Today I see that The Magna Carta Essay is number one on Hacker News and spreading like wildfire on Twitter and other social media sites. And why not? It’s one of those “how clever” stories that makes every reader feel smarter for having read it, and it also whips up an entirely understandable enthusiasm for punishing “plagiarists,” those odious people who seem to view credentialism as a game and whose play is not quite cricket.
The story is simple. A fellow puts together a fake essay and posts it in various places where people seem to go to download essays that they then submit as their own original work. His fake essay is entirely ridiculous, which shows that to submit it, you have to download it, massage it a bit to beat the similarity filters, and then submit it without stopping to ask whether King John's titles really did include being a "Duke of Hazzard."
Likewise, to accept and grade this essay, a professor must at most skim it, without pausing to ask whether "Discipulus tuus hunc tractatum non scripsit” means “No taxation without representation,” or whether it actually means “Your student did not write this essay.”
Malfeasance and negligence must align like the planets to get this through, and it seems that this eventually came to pass.
I am shocked, shocked to find cheating going on in here, this job market where people requrie degrees that have no measurable correlation to fitness for employment and where companies openly brag about finding ways to either circumvent or flout laws in order to "maximize shareholder value."
But let us pretend for a moment that passing some essay downloaded from the Internet off as your own composition is an opprobrious crime rooted in deep dishonesty, entirely different from, say, professors appropriating the work of their graduate students. Let’s say it’s nasty.
What am I to make of this blog post naming someone who is alleged to have done this with a “honeypot” essay deliberately seeded to catch such vile criminals? I make of it the same thing that I make of lynch mobs, of accusations of witchcraft, or of communism. An accusation is not the same thing as bringing someone before a court (whether criminal or scholastic) to face their accusers and to have the evidence tried by due process.
The title of this fake essay, containing such amusing tidbits as an account of the Battle of Runnymede near the Village of Bloor West, is “The Magna Carta Essay.” What is the “Magna Carta?” Let’s do as the plagiarists do and look it up on line:
Magna Carta is an English charter, originally issued in the year 1215 and reissued later in the 13th century in modified versions, which included the most direct challenges to the monarch's authority to date. The charter first passed into law in 1225. The 1297 version, with the long title (originally in Latin) The Great Charter of the Liberties of England, and of the Liberties of the Forest, still remains on the statute books of England and Wales.
The 1215 Charter required King John of England to proclaim certain liberties, and accept that his will was not arbitrary, for example by explicitly accepting that no "freeman" (in the sense of non-serf) could be punished except through the law of the land, a right which is still in existence today.
That last line is particularly interesting: No freeman could be punished except through the law of the land, a right which is still in existence today.
I’m all for using an issue like this to discuss problems with credentials, and essays, and marking, and professors. I’m all for using this as an anecdote to illustrate an argument. But when we talk about shaming or punishing the person accused, we ignore the very charter for which the honeypot essay was named.
Lately we have much lamented how our rights and freedoms are being taken away from us by the overclass. Let’s not abandon them ourselves by joining in mob rule and mob justice. All free persons deserve due process and a fair trial. Not just those we think may be innocent, but especially those we think are guilty.
If we punish this person for plagiarizing a work named after magna carta, we just trolled ourselves. Hard. If we are to blame someone for not reading an essay, we ought, ourselves, to go to the trouble of reading up on a little history first.
Sidebar: I think most people’s contempt for plagiarists and other school cheaters is deeply rooted in a fear that these cheaters will prosper. Let me ask you this: If a cheater gets a job based on their fraudulent credentials and keeps that job, if they make as much or more money than the people who obtained their marks and degrees from honest toil and the sweat of their brows, what does that say about the value of a degree? I say it discredits either the credentials or the employer that relies on them more than the cheater. If these degrees meant anything, cheaters would get no further than a few months into their jobs before being bounced for poor performance.
Update: I didn't imagine this needed saying, but my imaginationis limited and the Universe is limitless. This rant does not speak to whether somebody should express an opinion about someone else on the Internet. This essay concerns what we do with that information. If someone cries "Jim Henson murdered Frank Oz," I am not saying we punish them for accusing Jim. I am saying that we must not rush to hang Jim without process. I am saying we msut not repeat the accusation such that it becomes folklore ("Everybody knows that Jim murdered Frank.") I am saying we must not create the equivalent to punishment by shunning this person ("Hire Jim? Well... There's talk that he did something bad.")
