Books and Articles of Academic Interest.

The mention to AQ readers of "affirmative action" in higher education usually conjures thoughts of the racial or gender quota regime that has long dominated the academic hiring process, or to the race-based undergraduate admissions policies now increasingly subject to legal challenge. As a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education illustrates, however, there is another dimension, less often noted, that has begun to garner more attention in the current election year, namely the impact of federally mandated "gender equity" policies on collegiate athletics. In "Foes of Title IX Try to Make Equity in College Sports a Campaign Issue" (4 February 2000), the Chronicle provides some space for critics who charge that the present interpretation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which in general terms prohibits gender discrimination at schools receiving federal funds, has led to the micromanagement of college sports by Washington bureaucrats. Under the "guidelines" devised by the U.S. Department of Education (whose Office of Civil Rights recently aroused a firestorm of controversy by alleging that standardized college entrance tests were discriminatory), "recipient" institutions are required to maintain a roughly equivalent membership, or "substantial proportionality," between men and women's athletic programs. Left to their own devices, of course, college athletes of either sex do not participate in sports with a view to satisfying federal bean counters, so that randomly achieved male-to-female ratios seldom coincide with Department of Education rules. Since institutions must demonstrate compliance, however, with the loss of federal funding likely if they don't, "substantial proportionality" is usually contrived by eliminating such traditional male sports as wrestling, or by imposing strict ceilings on the numbers of men allowed to participate in all programs. Thus, "gender equity" comes at a steep price for male athletes, as one interviewee noted: "Their parents can't understand why these kids are being dropped for the sole reason that a university can meet a quota."

Plagiarism, one would ordinarily think, consists of appropriating the work of another and, without attribution, presenting it as one's own: stealing, in other words. Of course, individual cases will occasionally require nuanced handling, as many professors are well aware, but most would probably have no difficulty endorsing the general definition of plagiarism just noted. Rebecca Moore Howard, however, writing in the March 2000 issue of College Teaching, believes that the term is too vague and imprecise, and should be replaced with more specific alternates such as fraud, insufficient citation, and excessive repetition. This is obviously necessary, she argues, because

 
   the discourse of plagiarism regulates not only textuality but sexuality. 
   Embedded in the discursive construction of plagiarism are metaphors of 
   gender, weakness, collaboration, disease, adultery, rape and property that 
   communicate a fear of violating sexual as well as textual boundaries. To 
   regulate textual relations--and specifically the generalized field of 
   plagiarism--is to regulate the gendered, sexualized body. Hence, plagiarism 
   continues to elude definition, for teachers cannot possibly formulate and 
   act on a definition of plagiarism that articulates both its textual and 
   sexual work. 

The recognition of this definitional dilemma, she continues, poses clear practical problems for actual classroom situations:

 
   How are we English teachers, having recognized the sexual work of 
   plagiarism, going to deal with it in our classroom representations of 
   texuality? Shall we contest the gendering and sexualizing of plagiarism, 
   and in that contest necessarily reify its bifurcations, because we are 
   working against but within its categories? Shall we celebrate that which 
   was previously excoriated? Is the gendering of plagiarism simply a barnacle 
   on the hull of authorship that one might scrape off? Or does detaching it 
   require some revision of that economy of authorship? Are sexual preference 
   and plagiarism simply incidental associations, or are hierarchical gender 
   and sexuality integral to our fundamental concept of plagiarism--integral 
   to the cultural work accomplished by that concept? 

These issues would best be resolved by discarding the term "plagiarism" in favor of the three alternatives noted above. Many readers, of course, may already have resolved in their own minds any specific difficulties with which academic plagiarism may have confronted them. Anyone seeking a clear and accessible discussion of "gendering and sexualizing of plagiarism" and the related problem of "reified bifurcations" will find it in "Sexuality, Textuality: The Cultural Work of Plagiarism," College English, volume 62, number 4, March 2000.

In At War with the Word: Literary Theory and Liberal Education (ISI Books, 1999), R.