Theoria

As a general rule, the assignments in my courses do not require secondary research or reading. I teach second and third year level courses that are largely introductions or surveys in social, political and legal theory. If I were teaching advanced courses, I would most certainly expect secondary research or reading, but in introductory courses I believe it is the point to render the texts familiar and understandable to the students rather than getting into the murky waters of interpretation. Put simply, when reading Marx, second year students don’t need to know about the war between Louis Althusser and E.P. Thompson – yes, it is interesting, but it isn’t relevant when first encountering the concepts of ‘alienation’ or ‘social formation.’ Likewise, in my third year “Law and Regulation” class, which is largely an introduction to “governmentality studies” or “the history of the present,” my students don’t need to know about historical epistemology, they don’t need to know about the Rose/Curtis debate over the state, they don’t need to know the “Is the ‘late Foucault’ a liberal?” debate, and so on. Rather, I expect them to deal with the texts they are assigned, consider the arguments the texts put forward, and attempt to come to an understanding of them. Should interested students come forward looking for summer reading, I’m happy to point them to the relevant secondary and interpretive works. Getting the students to merely appreciate theoretical work and its complexities is a great enough task for the second and third year level. They already find the texts difficult enough and they already have enough trouble with history (such that many of them refer to the eighteenth century – firmly in the standard periodization of modernity – as ‘ancient times’); there is no point in asking more of them.

So, for my classes, I generally assign short papers of roughly a thousand words (about three for the third year level and two for the second year level) asking them directed questions aimed at the central concepts explored in the course lectures and readings. I explicitly tell them not to bother going to the library or relying on Google. Without exception, there are always students who insist on ignoring me. For the most part, they give the appropriate citation – or something resembling an appropriate citation. I prefer not to see this (the secondary work; not the citation!), but I usually forgive it.

Imagine my surprise when I was catching up on marking this week when I found something that I thought existed only in academic mythology: a student had submitted an assignment with paragraphs lifted directly – albeit with a few words changed and a few spelling errors not in the original – from my own blog! Closer inspection of the paper found passages lifted from another blog and some passages lifted from someone’s teaching notes who is, apparently, teaching a course similar to my own. The student even lifted passages from the assignment handout! In all, it would seem that the only original work performed by the student was writing, “According to Foucault,”.