Last week, the English department faculty met with freshman Mogwai Gremlink to discuss the terms of his academic suspension.
His offense: self-plagiarizing.
According to the department chairs, with whom we met to get to the bottom of what exactly this “self-plagiarizing” thing was, Gremlink had written a paper on the character of Iago from Shakespeare’s Othello.
His thesis was that Iago was motivated by his sense of ethnic superiority to kill Othello; an engaging and promising claim by all accounts.
But where he went terribly, terribly wrong was by citing his own mother as an expert on the matter…multiple times.
In his intro paragraph, he wrote, “Iago didn’t attempt to kill Othello out of a desire for material gain but rather a self-ascribed need to assert his own racial supremacy.” Then he followed up with, “Like my mother always said about Hitler, ‘Some people are just pure evil,’” adding a footnote at the bottom that read, “My mom. Los Angeles: family dinner, 2007. Verbal.”
He even sourced himself, multiple times in fact, making ridiculous justifications for his claims like “Iago is, what I like to call, ‘a racist, fascist pig,’ as evidenced by his obsession with power and being white.” The footnote read, “Myself. Tacoma: Diversions, 2013. Verbal.”
According to the school archives, Gremlink is the only student dumb enough to think sourcing yourself or your mom is a good idea.
Let’s hope it stays that way.
