The University as Copy Shop

Here's the ever interesting Rob Horning on the rise of plagiarism among college students and the speculative assumption that this is a Web 2.0 phenomenon. Most notable however is the following passage:

"Students, I suspect, don’t take attribution seriously because the work they are being asked to do is not serious to them. They don’t have much of a sense of scholarship as a collective enterprise, or of what they do in college as scholarship. With gen-ed classes, they know they are just marking time and doing busy work for the most part. They are right to think that plagiarism is not “a serious misdeed” that is somehow different from any other form of academic dishonesty. To pretend otherwise is to serve the ideological bidding of the lords of intellectual property.

"The implication of plagiarism hysteria is that scholarship is a process of claiming ownership of proprietary information, an exceedingly unnatural attitude that students have always needed to be indoctrinated into, particularly if they want an academic career. This usually involves a series of ritualized genuflections in the form of citations of the recognized masters of a particular discipline as part of a student’s professionalization into the academy. "

I can't say I agree wholeheartedly with this, but it's rather convincing that students are not convinced at school of the value of their scholarship. It's just assumed that their studies are valuable since they are studying them, but, as Horning points out, many of them just take it as "busy work" to fill time between drinking sessions and job applications. If people were to enter the corporate culture first and then the university, there would be no problem at all with plagairism or any other kind of equivalent cheating, as this is the natural order of success. If this is the future kids have to look forward to, what reason would they have to take seriously any kind of uncompensated tasks they must complete on the way to this dead end?