FIRST PERSON

When a Syllabus Is Not Your Own

Is it plagiarism when a colleague borrows your syllabus and then uses it in its entirety for his own course?

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By JENNIFER SINOR

A former student asks to borrow a book. She assumes I have it because, after all, "we're using your syllabus."

"What do you mean you're using my syllabus?" I ask.

"I'm fairly sure it's yours," she replies. "It looks like you." Rifling through her bag, she produces a stapled copy and hands it to me.

It is my syllabus. Only it isn't my name at the top. It's Professor P's.

Professor P has not just lifted a few choice sentences from my course description. He has not simply borrowed the assignments I had my students complete a year ago when I last taught the course. With few exceptions (he removed a section about my course policies, for example), he has taken almost every word, paragraph, and book. He has even taken my personal pronoun. Only now it is he rather than I who writes "we will be reading several memoirs by teachers to see how their personal lives change and are changed by the classroom."

I designed the course for my English-education students, to push them to think about what Parker Palmer calls the "inner landscape" of the teacher, the way our classrooms are outward reflections of our inner selves. We looked at teaching memoirs and considered how the themes we chose as teachers, the books we assigned, and the assignments we gave were an outward manifestation of our core beliefs.

Now Professor P is using my syllabus as though it were a piece of silverware, a tool to be reused and shared, as exchangeable as money.

Google "syllabus plagiarism" and you will find dozens of Web sites that recommend language for teachers to use in warning students about the rules of proper attribution. I use such cautionary language on my own syllabus, including on the one Professor P has adopted.

If you search long enough, however, you will come to one of the few links I could find that was actually about plagiarizing a syllabus.

In the minutes of a 2005 meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, an officer describes a case that involved "the rather strange notion of 'syllabus plagiarism'" in which a department withdrew a job offer to a faculty member after finding she had plagiarized her predecessor's syllabus.

I am left to wonder what made syllabus plagiarism strange: the fact that a syllabus can be plagiarized? The fact that you could actually lose your job for such a transgression? Or the fact that syllabus theft is something we hardly ever hear about in academe, like the infrequent sightings of a rare bird?

Perusing Professor P's syllabus, I notice that he has eliminated one of the five memoirs I had used — Laurie Stapleton's Against a White Sky: A Memoir of Closets and Classrooms, a moving account of her first year of teaching in rural California as a lesbian.

I teach in Utah, one of the reddest states on the map. Discussing gay and lesbian issues in the classroom is something I do with care. I try to find a path into the discussion that my students can walk. I fail as many times as I succeed, but I try to listen to what my students have to say, wait in silence with them, and risk my own stories of prejudice and judgment in hopes they will trust what I am doing.

Professor P chose the easier route and simply replaced that book on the reading list. I read the omission as his desire not to take on "controversial" issues. In so doing, he omits more than the book from his classroom. But I also read the omission as evidence that he considered my syllabus before taking it. He didn't just Xerox it. He read it and then made decisions to take most but not all.

In Stolen Words, Thomas Mallon writes that plagiarism as a concept emerged in the 17th century when, for the first time, people could make a living as writers. Before then, words could not be owned; no one would have claimed to own a sentence any more than they might claim to own the sky. For most of our literary history, Mallon writes, imitation was the preferred mode of composing. Originality emerged along with the notion of writing as an occupation and with, not surprisingly, the invention of the printing press. The history of plagiarism reinforces the fact that writing has to be seen as valuable to begin with before it will be deemed worth protecting.

That afternoon I storm down to my department head's office bearing a copy of Professor P's syllabus and a copy of my own. "He has taken my syllabus," I say. "He is lazy, unprofessional."

"Well," my chairman says, "I am not sure about that."

"I can sue," I respond.

"I don't think so," he says. "The university owns your syllabus, not you."

My chair is right, at least partially. The American Association of University Professors has an informational outline on intellectual-property issues that says the "prevailing academic practice" is for faculty members to own the copyrights of scholarly works and teaching materials that are "created independently and at the faculty member's own initiative." However, some faculty work is considered "work for hire" — documents made by faculty members for the university to fulfill their contractual obligations, and owned by the university.

It is much easier for institutions to claim to own the copyright for syllabi and other teaching materials than for published research. "Some argue that faculty are hired to teach," the AAUP outline says, "that teaching and the byproducts thereof are thus within the scope of employment, and this additional control by the employer institution transform syllabi into work-for-hire."

But maybe not. As Gary Rhoades writes in "Whose Property Is It? Negotiating with the University," "increasingly, faculty members' intellectual products, including those generated from their basic research and teaching activities, are being considered as commodities." Much of that push comes from courses delivered online, where the syllabus and other course materials are purchased and both faculty members and universities have the potential to make money.

As was the case with the printing press, it is the commodification of teaching materials that might eventually render the syllabus irrefutable intellectual property. While recent lawsuits seen to favor faculty members in broadening their claims to intellectual property, I couldn't find any mentioned online that relied on the syllabus as a test case for plagiarism.

One comes close. A 2006 article described the saga of Chris Dussold, an assistant professor of finance who sued Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville after it fired him for copying another professor's teaching statement (The Chronicle, February 10, 2006). Dussold's story was not straightforward. He claimed he was fired for persistent rumors that he was sleeping with one of his undergraduates, rumors both he and the student vigorously refute. (In April, the university and Dussold reached a confidential settlement, and the suit was dismissed.)

What interests me about the case, though, is the teaching statement, a document not unlike a syllabus, the kind of brass-tacks writing often placed in opposition to the "real" work of research and publications. In the Dussold case, the university treats the teaching statement as a protected document, like an essay or an article, one you could be fired for stealing.

I try to imagine Professor P's motivations. He is not in my department and teaches at another institution. It is common practice to look at other syllabi when constructing a new course. In fact, Professor P asked for mine a year before he adopted it as his own. Perhaps he ran out of time. Perhaps he was told to align his course with others. I can imagine all sorts of reasons that he took my work, but that doesn't make it OK.

My department head calls Professor P that afternoon. I can only guess at the conversation based on the e-mail message that I receive hours later from Professor P, in which he apologizes for "causing [me] any discomfort," a statement that trivializes the situation. He informs me that he had told the class on the first day that he was using my syllabus and that he had retroactively credited me with ownership of the syllabus in places where he had posted his version online.

Why am I so angry? Would others be? Reactions from my colleagues are mixed.

"Are there rules about that?" one colleague asks, when I raise the issue of syllabus plagiarism.

"I don't think so," I say, "at least not any written ones."

"So it's just a general breach of professional ethics?" he asks.

"I guess," I reply, "though I have to say, no one in my doctoral program ever explicitly said not to steal someone's entire syllabus."

"Yeah," he concludes, "you just know not to do it."

Another colleague appears less bothered by the situation. "Well," she says, when I ask for her opinion, "I guess our syllabi are sometimes available online, that must make them public property."

One colleague says her anger would depend on which syllabus the person stole — she doesn't care about her public-speaking syllabus but would be irate if someone stole the one she wrote for environmental rhetoric. Another faculty member says she wouldn't care at all.

For many colleagues, the tipping point seems to be the fact that Professor P took nearly the whole thing.

On his blog called Category D (http://categoryd.blogspot.com), Chris Cagle, a lecturer in film and media arts at Temple University, discusses syllabus plagiarism only to dismiss the concept, in part, because a syllabus has no monetary value. What has actually been stolen by Professor P, Cagle might ask me? More important, where are the damages?

Neal Bowers faced similar questions in the early 1990s when several of his poems were plagiarized in various literary journals. In his book Words for the Taking, Bowers describes the lengths to which he went to find the plagiarist, the pain he felt on having his words stolen, the wall of silence that met him at every turn, making him feel like he was the one who had done something wrong.

But what is most interesting to me is the point Bowers makes early in his narrative: "The most insidious aspect of plagiarism is how much damage it does to the surrounding terrain."

To decide that a syllabus is not a made thing, not worthy of protection without regard to market value or aesthetic value, erodes the terrain of the classroom, a terrain with a history of siege. I remember in graduate school being mocked by other doctoral students for caring about the classroom. Most tried to "get out" of teaching through grants and fellowships. The real work, I was meant to understand, lay in scholarship. In a culture where teaching is feminized, I see direct connections between the lack of protection surrounding the materials produced for the classroom and the fact that female faculty members tend to have higher teaching loads than their male counterparts, devote more hours to teaching, spend less time on research and therefore publish less, and dominate the adjunct ranks while lagging behind in the numbers of full professors. My syllabus participates in larger questions in academe about what, and who, is valued.

In our postmodern world it is outré,akin to wearing pastels to the MLA convention, to suggest that anything — a par-agraph, a poem, a course description — is your own. We live on slippery truths; nowhere is the path more slick than whendiscussing originality. I understand thatevery utterance is someone else's. Still, as Malcolm Gladwell writes in an essay called "Something Borrowed," the first eight notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony played with the right pauses in between belong to him alone.

A syllabus is not a symphony. It is an ordinary document made by a complicated person who writes from a specific position and for a particular audience. It is a made thing, crafted in the way an article is crafted, the way a grant proposal is crafted, the way this essay is crafted, through revision, feedback, and periods of study and reflection.

To devalue the documents made for the classroom is to devalue the classroom itself, not to mention the teacher who made them.

Jennifer Sinor is an associate professor of English at Utah State University.