Embarrassments

Theres The Rub
By Conrado de Quiros
Philippine Daily Inquirer

I’M GLAD the University of the Philippines is fighting back. In a statement entitled, “No to plagiarism! Asserting academic freedom!” the UP Diliman executive committee threw its weight behind its law faculty. It said: “The high court has undermined academic freedom by threatening to discipline 37 faculty members of the College of Law for taking a principled position on a grave academic concern.”

In fact academic freedom is the last thing the Supreme Court has undermined. Even the law is the last thing it has undermined. Common decency is first.

Its clearing of Justice Mariano del Castillo from the professors’ charge of plagiarism “for lack of merit” already constitutes an undermining of common decency. Its argument, that the plagiarism came from the accidental deletion of quotation marks by his legal researcher, is lamer than a polio victim.

At the very least, what’s wrong with it is that a student may commit accidents, a justice may not. A student’s accidents can affect only his grades, a judge’s accidents can affect other people’s lives. If you can be sloppy about your quotation marks, you can be sloppy about other things. Such as overlooking evidence that makes the accused innocent, or guilty.

In any case, you get caught for accidentally missing out on the quotation marks, you say sheepishly, “Ay mali! Sorry about that, it won’t happen again.” You do not mount your high horse and say haughtily, “You fools, I’ll give you an accident you won’t forget!”

But it’s more than that. You want “lack of merit,” don’t look at the UP professors’ complaint, look at Del Castillo’s accident. Let’s grant that Del Castillo made “tipid”, and hired someone who is an accident waiting to happen. Or let’s grant he made “sagad” and slave-drove the poor person to death, or to forgetfulness. But how explain how the accidentally quoted portion got to mean the opposite of what it originally did?

I’ve always wondered why people keep referring to the problem as plagiarism. The problem is not plagiarism—or not just plagiarism. The problem is the lifting of a portion from another person’s work and perverting its meaning. The plagiarized author himself, Evan Criddle, pointed it out: “Speaking for myself, the most troubling aspect of the Court’s jus cogens discussion is that it implies that the prohibitions against crimes against humanity, sexual slavery, and torture are not jus cogens norms. Our article emphatically asserts the opposite.”

That is not an accident. It explains why the quoted portion had no quotation marks and attribution. A reference to Criddle would readily have shown he was supplying an argument for the comfort women, not against them. The UP professors who discovered it do not deserve contempt, they deserve medals.

Which is really the astonishing thing about the Supreme Court’s persistence in persecuting them: The justices should in fact even now be falling on their knees and thanking them for saving them from a fate worse than death: dishonor of monumental and international proportions. Do they really think they can dispel the shame by shifting the blame? This won’t be Renato Corona’s crowning glory, this will be his crowning despair.

I don’t know where Del Castillo took his law, I don’t know where Corona took his law, I don’t know where the other justices took their law. But UP at least subscribes to US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ idea, emblazoned on the façade of its law school, that “[t]he business of a law school is not…to teach law or to make lawyers, it is to teach law in the grand manner and to make great lawyers.” And therefore the business of law is not to preach law and resort to lawyerly tactics, it is to practice law in the grand manner as befits great lawyers. One should think this idea would be fully grasped by judges, too, above all the ones whose breadth of wisdom is presumed by the word “supreme.”

This wrongheaded vengefulness is not grand, it is pathetic.

By the way, the UP College of Law puts its mantra in quotation marks, and makes the proper attribution.

* * *

I don’t know which is worse, the transgression itself or the lack of appreciation for its implications.
That is Mai Mislang’s now famous tweets from Vietnam. Specifically, “The wine sucks,” after Vietnamese President Nguyen Minh Triet hosted a state banquet, “Sorry pero walang pogi rito sa Vietnam,” after presumably scouring the place, and “Crossing the speedy motorcycle laden streets of Hanoi is the easiest way to die” after presumably crossing one.

Ricky Carandang says “it’s pretty harmless,” “she had no offense meant to anybody,” and “as far as we’re concerned, that’s over, that’s gone now.”

You’re a silly person visiting Vietnam with your silly boyfriend and you say those silly things in public, they are pretty harmless, or you harm only yourself. You’re a silly public official visiting Vietnam with your serious boss, the President, and you say those silly things in public, they are not harmless, you harm your boss. By now those tweets will have been read by the Vietnamese Embassy and the other Asean embassies. At the time Mislang put them out, P-Noy was telling the other Asean countries to “speak with one voice.” The irony will not be lost on the people in those embassies, not all of whom are silly.

Besides, if you can be tasteless in this respect, what makes you think you can’t be so in others? If you can be tasteless in this respect, what makes you think you can tell good wine from bad? If you are tasteless in this respect, what makes you think you can tell pogi from not?

If you can be tasteless in this respect, what makes you think the Vietnamese ambassador might not say, “We’d be most happy if you’d cross our streets more often”?