Plenty of Web sites offer to write students’ papers or complete their assignments for a fee. But they appear to be growing more aggressive in promising to get students good grades for no work; some even promise to take entire online courses for students.
[A] relatively new Web site actually promises that former professors will be the ones writing term papers for hire. The site, Unemployed Professors, offers a commentary on higher education by purporting to hire disenchanted academics to complete assignments for students.
Leaders of the site, based in Montreal, say that they employ about 30 people qualified to teach at the college level—and that some held prior positions as adjuncts, lecturers, and graduate instructors. Others hold those positions now and work for the site to make money on the side, an employee using the pseudonym “Professor Fishnets” said in an e-mail interview on Thursday.
“This project is all about helping those who have been screwed/hosed/cheated by the academic system earn a living wage,” said Professor Fishnets. “The demise of the tenure system, the rise of adjuncts living under the poverty line, and the corporatization of the university are all developments that embody how the latter has screwed an entire generation of often competent academics. This is thus an ironic gesture oriented toward preserving living wages, protesting the over-commoditization of education, and making mad money—of course.”
MORE.
The Unemployed Professors website.
Is an unemployed professor still a professor?
ReplyDeleteYes, in the sense that he is professed to his craft.
DeleteSo not in a meaningful sense about what one does for a living.
DeleteReally conflicted on this one.
ReplyDeleteInitially, of course, disgusted at yet another growing opportunity for flakes to take no responsibility for their side of the learning contract. C'mon, the motto "So you can play while we make your papers go away"?
But, on the other hand, difficult to deny that academe has "screwed/hosed/cheated" most of us from earning a living wage.
Devil living in the details though.
Gotta love the hubris, in the ToS:
"Plagiarism-Free Zone
Just as we construct plagiarism-free work for our customers in the essays that we produce, we expect the same from our clients. In that vein, we reserve the right to cancel any agreement, contract, or arrangement with any person who condones or attempts to engage in plagiarism through our service. In this vein, by purchasing one of our essays, you agree to not distribute the essay purchased, for payment or any other purpose, to any third party."
So, you can purchase our product to cheat, but only once. If you attempt to profit from reselling what you bought from us, NOW we are dedicated to a "plagiarism-free zone." Oh the integrity! (And what's their fixation with blood vessels?)
Then: "Any information and/or ideas used from the product must be properly cited."
So you can cheat with our product, but you have to give us proper publication credit? How do you do that?
Fishnets, P. (2012). Purchased paper. UnemployedProfessor.com. Retrieved September 22, 2012 from: unemployedprofessor.com?
But the biggest whopper of them all: "All products are provided solely as examples for research, reference, and/or for the purposes of learning how to write a paper in a proper manner and in a particular citation style (MLA, APA, Chicago, Turabian, Harvard, etc.)."
Yup, because that is precisely how I used all of the exemplars my professors and library staff provided me "so [I could] play while [they made] your papers go away."
::sigh::
"But, on the other hand, difficult to deny that academe has "screwed/hosed/cheated" most of us from earning a living wage."
DeletePerhaps, but one of the ways that an academic job becomes a time suck is dealing with lousy student behavior (and the subsequent lack of support from the administration), and this site panders to exactly those students.
Oh, no, I hear you HPP.
DeleteBut as someone who has JUST achieved self-sufficiency with an adjunct workload and has fought an uphill battle with academic integrity issues throughout, I'm just exhausted from the unrelenting tea-partying.
I have generally been lucky (blessed, even) that my immediate supervisors have supported my efforts. But given all the changes going on in academe, the number of layers of "upper" admin, the turnover of front line management, I can only assume it is a matter of time before that support disappears. Instead of a career educator overseeing my work, moving to a customer service manager where finally that one extra student complaint is enough to push me over the line.
I despise what Unemployed Professor (and all others like them) are doing. But given how higher ed has capitulated to the "market economy," how soon before the universities themselves provide this service so they can claim they are "helping student retention"?
I strongly suspect that the site's lawyers would claim, if challenged, that the agreement "to not distribute the essay purchased, for payment or any other purpose, to any third party" means that the student has agreed not to "distribute" the paper to a professor (a "third party") for credit ("an[ ] other purpose"). The front page was presumably written by someone else than the lawyers (and I'm not sure why they even bothered with lawyers, since I don't think any of this is illegal, just completely unethical).
DeleteMy college seems well down the path of the "customer service" model. Since those exact words were used in an email sent by uber-supreme administrator just the other day. And all of our "career educators" (good, smart people who actually teach) who had moved into dean positions were mysteriously gone after the reorganization and replaced with career adminstrators with rather little experience. I am very afraid of what is to come next.
Delete@Aware and Scared, I've been hiding in my adjunct dungeon of horrors, but I totally appreciate and agree where you are coming from.
Delete"All products are provided solely as examples for research, reference, and/or for the purposes of learning how to write a paper in a proper manner and in a particular citation style...."
ReplyDeleteIsn't that what all these sites say?
Yeah, that's the standard disclaimer. I've seen it for years. The way in which they sell their products, though, completely contradicts the caveat.
Delete"shocked, shocked" etc.
The FAQ makes it clear the purchaser is welcome to whatever is wanted with the purchase, not just learn from it as an example.
ReplyDeleteBut my favorite is how to get a refund: "If the essay provided by your writer does not meet the guidelines that you provided, and you are capable of cogently articulating why, you will be entitled to a full or partial refund..." Sneaky! If a student could do that, he wouldn't need this service in the first place.
"Come to the dark side, we have a living wage!" Even better than cookies!
ReplyDeleteListen, I have rationalized all sorts of things in my life. Anyone who supports the notion of the site is doing the same thing. No reasonable person writes essays for a students' use and doesn't know it's just plain fucking wrong.
ReplyDeleteHiram, believe me, I would have agreed with you wholeheartedly for most of my decades in education.
DeleteBut given what I have heard for the past few years, where RETAINING students is more important than ANY other facet of education, seriously, "plain fucking wrong" has become much more fluid.
In all seriousness (although I am still picturing Darth Vader beckoning me to start writing), there is a small part of me that says "really? I could make decent money and not just be screwed over by a system that doesn't give a damn?" But ultimately I know that I'll cut my own damn hand off before writing essays to help students cheat. Stupid integrity.
DeleteI'm going to go eat some cookies now and remind myself that I may be broke but at least I'm (mostly) honest.
But wouldn't it be funny (sad?) if you did work for this company and wrote a paper for a student who then turned in said paper to you for class. You could fail him and sue him! Of course then everyone would know you were an unethical boob, but it would make for a great story.
DeleteOf course it's wrong. But I have to say that the idea that I could possibly get fifty bucks a page for writing a research paper does give me a wee tingle. Yes, again, of course it's wrong--but in a slightly thrilling sort of way.
ReplyDeleteOh, it's occurred to me, in my darkest hours, I'm not gonna lie.
ReplyDeleteSince so many grad students TA for their institutions while earning PhDs and then adjunct for those same institutions after defending, I can see the credential verification process going very well indeed.
ReplyDeleteAt least this makes me feel a little better about various freelance jobs I've done, including writing standardized-test questions, and writing entries for reference works produced by one the major academic publishing megaliths. I may have some questions about the necessity and/or underlying value of both enterprises, but at least it's more or less mhonest work for honest, if not munificent, pay.
ReplyDeleteThese freelance activities (and my tortoise-pace attempts at unpaid scholarly writing, spurred on partly by genuine love of the enterprise, and partly by fear that I'm unmarketable should my contract job go "poof") do consume some time that I might otherwise devote to my students, which poses its own ethical quandaries (as does, sometimes, I suspect, the question of how one balances teaching, service, and research on the tenure track). The bottom line is that the reward system in academia is totally tea-partied up. But that doesn't excuse the proffie-ghost-writers-for-hire, though it may help explain them. And if the existence of the proffies-for-hire helps publicize just how tea-partied up things really are -- well, I suppose sometimes bad things can have good results, however accidentally.
I'm going to sign up as a contributor for that site, and simultaneously assign the most difficult, convoluted paper-topics of unreasonable-length that one can imagine. Five times a semester.
ReplyDeleteI will then charge the students $100 each to write that paper, which they will then submit to me as their own, and I will give it a near-excellent grade. And I will fill my lectures with nothing but entertaining anecdotes and digressions.
I will have full classes, with stellar student-evaluations, lots of cash in my pocket, and best of all, no piles of poorly-written papers to grade.
Merely for the price of integrity.
I have a sinking feeling that on the customer model this IS integrity. Everybody gets what they want in return for a price they are willing to pay. If we fully embrace the customer model, then by definition that is a desirable outcome. (I think the economists call it an "efficient market")
DeleteThis is why "business ethics" is an oxymoron.
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