One of the dichotomies that puzzles me the most in the U.S. academic culture is its emphasis on students’ development as independent thinkers, while it obligates students to conform to academic culture which is fraught with rules and restrictions. If (m)any student dares to transgress the normative of academic culture for academic convenience or intellectual urge, he/she is subject to charge of dishonesty. And, punishment, including expulsion from school, follows. One of the charges which is considered as the ultimate violation of academic integrity is plagiarism. According to Bloch, “The integration of previously published written texts into a new text is governed by a set of rules, the violation of which is called plagiarism. I would contend that this definition of plagiarism is qualified in that it has not considered critically the varying perception of plagiarism in different cultures. Obviously, plagiarism is a construct coined in the Western academia which has not reflected the Oriental realities with regard to the production and promotion of knowledge.
Pennycook (1996) seems to have been addressing the cultural dimension imbricated in the concept of plagiarism. As such, he has declined to consider plagiarism “as a simple black-and-while issue” (p.201). Surprising even, he establishes the fact with empirical evidence that the textual borrowing or the reproduction of ideas without acknowledging the source is inseparable from the humans’ history of intellectual development. He mentions that a great deal of the flourishing of Roman arts was based on the free imitation of Greek works. He also presents a list of plagiarists which includes Samuel Coleridge, Edger Allen Poe, Martine Luther King, Norman Miller, Alex Hailey and so on. This phenomenon, of course, leads to the question if plagiarism is at all a crime when some of the most creative thinkers of human history have done so to prove their intellectual ingenuity. I would propose that before we consider plagiarism as a crime, we must acknowledge that the development of knowledge is a gradual and consensual phenomenon, which surpasses the special and temporal boundaries to maintain a linear connection between past and present, so the future is sustained. And, of course, students should be allowed to take part in this act of intellectual tradition without being punished at least until plagiarism is clearly defined. The following question merits critical consideration while plagiarism is defined:

· In some cultures, memorizing written discourses is considered critical to one’s intellectual development; therefore, regurgitating memorized discourses is not considered as a crime in academia at all. When a student of this background comes to an academic culture which considers memorization as plagiarism, who should be in position of compromise—the student or the academia—to ensure his/her academic development?