The Academic Bates Motel

Abstract

Anti-plagiarism norms have nothing to do with what children want out of life a priori. There are children who love to copy from young ages. Yet teachers universally proselytize anti-plagiarism values as if they are natural law to people when they are more impressionable. Why? Plagiarism is not a crime, so telling them that it is bad is not for the children's benefit. The reason academics teach anti-plagiarism norms is that anti-plagiarism values are common in academia. Academics are abusing their position of power over children by embedding professional academic norms in children's minds.

In this article, I explain this by developing a metaphor I call "the Academic Bates Motel." I believe academics are earnestly trying to shuffle young people through the pipeline from education to employment. The crux of this is the Hotel; that is, universities, the academics' domain. Academics take hold of people when they are very young and start training them to become guests at the Hotel. This means that the values required of Hotel guests tend to become inseparable from the way that people think. However, people eventually check out. They do not "need" these norms outside the Hotel, yet can only continue to believe in their indoctrination in the absence of deprogramming.

In looking at the Hotel through the lens of plagiarism norms, I discuss ways that the enforcement of academic norms teaches values beyond anti-plagiarism. It introduces harmful peculiarities into people's psyches, like the belief that copying itself is uncreative, that it is good to be a snitch, that "abnormal" people deserve to be ostracized, etc. All of these are taught in order to inhibit a completely natural desire, merely because it goes against the rules of a Hotel they will never see again. What a tragic waste of potential plagiarists.

Keywords: plagiarism, academia, schools, education, learning, norms, teaching

JEL Classification: K11, I21, I23