In justice, intention matters

As most Princetonians know, students accused of cheating on an exam are summoned before the student-run Honor Committee, while all other suspected offenses, including things like plagiarism on papers, are charged by the student-faculty Committee on Discipline, composed of five students, four faculty members and two deans. For both types of offenses, a student’s intent — whether he or she knowingly plagiarized whole passages or forgot a pair of quotation marks in an otherwise cited idea — does not matter in determining guilt. The most common punishment assigned is a one-year suspension from the University, a permanent black mark on a student’s record that he will have to explain for the rest of his life.

Let’s see the effects of this failure to allow a lack of malicious intent to mitigate even part of the guilt assigned to victims of this system. In writing seminars, many freshmen learn the real example of a senior who was punished harshly even with a complete lack of intent to plagiarize and the strongest effort to cite all sources properly — let’s call her Mary. Mary has just finished a meticulously researched and cited 150-page thesis. A few weeks later, she is notified that she must appear before the Committee on Discipline. The offense: after paraphrasing an idea and citing the idea with a footnote, it was determined that she did not change the original wording of the passage sufficiently and should have used quotation marks. Under a rationally structured system or under almost any criminal justice system in the world, she would be given a chance to correct her error, with perhaps a point penalty on her grade. Under Princeton’s system, she was suspended for a year and forced to write a completely new thesis.

Rather than allowing intent to play a role in deciding which punishments to assign students, Princeton’s “Rights, Rules, Responsibilities” use the unjustifiably weak standard of whether a student “ought reasonably to have understood that his or her actions were in violation of University regulations.” So even if a student thought she was completely diligent in citing all her sources, the committee could still make the subjective determination that she “ought reasonably to have understood” that she was committing a violation and would receive the normal penalty — a one-year suspension. Even if a violation does not meet this standard, it still “will be considered an academic infraction and will normally result in a disciplinary penalty.” That means even if the committee determines that a student could not have been reasonably expected to understand his or her actions constituted a violation, he or she will still be punished!

It’s true that intellectual property is essential to the institution of academia and unattributed or improperly attributed use of sources is a serious offense. Nevertheless, to maintain a system in which the lack of intent does nothing to differentiate the type of punishment given is an injustice to the students who accidentally fail to cite properly and are therefore given the same permanent stigma of a year-long suspension as those who knowingly plagiarize.

I am not suggesting that a lack of intent to plagiarize is enough to absolve a student of all guilt and exempt the student from all punishment. The current system seems to purposely remove intent from the equation because such a removal is necessary for the function of a binary system: a violation occurred or it did not, and punishment is assessed accordingly. Instead, there must be a differentiation of types of violations so that intent can matter in disciplinary hearings. Both willful, malicious plagiarism of entire passages and accidental improper citation are detrimental to the ideal of intellectual property rights, but not equally so. The students who engage in these different types of acts have different degrees of moral culpability. A willful violation and an unwitting one are fundamentally different offenses and must be treated and defined as such by Princeton, with less severe penalties for those done without intent.

Finally, that intention is difficult to determine should not preclude its use in academic violations. In the American legal system, the “violation” of killing someone does not automatically merit the death penalty. The charges can range from any degree of murder, to manslaughter to justified homicide — all based on intent. The common law recognizes that for the sake of justice, one’s intentions must be taken into consideration, even for someone who kills. Why can’t Princeton’s administration, for a few quotation marks?

Connor Mui is a freshman from Tenafly, N.J. He can be reached at cmui@princeton.edu.