Plagiarists: The Scum of the Earth

Contributed by our always curmudgeonly, sometimes hilarious editor StenchBlossom…

There are probably a few of you out there reading this who are guilty of this most loathsome crime: plagiarism.  If you have ever plagiarized a work you are instantly made a thief and a liar, not to mention an idiot and insufferably lazy (seriously, all you have to do is put quotes around something and it ceases to be plagiarized, it doesn’t get much easier). 

I would be more ready to forgive a rapist murderer of children than a plagiarist, though perhaps I feel a little more strongly on the issue than most.

Apparently at the University of Texas—San Antonio decided to redraft an honor code that urges students to refrain from plagiarism, a noble venture, indeed, until it was discovered that the draftsmen had actually plagiarized the honor code from Brigham Young University. 

Ideas may overlap, that is understandable, and for the wording in these two documents to be similar is almost unavoidable since they cover the same topic, but exact phrases, word for word showed up in both school’s codes.  What kind of a fool would plagiarize in this instance? 

And now the students responsible are trying to cover their tracks, saying that they believe there is a works cited page that has merely been lost.  Come on, nobody is going to believe that, don’t compound your lie with more lies. 

I’m not saying that these students should come clean and say, “Yup, we’re guilty,” they have the same right for deceitful self preservation as we all do, but perhaps they should be a little more creative in their defense (though, it is, I suppose, due to their lack of creativity that they have found themselves in hot water to begin with). 

If I were one of them, I would call the plagiarized honor code a metaphysical representation of the adverse effects of plagiarism, “See all the trouble I got into for plagiarizing, this is not so much an honor code as an example of the detriment of lies, and I have heroically taken the plunge to show you what to avoid.” 

I would go on and on until I had convinced the world that I was a martyr, taking on the punishments in order to better the lives of everyone else.  But then again, I’m not a plagiarist (and here’s the proof: the information in this blog comes from Mike Nizza, The New York Times).