Posts

Showing posts from July, 2015

Plagiarism is but one Symptom

  Plagiarism continues to rear its head in our universities and the response is the same “dump on our professors.” Perhaps it is a part of our larger disdain for learning. But of that later! Every so often there is a gleeful story that x number of professors caught plagiarizing and they have been suspended. The gossip on this lasts a few hours and subsides.   Whether or not an investigation is properly conducted we will never know. Could it be that in academia, plagiarism charges have become what blasphemy is in the rest of the country? Could this be how rivalries for promotion are now settled? No one has looked into this and we are all content with the charge of plagiarism being used and some careers ruined. Now I am not saying there is no plagiarism. Of course there is. And some prominent cases have been uncovered convincingly where papers of Nobel Laureates have been blindly copied. This incident speaks well to the level of academic development in Pakistan where academics