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NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
October 27,1999 Vol. CXXXVIII, No. 41
I’ve got you babe
Azad Jafarian I Daily Trojan
Babysitter's club. Sheila Tehrani, a junior majoring in international relations, watches Alexander for his mother outside Commons on Tuesday afternoon.
Departments work against plagiarism
Academics: More than half of Student Conduct cases last year involved copying
By LISA ANN NOURSE
Staff Writer
Plagiarism constituted more than half of the academic cases the Office of Student Conduct handled during the 1998-99 school year, said Interim Director Bob Schnereger, a concern that has prompted administrators within individual academic disciplines to see that academic integrity is upheld within departments.
Though approximately 75 of the 145 academic cases involved the copying of previously published materials, more faculty members are developing an aggressive approach to tackling plagiarism and addressing the issue in course syllabi, introductions and instructions on the proper citations of sources, Schnereger said.
Because students will eventually fill leadership positions and professional roles, academic integrity “is a preparation for professional practice in life,” Schnereger said. “Faculty are good at articulating standards clearly in such a way that students are clear that plagiarism will not occur.”
Many of the cases of plagiarism that the office deals with involve students from the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Schnereger said, because plagiarism is dependent on the academic discipline. The office encounters few problems with engineering students, partly because it is a disci-
pline that is mostly project-oriented and field-based rather than theoretical research-based, Schnereger said.
“Academic integrity is crucial to academic w'riting,” said John Holland, co-director of the Writing Program. “Plagiarism is a complex issue....There are so many different varieties of plagiarism....”
“Much of the time, plagiarism is unintentional and is based on the incorrect use of a resource,” Holland said. “I think sometimes these cases get generically reported as plagiarism.”
Schnereger said plagiarism occurs for a number of reasons, one being that students enter the university with a lack of confidence in their writing. In addition, some international students whose primary language is not English struggle to express themselves, he said, adding that English as a Second Language students tell him that there is a “leap in speaking and writing.”
The competitive academic environment that the university fosters is also a contributing factor, Schnereger said. USC students are goal-oriented and driven, he said, and so the end result, in terms of degrees and grades, “can color one’s decision-making process” and be a motivation to plagiarize.
Plagiarism from electronic resources, such as web sites, is the most commonly seen form because it is “easy to cut and paste without acknowledging the sources,” Schnereger said, adding that it is easy to lose track of the sources of information during the note-tak-ing process. Students generally extract a body of text from a source and utilize it in their own copy, he said.
In an effort to equip students with the I see Plagiarism, page 13 I
Greek assembly allots $12,500 to honor society
Organization: Voting rights for Order of Omega not discussed during Tuesday night’s meeting
By JENNIFER MEDINA
Assignment Editor
The Greek Student Assembly allocated $12;500
—	nearly half its total budget — to the Order of Omega Greek honor society retreat at its meeting Tuesday night.
This is the first year the retreat will receive funds from an umbrella organization. Last year the retreat was a separate “extraordinary account” line item and received $12,500 in the Student Senate budget.
The allocation leaves $13,500 in GSA’s account. Senate allocated $10,000 to the assembly in 1998-99.
The honor society will request an additional $2,500 from the assembly next week, said Quinn Allphin, Order of Omega president and a senior majoring in political science.
Because GSA determines the amount of funding the society receives, Allphin said he will still request that Order of Omega be a voting member of the assembly. The issue was not discussed during the meeting.
After GSA reviews and amends its constitution, it will consider allocating additional funds and voting privileges to Order of Omega, said Brian Hassan, pres-
I see GSA, page 14 I
Anti-sweatshop cause ‘strongest’
Speaker: Director of labor committee urges students to continue their work
By RYAN PEARSON
Staff Writer
College students organizing anti-sweatshop protests are part of the “strongest human rights movement alive in the country today,” but they must bring in
new, younger members to be effective, said anti-sweatshop activist Charles Kernaghan, speaking to a group of about 40 students on campus Tuesday.
Kernaghan is the executive director of the National Labor Committee, a five-member organization working out of Washington, D.C., to end the use of “sweatshops" in manufacturing of American apparel products. In 1996, he garnered national attention for his expose on clothing made in sweatshops for Wal-Mart’s Kathie Lee Gifford line of clothes.
“The whole corporate plan to
deal with (student activists) is to delay and delay and delay, until (organized students) graduate,” Kernaghan said. “And I think that’s actually what your administration is doing right now.”
As part of a 30-campus tour with United Students Against Sweatshops, Kernaghan’s speech at USC touched on the aftermath of his Gifford effort, highlighted numbers showing the exploitative low wages paid to workers in sweatshops and detailed the specific conditions of factories that he visited in Honduras, China I see Sweatshops, page 18 I
“The whole corporate plan to deal with (student activists) is to delay...until (they) graduate.”
Charles
Kernaghan
director National Labor Committee
Constitutional ‘cleanup’ approved
Senate: Changes will make document more accurately reflect group
By MEREDITH COOPER
Student Senate Writer
Student Senate unanimously passed the second in a series of “cleanup” amendments to the bylaws of the constitution at Tuesday night’s meeting.
“We started with the constitution, and this is the first 10 pages of bylaws,” said Danielle Hultenius, parliamentarian and a senior majoring in political science. The remaining bylaws will be amended biweekly until they are finished, she said.
Two weeks ago, Senate approved the constitution as it stood in order to have a starting point from which to make further amendments. Changes will be made to the constitution and its bylaws so that it is consistent with the actual practices of Senate and amendments do not con-
tradict each other, Hultenius said.
Changes to the constitution’s language and two additions — one regarding parliamentary procedure and another addressing proxies — were approved in the cleanup amendment, Hultenius said.
Senate debated adding another amendment that Program Board general meetings are closed to the public, but voted against it because the issue was not present in the original constitution.
“If we’re going to clean up, we should clean up,” said Dana Parker, I see Senate, page 14 I