A Cribber and a Fibber

In 2005 Robert Manne edited a collection of his political essays entitled Left Right Left. It is a large book of thirty-eight works, ranging from those published as long ago as 1977 to as recently as 2005. The turning point within them, Manne says, is the year 1995, roughly the time when he switched his allegiances from the political Right to the Left. Many of the essays published before that year, he says in the preface, involved arguments with the Left; after 1995 many involved arguments with the Right.

One essay called “A Case for Censorship” was originally published in Quadrant in September 1993 when Manne was the journal’s editor. It is both a lament about the ready availability of sexually explicit and sexually violent pornography, and a critique of the ideology of the liberal intelligentsia of the 1960s that allowed this to happen. It is also a review of evidence presented by academic and police sources that points to the degree of harm caused by pornography, both to consumers of this material themselves and to the victims of sexual offenders and murderers whose consumption of pornography fuelled their behaviour.

I sympathise with the position Manne argues in this piece. He makes a strong case that much pornography is socially and individually damaging, that it fosters misogyny and pederasty, and that anti-censorship intellectuals, rather than defending freedom from a censorious puritanism, are simply helping the porn industry generate fortunes from degrading sleaze.

It is a pity, therefore, to have to report that Manne has spoilt his case by indulging in an entirely different vice of his own. For his essay abounds in the academic sin of plagiarism. Manne plagiarises not inadvertently, just once or twice, but several times throughout the essay. It is integral to the very way he makes his case about the social damage caused by pornography. In this work, plagiarism becomes his modus operandi.

Manne is a professor of politics at La Trobe University, an institution that has a powerful set of regulations about academic misconduct. La Trobe requires its academic staff and students “to observe the highest ethical standards in all aspects of academic work”. The university says it will enforce these values “by penalising academic dishonesty and all forms of cheating”. The very first type of cheating and dishonesty defined by the regulations is plagiarism. It identifies five examples, including copying extracts from someone else without proper acknowledgment and passing off the assignments of others as one’s own.

The regulations specifically identify two kinds of plagiarism that can be found in “A Case for Censorship”. They are:

“1.2 (b) paraphrasing someone else’s words without acknowledging the source;
1.2 (c) using facts and information from a source without acknowledging it.”1

La Trobe is not, of course, the only academic institution to publish a code of academic misconduct. They are mandatory for all public and accredited institutions of higher education. Plagiarism is a common offence in all codes, though some go to greater lengths than others to spell out what they mean. The University of Melbourne’s Policy and Procedures for Responding to Academic Misconduct provide the following advice:

“3. Secondary citation
When you want to use a quotation that another author has used, you should locate and read the original source of the quotation for yourself. Using the quote and copying the second author’s footnote reference without either checking the original source for yourself or acknowledging the second author is technically plagiarism.
If you cannot locate the original text for some reason (eg the original source is not available in the library or on-line), then your footnotes must acknowledge that you are relying on the second author’s recording of the quote.” 2

Manne’s essay clearly breaches this rule of conduct too. Rather than doing as much research into the original sources as he led his readers to believe, Manne lifted the findings of several primary research projects from two secondary works on the topic in a way that the above university policies prescribe as unethical.

There are at least six examples of plagiarism in “A Case for Censorship”. They were submitted to Quadrant by a Melbourne informant who chooses not to be named. I have double-checked his work in all the available sources cited by both him and Manne, and can confirm the points he makes are accurate. Although Quadrant does not usually publish notes with articles, we are breaking the rule in this case and including endnotes since they are essential to establishing the case. What follows is my informant’s findings and commentary.

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