How professors behave: from academics to thieves

I made a brief note on my half-read good read Michèle Lamont's How professors think: inside the curious world of academic judgement (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2009) some time ago. Just today, when I was on the way to the office in a refreshing morning, I was thinking another interesting title which could draw curious eyes of postgraduates students and the public who hold a highbrow attitude on academics: How professors behave.

I hadn't had a very clear idea about how to make the subtitle as sound as possible, issues ranging from conversation to speech, from conduct to manners, from phone etiquette to table etiquette, from outfit to walking style, from attitude toward cleaners to superstars. The list runs as far as an ordinary person will probably do.

Coming back to the office for less than an hour I decided to use what had just happened to me to be a sound subtitle and here is the full title: How professors behave: from academics to thieves. Intriguing! A visiting young scholar from afar unlocked the (his) mysteries to life, to me.

Yes, he stole my sources behind me and was caught by me in the office. Technically, he copied a file (pdf copy of published primary sources) and was ready to copy more from my flash drive in an open-for-all desktop to his own portable drive when I left my flash drive unattended. I was terribly shocked at that very moment as if your laptop hanged suddenly before you save your doctoral thesis. So was he as if you as a schoolboy cheating on exam was caught by a teacher.

He admitted that he stole (he himself said "stole" many times) the file from me when he realized that the drive was mine as soon as I was returning to the desktop. Apparently, he did not know, as he insisted twice, it was mine and thought it belonged to my colleague as he confessed later in front of two of us such that he seemed to feel free to copy as many and freely as he wished.

Yes, it was not his first-time file lifting, not even second or third I dare to assure you.

We were taught not to plagiarize in university and postgraduate school; in the same way I teach students not to do so. I admit now that I was wrong so were my teachers. We should not even steal!

I myself was responsible for my own fault, carelessness and lack of sense of academic security (I could hardly claim it is about copyright at all).

After all, academics are human beings. This incident drew me back to the column I read lately, Stanley Fish's "Will the Humanities Save Us?" on The New York Times in which he questioned desperately but strongly: "Do the humanities ennoble?" I myself add a negligible remark to this academic incident: the theft is a humanities academic.