Consider the name of this educational institution which we attend: Carleton College. Notice no reference to any outside source, let alone in MLA or APA formatting. Not even a slight nod to a previous source through the use of quotation marks around the word “college.” And yet, Carletonian reporters have recently uncovered disturbing information: this term is not the intellectual property of Carleton. In fact, Carleton stole the whole idea of a college from other colleges.
Upon what grounds do professors stand when they preach of the ills of plagiarism? The very system they uphold has been caught in an egregious scandal of intellectual property theft; surely, they cannot expect students to stand by and follow their hollow instructions while they contribute to the perpetration of billions of dollars’ worth of lazy neglect of our predecessors in higher education. Among the institutions that have filed suit against Carleton for this violation of copyright law and breach of the friendship pact they entered together in their youth are Mount Holyoke College of South Hadley, Massachusetts, Wartburg College of Fungus, Iowa, and Hot Dog College of Venice, Italy. Wartburg vowed in a statement that they would “throw our friendship bracelet into the trash. It doesn’t mean anything anymore,” while Hot Dog College said that Carleton had “really gotten our bun wet” with their conduct.
More recently, the question has been raised how Carleton can right this wrong. Obviously, the emotional toll on the victims of this plagiarism cannot nearly be compensated, but through an extensive series of calculations, professors at Hot Dog College have come up with a figure of $14.1 billion owed by Carleton to prior colleges for lost sponsorships, branding opportunities, and student tuition fees that unwittingly went to a college that was only a knockoff of the original. William Hotdog, professor of hot dogs at Hot Dog College, called the figure “a conservative estimate that will still go a long way toward mending the rift between our two colleges.”
Given the recent allegations of plagiarism against Harvard president Claudine Gay and the swift response leading to her resignation, it is natural that Carleton should also consider purging its institutional structure of those who authorized this decision in the first place. However, Carleton president Allison Byerly recounted that “upon consulting with the college archivist, we discovered all founders and original trustees of Carleton College no longer to be employed at this institution.” As such, no punitive action will be taken.
The Carletonian applauds Carleton College for the attempt to restore intellectual honesty by drawing awareness to its past misdeeds. However, many students are still marred by the realization that the very halls they walk through are the result of decades of misinformation and continued plagiarism. The name of the school we attend may be forever tainted, especially for those of us most familiar with it. After these disturbing findings, it may be difficult to ever again look a professor in the eye when they demand properly cited sources: look around, profs. Do you see a footnote on the Carleton sign?
