What Will Kaavya Do?

So a Maven friend of mine pointed out that Harvard really has no grounds to expel Kaavya Viswanathan, that legally, since her plagiarism was not dealing with class work, they can’t just expel her. Sure, there is a student’s code of ethics, and it is expected that students should conduct themselves with integrity. But Harvard can’t really do anything. I suppose they could review any papers she may have written for her classes for plagiarism, and they would be entitled to do that, as far as I’m concerned, to find grounds to expel her, but since she left, what’s the point?

So I apologize. I retract my previous soapbox stand as having overstepped the reasonable. I was wrong. I still stand by what I said in the rest of the post, but I will back down on the Harvard issue.

So why did I get so defensive? Why did I get so carried away (other than because I have a tendency to do so every once in a while)? Perhaps it is because I am a writer. Perhaps because I’m an Indian woman writer, and I fear that Kaavya has ruined it for us minority women writer, I feel that this matter needs to be dealt with strongly, so it’s clear that it’s an isolated incidence and that it won’t happen again because the cost is too high.

So what is the cost? What will happen to Ms. Viswanathan? Let’s assume she does go back to college – somewhere – and does, as planned, become an investment banker. How will that work for her? On the one hand, does this incident tarnish her reputation enough that she would not be trustworthy and would find it difficult to find a job? Or is it unlikely that the circles overlap, so those in the investment banking world wouldn’t even know – a few years down the line – that any of this ever happened (if they know now)? I suppose any potential employer could google Ms. Viswanathan and discover the truth, but even then, would they find it relevant? I say yes, it speaks of her character.

I’ve discussed this matter at length with my sister-in-law (well, technically, my husband’s sister-in-law, so would that make her my sister-in-law-in-law?), and one question she raised is whether she did this on purpose, and whether she wanted to be caught. Could the pressure of all the expectations placed upon this potential child prodigy (I know, she’s nineteen, but in the publishing world, that’s pretty young) have driven her to this? Her parents spends upwards of $20,000 to help her get into Harvard. She gets there, and Harvard is a very competitive place. She manages to get a $500,000 two-book deal, and proceeds to write a novel in the Harvard library between classes, homework, exams, and, presumably, establishing a social life in her first year of college. She’s living on her own for the first time, and is finding her own way, listening the voice inside her head instead of those of her parents. That’s a stressful situation even without the pressures of publication.

So it seems I’m showing a bit of sympathy here. While I’m at it, here’s a theory. She spent the first twelve years of her life living in India, right? Well, over there, at least in the early years, most learning is done through rote memorization. So, it’s quite reasonable to conclude that Ms. Viswanathan got quite good at memorizing. So, really, while it may seem unlikely to those of us who went through an entirely American system of education to accept that Ms. Viswanathan may have actually memorized complete passages of these novels without realizing it, given her early education background, it is entirely plausible that her copying was not intentional, but rather completely unconscious.

But plagiarism is wrong. If she at any point even had some inkling that the lines she was writing sounded vaguely familiar, she should have checked back to what it seemed to remind her of – taking the time away from writing her novel – to make sure she wasn’t plagiarizing. Certainly, in some writing course at Harvard (if not all of them), plagiarism was discussed, including the fact that just changing a couple of words here or there is not good enough.

Writing is seen as such a chore for many people. My husband chose his classes to minimize the number of papers he’d have to write during college. Interpreting papers seems to be so subjective, as opposed to science or math exams where there’s a definite right answer. (I suppose this would be the academic equivalent of gymnastics or figure skating, where there are points for "style"). And so, plagiarism doesn’t necessarily seem like as big a deal as, say, copying someone’s answers on an exam. But why is it any different? Is it really a lesser sin?

Writing well is difficult, and yet good writing is not valued. Reading novels is considered something you do to pass time, something akin to watching television. Textbooks, where you learn something, can be written like crap, and are often regarded as less good if they are too “reader-friendly.” The writer is then regarded as too “fluff”. True technical writing should not be written for the layman. How else do you explain many users manuals? But why can’t writing be educational and easy to read? I’ve recently started reading non-fiction, and held off for a long time because I need to be able to stay awake long enough to learn something. But then, maybe I just didn’t know where to find good non-fiction.

I guess the point I’m trying to make here is that I take this whole Kaavya Viswanathan issue seriously (and I apologize to those of you who are sick of my coverage of the topic in this blog). Writing was something I was encouraged to do, but not as a career. To make real money, I should have a job in a field that provides a much more reliable source of income. So the bias against “softer” fields like writing (as opposed to science) is still very real to me, and even as I sit here defending writing and literature as necessary components of life, I know that when I return to work, I will look for job in Computer Science. If I can’t fight this bias in myself, how can I expect to fight it in anyone else?

We teach our kids to read and write, and then somewhere down the line, we tell them not to waste their time reading stories because they should either be working on school work or participating in sports. How do we find the time for books, for exercising the imagination, for keeping the creative mind finely tuned so that our kids can think outside the box and not always strive to simply work in a cubicle?