http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/
Here's a quotation to whet your appetite:
You've never heard of me, but there's a good chance that you've read some of my work. I'm a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can't detect, that you can't defend against, that you may not even know exists.I'm curious about your reactions and experiences related to purchased term papers.
I'm sorry Eskarina, but we hit this topic back on the 15th of this month* and the comments thread was hacked to pieces because of some nastiness I got into in another thread (and never use the AV Club's patented insult "cancerAIDS"** around here, whatever you do.)
ReplyDeleteBut getting to the ghost paper writer, this issue has been going on long before; "Harper's" ran a piece on how it was done in Canada titled "This Pen for Hire" (June, 1995.) Unlike "Dante" the free agent, the people in the piece wrote for a "mom and pop" outfit in Montreal; there were time limits and the pay was pretty schlubby. The author was an American expat writing under the assumed name "Abigale Witherspoon", and she was marooned in the Great White North for some reason (visa issue, I think.) Unlike "Ed Dante" she was not happy cheapening the educations of Canada's lazy slug college student demographic, but money was money and she needed it to live. Dante reminds me less of a starving post-grad and more like the Hungarian art forger Elmyr de Hori; he has great talent, probably lies about everything (de Hori claimed to be Austro-Hungarian nobility, a lie; the Germans put him in a concentration camp because they though he was Jewish; in reality he was a gay Calvinist), and will probably wind up talking himself into some rich person's summer home (when Orson Welles ran into de Hori while making "F for Fake", the old man was doing just that in Ibiza.) So yes, if there were still a Soviet gulag system, I would gladly sentence Mr. "Dante" to three tenners.***
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* Post tile: "Did you ever feel like that there wasn't enough puke in the world?"
** And I used it for Ed Dante!
*** Thirty years; "tenner" is a bit of Zek (prisoner) slang. For more on the Soviet camp system, read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago."
Yeah we covered this already. Half of what this guy says is bullshit, and the other half exaggeration. He' got an agent, probably a book contract with lighthouse or whatever that conservative imprint is called, and this is part of the rollout. He and his agent are playing the Chronicle like a cheap tambourine.
ReplyDeleteHe has two arguments: students are desperate to get grades because the vocational stakes are so high and the cost of education so out of control. And American universities have admitted too many ESL students who can't handle writing in English. His prescription is that faculty need to relax and lower the stakes (how he doesn't say, I presume that's being saved for the book) so that students can recapture their love of learning.
It strikes me as a mostly empty argument. He's obviously right about tuition at private schools, but he's ignoring the fact that people who are paying sticker price at those places are getting rooked. He's probably right that the students perceive the vocational stakes to be high, but they are mostly wrong about that--maybe we do need to do a better job convincing them that they are wrong about that. I don't know what to think about the ESL argument. My university has 7,000 foreign students--some of them are from Anglophone countries, but most aren't--and I haven't noticed that much of a problem in either speech or writing. There have been a couple of problem cases, but that's it. However, I may just be lucky that way.
Obviously it is a complex problem with multiple causes, but my general sense is that the paper mills have merely democratized cheating. Back in the good old days, the rich kids cheated like crazy. Now anyone with a credit card and bad intentions can do it.
But I don't believe for a second that he made 66K last year, just as I don't believe for a second that he wrote anyone's doctoral thesis, or that he wrote anywhere near the page count he claims last year without giving his Johns an easily discoverable plagiarized product.
He's a fuckstick with a book contract, that's it.
I don't know what to think about the ESL argument.
ReplyDeleteI do. In my experience, the average ESL student is better-prepared than the average American student.
I agree with introvert. In terms of writing, my less-competent international students are substantially better than my less-competent American students. There are other differences, if one wishes to stereotype, but writing competency is not a defining one.
ReplyDeleteRe: ESL students -- while I find that some of my ESL students' work is far, far below the most basic English writing skill level required for a first-year course, my strongest students are often ESL folks too, especially the older ones.
ReplyDeleteBut I can at least understand their difficulties; I've studied other languages, and can't imagine ever attaining the sort of competence in them that university coursework would require. It's the English-as-a-first-language folks that make me throw up my hands -- how can one not know how to write in his or her own mother tongue? Why aren't they terribly ashamed of this?
I realize that a great many of my students have parents who are not fluent in English, or who speak non-standard English of one sort or another, and therefore can't sit down and help their kids edit their papers, something which I think is nearly indispensable for most people during their middle- and high-school years. (It's been students from economically well-off immigrant families who tend to 'buy' papers, in my experience -- they're under so much pressure to succeed and yet lack the skills to do so.)
Nothing can magically turn my highly diverse and multicultural class into a bunch of middle-class WASPs, with the privileges that such an upbringing affords. Yet, how can we continue to offer these students what amounts to a 'fake' primary, secondary, and post-secondary education, one that doesn't provide the most basic of skills that they will require to survive in the world and compete with the well-off WASPy folks? No wonder some of them buy their papers -- the gap must appear as unbridgeable to them within the current system as it does to me.
I think the skeezeball and/or his is editor is chatting this up on the Internet so they can incorporate the reactions into the editorial process and marketing strategy. None of you will who comment and help with this project will be renumerated or credited with refining his argument. Keep up the buzz!
ReplyDeleteYeah, I'm with Archie on this one - I call bullshit on a variety of the guy's claims. Most notably, I can't think of any decent program in which a student could present a Master's thesis - or above! - that was (a) cobbled together from snippets from Google books as opposed to based on real research and (b) not the work of the student whom the professor knows and has observed and spoken to over the past several years. Maybe, *maybe* if it's some online diploma mill... maybe then. But in any real program, this would get caught so fast... yeah, I'm not buying it.
ReplyDelete@ Strelnikov and Angry Archie: Sorry to repeat a topic; I guess I'd better check in more often.
ReplyDeletere: ESL students. Mine also tend to be at both ends of the spectrum, but they also tend to be far more polite, respectful, and hard-working than most of my US-born students.
@ Eskarina
ReplyDeleteIt's not your fault; things are posted at a rapid clip and the original had a weird title. It gave me a chance to find that "Harper's" piece, for which I am thankful.