I have to say, given the many ongoing discussions about plagiarism in this forum and in the composition field in general, that I was rather amused when I got the following notice in a Council of Writing Program Administrators email this morning:
The Network for Media Action’s fall campaign boilerplate “news
release” is ready for use. The topic this year is, more or less,
“what happens in the first-year composition course anyway?” The
boilerplate puts a positive spin on this, as indicated in the working
headline: “Freshman Comp: Gateway to Success,” a theme that carries
through the piece. It runs about 1300 words.
This boilerplate is available for use without permission from its
author and with no credit or attribution to him needed. You might wish
to ask your public relations office to release it to your local news
media, with or without adding local numbers or statements or quotes;
you might wish to use it as the basis for an op-ed piece in your local
newspaper; you might use it as the basis for a letter to the editor of
your local paper. At any rate, the idea behind these campaigns is to
get the voice(s) of WPA(s) into the public conversation.
I've done PR before, and my husband was formerly a speechwriter for John Brademas, then-president of NYU, so I'm well aware of the principle of the fungible text and of the slippery concept of authorship in many mercantile and political realms. But the notion that Writing Program Administrators, notwithstanding their very busy schedules consisting mostly of endless meetings (if my own experience fits the mold), would be encouraged to "use" a "boilerplate 'news release'" in any form whatsoever without attribution, strikes me as rich. Presumably, WPAs are singularly capable of penning their own views of freshman composition. If they're not able to pound out 1300 words in short order on how the courses they and their programs offer constitute a "gateway to success," some minds might wonder how suited they are to do what they are doing.
Last week, I heard a story, unverified, about several students who happened upon a copy of another student's composition paper on a lab computer, and cleverly copied it as their own. Only problem was that they all three turned it in to the same instructor. (This does seem a kind of urban myth of composition, but it probably does occasionally happen.)
One rather savors the idea of these same students going onto Lexis/Nexis and happening upon three op-ed pieces about the value of composition in, say, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, and the Baltimore Sun, the texts of which are almost identical, under the byline of three different authors, all WPAs.
Why is copying verbiage without attribution plagiarism if students do it but an exercise in--uhm, acceptable disciplinary promotion? savvy media relations? collectively enabled efficiency?--if administrators do it?
It's vaguely--and only vaguely--understandable that professional groups populated by those not known for their prose proficiency would opt for this sort of public relations stratagem. But here, the effect is one of cognitive dissonance.
Ah well, in journalism these days, 1300 words is, for an op-ed or even a feature, a rara avis. So maybe the problem is obviated: anyone "using" the "boilerplate" as is, will be unlikely to find a journalistic perch.
Disciplinarity and Plagiarism
Your post points out an important consideration in any discussion on plagiarism: that there are situations--discipline-specific, or perhaps workplace-specific--in which copying text is completely acceptable. The use of a boilerplate news release is one; law might provide another example (according to my neighbor, a lawyer, who says that text is basically copied & pasted for various contracts, etc, because there's no point in reinventing text that needs to say essentially the same thing from document to document). Students in the Intro to Professional Writing course I teach fairly regularly are encouraged to reuse passages of text as they move from one assignment to another (the brochure to the web page, for example), which is sort of related to this idea of boilerplate text that a community is invited to borrow from/use.
It appeals to me, this "voice of the organization," this idea of the community text. Doesn't strike me at odds with discussions of plagiarism at all, since the way sources are cited or others' voices are incorporated into text--even the way we are invited to cite/use writing from a document--is essentially genre-specific, with all the social/disciplinary/rhetorical/contextual richness the term "genre" implies.
NMA
As the coordinator of the NMA, I found this a darned interesting post. Before I comment, though, let me invite you (and anyone else who's interested in this!) to become part of the NMA - we work from the expertise of people like you, so please join us! Check out the NMA site to learn more - and there's a link to our listserv there, too.
You're absolutely right to point out that textual attribution - in fact, conventions of text use - are quite different in different contexts. One need look no further than the Bush administration to see that, of course, since they use the same text repeatedly . But beyond that, as Chris Anson has pointed out in many talks, you can do a web search for things like "lightening and tires" or "safe defrosting" and find many, many sites that reprint information without attribution.
Beyond noting that conventions of textual attribution are context-specific, a couple of things. First, the fact is that compositionists and rhetoricians have not historically been super adept at framing the case *for* our work (as opposed to, say, arguing against people/movements attempting to shape it differently). This is a point made in our research - see, for instance, Joseph Harris's A Teaching Subject. We're not alone, of course - as a whole, education is currently behind a tremendous 8-ball in this respect. (Take a look at the Spellings Commission report on this, for instance - it uses metaphors of competition, business... all the things that we hear and complain about fairly regularly.) The NMA - which consists of a group of about 200+ members - is trying to reshape that discourse by reshaping the frames that we use surrouding our work. We're not alone, of course - there are lots of organizations working on this, organizations that also provide some boilerplate language (see, for instance, The Opportunity Agenda).
The other thing to remember is that this boilerplate is intended to be 'customized' by WPAs. So while some of the language might resonate, the content will be specific to the institution. ("Act locally" is the first item listed in the "Writing Tips" section of all the NMA position statements.)