A defense for the Punishers of Plagiarizers

The DeVoss and Porter article was a fascinating (and terrifying?) exploration of the future of "writing." I need 31 more years under my belt before I'm fully vested in my pension, so I hope I can avoid complete obsolescence. I was particularly interested in their discussion of plagiarism. In my first three years of teaching, we as a staff have revised the section in the student handbook on "academic dishonesty" three times. DeVoss and Porter would probably ask why we focus on "dishonesty" instead of honesty, but I digress. There is no doubt that the scope through which we identify and define plagiarism will need to be revisited and reshaped rather often as the landscape of writing in the most-modern world ceaselessly changes.

Where I think they miss the mark, however, is in their indictment of "most teachers [who] are not building a positive ethic of sharing in their courses, and are instead following the traditional disciplinary (and by disciplinary, we mean discipline and punish) approach to the use of others' work." In their discussion, the authors make reference on more than one occasion to the idea that punishing students for "sharing others' work" is an historically anchored, outdated philosophy. Here's my question to all you teachers out there: Have any of you ever believed that your students who plagiarized were simply trying to share others' work? Of course not. DeVoss and Porter also lend too much credence to the notion that the Punishers of Plagiarizers do so in order to preserve justice for the original authors. I couldn't care less about the original author getting credit for his or her work. What concerns me is my student passing that work off as his or her own. I encourage my students to infuse the ideas and research of others into their own work; original spin can be just as interesting (sometime more) than a seemingly original idea (I sometimes wonder if such a thing exists anymore). The distinction between the "original idea" (from the originating source) and my student's original spin, however, had better be clear.