The Term Paper Thief
July 13, 2011
THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes about college plagiarists in an article at the website of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. The bloating of college enrollment has created a pool of students unqualified to complete college writing assignments and shameless enough to steal. While the Internet offers unprecedented temptation, it also has made it easy for professors to catch plagiarists. Mr. Bertonneau describes one student who stole an entire article about Henrik Ibsen’s play, Emperor and Galilean. When confronted with proof, she denied it. She then suggested Mr. Bertonneau was in the wrong: “You are my only one professor that says I plagiarized.”
Quite a few plagiarists consider completing a writing assignment beneath them. The professor deserves to be deceived for the crime of assigning difficult and pointlesss work.
— Comments —
Sandy Kemper writes:
Plagiarism means putting one’s name on work that is not one’s own. The students who purchase ghostwriter “Ed Dante’s” work are plagiarists under the definition; they differ from the plagiarists in my essay only in that my plagiarists looked for prose that they could appropriate gratis. Maybe we should call the ghostwriter’s clients “contractual plagiarists.” Maybe we should call mine “skinflint plagiarists.”
The plagiarism blight in colleges and universities entails many ironies. One is that the spreading plagiarism problem is correlated with the spreading currency of the paired clichés that “everybody is unique” and “everybody has his own opinion.” But one of the things that the plagiarist implicitly declares is that he has no capacity for verbal articulation or organized thinking in prose; that is, nothing distinguishes him from other unlettered, inarticulate people. It’s his nullity that he must overcome by prosthesis. He also implicitly declares that he has no opinion; rather, he has someone else’s opinion and has it only by virtue of having paid for it with cash money.
A friend wrote to me, in response to the Pope Center article, asking whether I felt personally betrayed or insulted by my plagiarists. I answered that the offenders were too stupid to bother me personally, but that I felt a good deal of vicarious anger against them on behalf of honest students – especially the ones who labor diligently for a C+ or a B-. Another friend wrote to me to say that what he found most astonishing in my anecdotes was the apparent belief of the plagiarists that I would believe that the identity of the submitted assignment with the contents of the websites from which they had been downloaded was a coincidence. If that were their estimate of probability, my friend wrote, it would be a miracle that any of them survived through a given day.
The big news in the Chronicle of Higher Education piece that SK links is that “Ed Dante” seems to do most of his ghost writing for graduate students. He claims plausibly to have written master’s theses and doctoral dissertations. Some of his “clients” will likely end up as instructors in higher education, just as one of my plagiarists might end up as a teacher in a high school. On the other hand, how many celebrity and politician books are actually written by their putative authors? Few. Theodore Sorensen apparently wrote Profiles in Courage for John F. Kennedy and Bill Ayers seems the likely ghostwriter of at least one book that Barack Obama audaciously ascribes to his own hand.
Art from Texas writes:
It is interesting to note that Henry VIII had Thomas More as his ghostwriter for Defense of the Seven Sacraments.
