel
Bristow-Bovey, once a columnist for a number of newspapers, including The Sunday
Independent, and Cynthia Vongai, one-time editor of South Africa's Elle
magazine, are just two of many literary miscreants who were caught out after
stealing chunks of other people's work. They both had the audacity to claim
these literary nuggets as their own creation.
The problem is that many perceive plagiarism as an abstract academic construct,
something far removed from their daily lives. In fact, plagiarism is stealing.
If a person who works for this newspaper were to take a story, word for word,
paragraph for paragraph, from an opposition newspaper, that would be sheer
theft.
If the misdemeanour were discovered, he or she would not only lose credibility
as a journalist, but this paper and the entire print media, by implication,
would be tarred with the same brush.
If you steal, as Kader Asmal pointed out at the same conference that I attended,
you go to prison. Students who resort to plagiarism lose marks or they get
disqualified from writing exams.
At the DUT one student, after receiving a series of warnings for instances of
plagiarism, received a zero mark for his dissertation, and is prohibited from
registering at the university for any qualification for a period of five years.
His academic record contains details of these infractions.
Another more famous case of plagiarism relates to one Chippy Shaik, who was
stripped of his doctorate from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in 2008.
Earlier newspaper reports had pointed out that "more than two-thirds" of his PhD
in mechanical engineering had been plagiarised. Shaik has repeatedly denied any
allegations of plagiarism - but there you have it, he has been stripped of the
degree.
Shaik is on record as saying he will challenge the university's decision.
The reality is that plagiarism does not stop at university level - it takes a
more sophisticated form and permeates an individual's professional conduct
because dishonour, like a bad virus, has a tendency to replicate itself.
Plagiarists are merely sophisticated thieves who should be outed at every turn.
Instead of expending their energy creating new knowledge and coming up with new
solutions to problems that present themselves at every turn, they use their
guile to plunder and rape other people's creations.
I don't know where Milkota is now, but it wouldn't surprise me if he turned out
to be a thief or, better still, a car hijacker, because he stole our words and
ideas without batting an eyelid and threatened us with violence if we told on
him.
With acknowledgements to
Fred Khumalo and Sunday Times.
Plagiarism is not like stealing - it is
stealing.
It's called intellectual property theft and is a criminal offence.
When plagiarism is used to achieve a qualification, academic or technical, it is
also fraud.