Features
Other people's words
by Joanne Black
As more lines from Witi Ihimaera’s new novel are identified as having come from other authors’ works, an American academic says the University of Auckland has not done enough to investigate.
It has been a big week for writer Witi Ihimaera. Despite allegations of plagiarism hanging over him, on Tuesday he was named as a 2009 Arts Foundation Laureate. Then on Wednesday his publisher, Penguin New Zealand, announced that Ihimaera would be buying back the remaining warehouse stock of his new novel, The Trowenna Sea. The developments came two weeks after the Listener revealed that 16 passages in the novel bore remarkable similarities to other authors’ works, but were not attributed to them.
Since then, Listener reviewer Jolisa Gracewood has discovered further similarities in Ihimaera’s text, prompting overseas academics to weigh into the debate and, in particular, to question the University of Auckland’s handling of the affair. Ihimaera is employed by the university as a professor of English and is founder and course convener of the Masters in Creative Writing programme.
Margaret Soltan is a professor of English at George Washington University in Washington DC and also writes University Diaries, a blog examining all aspects of university life.
This week her blog took a swipe not only at Ihimaera but also at the University of Auckland for too readily accepting his word that the use of unattributed lines in his novel was inadvertent.
“Pretending it didn’t happen is the sort of thing a very provincial university will do,” she wrote on her blog.
Last week the Listener asked the university whether it searched for any other unattributed material in The Trowenna Sea. The Listener also asked how the university had determined that the borrowings were accidental.
Dean of the arts faculty, Associate Professor Jan Crosthwaite, replied saying that the head of department had investigated the use of unattributed material and had interviewed Ihimaera. For that review, they had in front of them “a marked copy of The Trowenna Sea, the material supplied to Witi Ihimaera by the Listener reporter and Witi’s explanations as to how the unattributed copying occurred. This process satisfied the head of department that there had been no deliberate wrong-doing.”
Asked if the university accepted there could be more instances of duplication in the novel, Crosthwaite replied, “that is possible, but as far as we know and as far as Witi Ihimaera is aware, there are none”.
But a few days later, Gracewood did find more duplications. When approached, Penguin’s publishing director Geoff Walker first asked to see the new examples of duplications, then replied by saying Penguin was conducting its own audit of the book. Subsequently, Penguin announced Ihimaera was buying back the books and a new edition would be published next year, “making full acknow-ledgement to writers whose work has been drawn on”.
Soltan, who takes an interest in plagiarism, says it has always been a problem among students at universities, “and technology has made it far worse”.
“The same technology tempts some [members of] faculty towards plagiarism. Other factors tempting [them] may be pressure to publish, desire to publish quickly and, in some special cases, having groups of graduate students help you do research for your books – research then can easily shade into the students writing some of the book for you.”
Soltan says the last technique has been a particular problem at Harvard Law School, where some “very busy people with very big names appoint groups of students to do the legwork on their books, and in some cases these books turn out to be plagiarised – that is, the students lifted texts and the professors didn’t even notice because they’re not really writing their own books”.
“Law schools in any case are, in my experience, real epicentres of university plagiarism, either through this so-called atelier method or more traditional -methods.”
She says that whenever potential plagiarism comes to light, a committee, “made up of professors of unquestioned academic integrity from different departments from those of the people being reviewed”, needs to be established.
“The committee should, if possible, examine other publications by the same author for the possibility of multiple instances of plagiarism. Plagiarists tend to be repeat offenders.
“While an interview should be conducted with the person being reviewed, the person will in almost every case claim the plagiarism was an honest mistake,” she says. Soltan is scathing that any university would simply accept an author’s word that duplication had occurred inadvertently. “To make your institution’s decisions wholly dependent on the claims of innocence by the person under review is ludicrous.
“If your university has even an ounce of academic integrity, it must make a neutral, informed, autonomous decision based on the evidence, and based on an understanding of the terrible insult to institutional ethics that plagiarism on the part of a professor represents.”
Dr Mike Reddy, a lecturer in future technology at the University of Wales, and a member of the UK’s Plagiarism Advisory Service for universities, agrees it is imperative that allegations of -plagiarism are dealt with thoroughly.
He says it is difficult to believe someone would allow his reputation and that of his university to be tarnished in the way Ihimaera has.
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