Oh, that's outstanding. Right up there with the P-P-P-Powerbook!
It's a great story up to and including contacting the college president, but I think making the entire saga public is bit much. Should've told the story without the real name, IMHO.
[but, yes, still quite funny]
Hey, anyone who would pass on a plagairized paper that included the sentence, "I made a doody." deserves anything and everything that happens to them. Fourth paragraph, if you missed it. If you aren't willing to at least carefully read the paper, which you bought off a stranger from the internet, before handing it in...
well, "deserves anything and everything" is a bit much. The internets can turn anyone into an instant "celebrity" and one should think twice before turning a private figure into a public one.
Don't worry, I'm not on some moral high horse here, or condemning Kushner for having done it. It is funny, as I said, just that if it were me I hope I'd resist the temptation. What she does deserve, of course, is the full weight of whatever punishment her college is supposed to dish out, which in practice colleges are often hesitant to do.
I'm disgusted. Whatever happened to honor among thieves? The guy is not only a snitch but a profiteer. That he is sadistic in his righteousness is even better. Maybe we could hook him up with a job at Guantanamo.
Lighten up, Kumachka -- the blogger has mentioned he wasn't in it for the money. The girl is ostensibly in college for an education. Well, she's getting one.
In response to Atrios, I think publishing her name but not her email address walks the right side of that fine line.
If you were going to pay by check, and get the paper by email, why would you use your real name?
Is it really certain that he got the right person?
Thanks for sharing Prof. B.- I really hope she gets expelled. I knew people in college who pulled that kind of shit and it pissed me off to no end.
Click homepage. She made Dean's list last year!
I'm all for shaming plagiarists. Unfortunately, because of Buckley amendment, I cannot post a plagiarized paper on my door and commence with the public shaming.
I can, however, shame the student in my office--face to face.
I do not tolerate plagiarism. This student is getting what she deserves. Karma, indeed.
oh that's just fucking hilarious. thanks for the link.
Oh, this is beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Thanks for posting it. You made my day.
I had some plagiarists in the very first college class I ever taught. What blew me away was that both students were able to 1. stay in my class and 2. receive high final grades. The University told me to fail the one small paper they'd cheated on, and to let them stay enrolled in the course, where they glared at me during the entire class period, all term long. Somehow the fact that their papers were identical (down to the grammatical errors) wasn't relevant. What mattered to them? They'd been caught, that's all.
I'm all for public humiliation of plagiarists when it's clear that a personal sense of honor is missing from their lives.
I seriously doubt that this student will be expelled. At my university, multiple proven cases of plagiarism are required in order to expel a student.
I despise academic dishonesty, but I also believe in second chances. If this is the student's only proven case, fail her on this assignment. She does it again, well, that's another story.
Possibly the best part, if he has the right Laura - the google cite indicates that she is on the Dean's List in the School of Education. So not only is he catching her, he's preventing her from passing on her bad attitude to others.
The fact that a student for whom "money was no object" offered ONLY $75.00 for a paper she expected to materialize THAT NIGHT, in a matter of hours...speaks volumes, VOLUMES about her contempt for the process and her utter ignorance of the time and effort "writing a paper" entails. Why on earth are her parents wasting their money to send this twit to college? No pity from me...maybe she will get expelled and save her family many grand.
When I started college and the web was brand new (we all had e-mail, but I didn't know about it before I started college), we got a big lecture about the horrors of plagiarism and how we could all get kicked out of school.
We were terrified for several months, and our expository writing teachers had to give us a second lecture about how hard it was to commit plagiarism. We were sure that a messed up footnote would doom our entire careers.
We all know she won't be expelled, and she may not even fail the course. Which is one reason why, for my part, I think the public shaming is damn well what she deserves.
There was a story awhile back about a woman who donated money to her alma mater to endow a bulding -- in Missouri I think. At some point it turned out that she had plagiarized ALL of her college papers at the school -- she had a fellow-student on a stipend of several thousand dollars a year.
Hey Bitch! (I'm not intending to be derogatory, I swear)...
...I hate to promote the site any more than it needs to be promoted, but Nate has added another lengthy post about the ongoing saga, and I just spoke to him, and I can promise that even more is on the way after this. It's very much still developing.
http://www.aweekofkindness.com/blog
Excellent Chris, keep us updated.
And it isn't derogatory; it's my nom de plume.
Well, as a non-traditional adult student, my opinion is that anyone caught doing this should A: be kicked out, and B: be required to pay the tuition of a deserving student out of her own pocket for a semester or two(not with mommy's and daddy's money) as punishment.
I actually took a class on-line where we had to respond to a reading, and someone in the same damned class copied my response, with very minimal editing (a rather memorable, if idealistic, rant about classism).
I can only speculate as to how this makes the prof feel. Anyone enjoying the privilege of higher ed had damn well better respect it.
It's very simple. Plagiarism is theft. Thieves should be prosecuted. And shamed publicly.
Erudite Redneck: plagiarism can be theft but doesn't have to be. Plagiarism at its root is dishonestly representing somebody else's writing as your own. In this case Laura K. Pahl at Lewis University paid for and did not steal the writing.
While theft is not essential to plagiarism, in seems to be involved in this case. Above I should have said that Laura K. Pahl contracted for custom writing. It seems she tried to cheat the author out of actually paying for it.
Having had to deal with students who've cheated I think the girl got what she deserved. Hopefully she'll be made an example of and it'll discourage others from trying to dishonestly improve their marks.
Not since being linked to the Nigerian scambuster on bustedupcowgirl.com have I wasted so many useless hours that I'll never get back .... thanks! It's much better than working or blogging or, you know, any number of things I SHOULD have been doing.
Damn, MonkeyBoy beat me to it.
Thanks for this, incredible! You gave me something to write about (quickly) today. In this day and age of the Internet, it's amazing that anyone thinks they could get away with something like this. I hope she gets kicked out.
I don't feel sorry for her, but I do think Nate Kushner is an asshole. He didn't have to make it quite the production.
I just posted a comment over at Nate's blog. Thank you Prof B for bringing it to the attention of your readers.
Not to rehash it, but I sat on an honor council when I was an undergrad, and really, there's not a college out there that doesn't let you know that if you cheat, you're up shit creek without a paddle. If you know it's wrong and do it anyway, you deserve any and all punishment that comes to you. I usually voted expulsion if there was clear evidence that willful plagiarism took place.
It's wrong, and it's not a victimless crime. If your school gets a rep as one where cheating is condoned, your degree is worthless. If you're so arrogant that you think it's okay to screw over everyone else who did their work, you don't deserve your place in higher education. Better it should go to someone who'll work harder than you and appreciate the opportunity.
I think she deserved to have the book thrown at her, but do y'all really think she deserved, for a crime she committed at age 19 or whatever, being made into the World's Most Famous Plagiarist for all time? The Terri Schiavo of Plagiarism, except that she has to live with it for the rest of her life? I hope she gets a book contract out of it, 'cause she's probably gonna have a tough time finding a job.
As a teacher, I'm sick of plagiarism--it really pissed me off when I think I see it in a student's work. However, though we don't have all the details yet, from the way it looks right now, Nate sprang his story, along with the woman's real name and school, before it was verified that a) it was really the name of the essay-buying student (and not, for instance, a roommate, boyfriend, sister, etc. using her aol account and photographing her checks), and b) the student actually turned the essay in. Both of those may turn out to be verified yet (the rest of story is supposed to go up today), but seeing as he did not have all the facts, he may have dragged an innocent person's name through the mud. If she's guilty, I don't have a lot of sympathy, but if she's not, this is not cool.
Bitch phd, I totally agree with your point (and love your blog, btw), and want to expand on it for a minute.
The really sad truth is that the whole notion of personal ethics seems to have hit an all time low with respect to students' concern for the violations of plagiarism. Moreover, institutions have more or less abdicated their usual role as enforcers of strict standards - the "no tolerance" policy that might truly make a difference - and to have retreated o a kind of tepid, multiple-pardon policy that students seem to find (perhaps rightly) both mutable and generally unthreatening.
What's left? Perhaps the kind of public shaming that this incident represents. The repercussions of having the whole wide internet know about your folly - and yes, knowing the plagiarist's name is key here - may have a deterrent effect that no other measure can offer. This woman can get kicked out, or reprimanded, or even face no academic consequence at all. But the very fact that she has been embarrassed in public is, I think, still likely to have a real impact on her. I think that is not only right, but necessary.
And yeah, I probably would have been one of those Puritans who approved of the public stocks. I think plagiarism is such an offense to society (as bliz points out, not victimless at all) that it merits retribution. It's sad that Nate's single-handed action (which gets him unfairly branded an ass, even though he did not profit from it in any way) had to be the means of justice. But hey, the end was achieved - which is more than the usual satisfaction one gets in these sorry cases...
Tiger
Tiger, and everybody, I really don't know why intellectuals who in other contexts have a critique of originality get so vicious with students who plagiarize. I spend a lot of time getting my students to appreciate the fact that our modern notion of intellectual property is the product of capitalism and commodification and that the ever-increasing constraints on the use of cultural "products" are really stifling creativity for the benefit of giant corporations. If you're an independent filmmaker making a small documentary you can't show kids singing "Happy Birthday" without paying rights to Time Warner. In their classes students learn that postmodernism critiqued the modernist ideology of absolute newness and individual originality. Sometimes it did this by using techniques that would be called plagiarism if a student did it. And the fetish of originality is not the way cultural production has always been organized. I mean, is folk music plagiarism? Is traditional religious painting or textual adaptation and storytelling plagiarism? Am I plagiarizing when I lecture and don't cite every single source of my knowledge? These things are complicated and we're sending our students mixed messages.
I had a long discussion of this in a class recently that ended in a thoughtful reconciliation of different values -- the idea that the best adaptations add something unique and interesting of their own. But that doesn't mean they can't use previously existing material. It can be a fine line, and it's a learning process for students, and sometimes they err on the wrong side of the line. In this case, OBVIOUSLY, the student went way over the line. But to generalize from that to a whole culture, to point to some grand failure of ethics that requires public shaming to fix, I don't think that's fair to the students. They're getting mixed messages from us, which we need to articulate better.
Tiger, I agree. Not with the Puritan stocks thing, but in this instance. And I really don't agree with rabbit that the plagiarist will have a hard time getting the job in the future; it'll be embarrassing for a while, yeah, but the fact is most people see this kind of thing as a minor slipup, at best (just look at the reaction). I bet it just turns into a very minor very occasional joke in her life, if that.
I do think it'll serve as a great deterrent FOR OTHERS. I just wish it didn't have to be at the expense of a real (and very young) person.
Rabbit, I really don't agree that we send them mixed messages by teaching them that plagiarism is culturally constructed. At all. Any more than I think we would send them mixed messages if we taught them, say, Discipline and Punish and yet still said that government-sanctioned torture is Not Okay under any circumstances. They're young; but they're old enough to know what cheating is.
Which isn't to say that students, as a group, are unethical swine; I don't think they are. I do think, however, that culturally we tolerate a lot of cheating on the grounds that, well, you do what you need to get ahead; and that cheating in college, specifically, is seen as unimportant because it's *just* college, and who cares about that liberal arts crap when we all know that the real purpose is to get the degree so you can get a "good job." And that's how I read this situation: the student is operating with the belief that her ability to pay lets her off the hook, that that's technically cheating but not really very important, and that a lot of the people defending her (present company excepted) are operating from the same paradigm: that her long-term earning potential is more important than academic integrity or learning. Which is why I really think the person in question will suffer no long-term consequences from this, at all.
All of which is to say that I think you and I have fundamentally different pedagogical philosophies on this issue 
New update at the blog.
You beat me to it, Ben. Nate's participating a lot in the discussion, so if you have questions for him, this is your chance to ask him.
Eh, I think it sounds like she mostly just wanted to avoid getting in trouble--hence the not admitting it to the dean, hence the offering to "do anything" (bribe, again?) to get Nate to retract the story. I can certainly understand that avoiding punishment would be her first reaction, but I'm not so sure--from this latest post--if it's cheating, or getting caught, that she really feels bad about.
In other words, I am a heartless bitch, and I am less willing than Nate to let her off the hook for just being a "dumb kid who made a mistake."
Oh she definitely wanted to weasel her way out. Hell, as far as anybody, including Nate knows, she still hasn't fessed up to the dean.
Nate's essentially a good guy, and I'd call him more mischievious than anything. I think he figures she's learned her lesson, and I hope she has.
I hope her school gives her a shot, because it's got to be hard not to learn your lesson after something like this. Hell, at the very least, if she does try it again, there's no way she won't get caught.
At the very least, if she tries it again, she'll check to make sure the essay she hands in doesn't contain the sentence "I made a doody".
Rabbit, Dr. Bitch, and other friends,
Ha Rabbit, I spend an awful lot of time thinking about intellectual property and the cultural commons (it's supposed to be the topic of my dissertation - which is what I'm supposed to be doing, um, right now), and author/owner constructs. So let me try not to pontificate, but...
You're quite right that there is a gray area in which creative "borrowing" can look akin to "appropriation" (I think the rap "sampling" controversies, for one, raised this strikingly). You also have an important point that "originality" with respect to creative production bears challenging. It can be predicated upon a Romantic notion of authorship (I cite James Boyle here - how properly, you will note!) that assigns ownership claims to a single "creator" without always recognizing the contributions that went into the work. Even in the way you frame the debate, I agree with plenty of what you are saying.
But while IP privileges authorship, it does have notable carve outs for use, sharing, quoting, and so on, in creative production and interpretation. First, fair use will (or should) allow you to quote chunks of a text/score/film/whatever without having to pay for its appearance. Further, you can easily quote or paraphrase passages in a paper, if you cite the source. Still further, thanks to the idea-expression dichotomy, you can make substantial reference to, or indeed use of, others' ideas, constructs, and so on without worrying at all about infringing on their IP rights. And so on.
(Now, we can sit around and argue about whether these things are being misshaped by those who lobby for changes to IP law. That's fair ground; but part of another convo altogether.)
I know you know all this. And I do respect your exploring it thoughtfully with your students (indeed, I'd like to do the same someday). But honestly, it's a huge, huge stretch to go from those critiques of cultural production to "you can copy an entire work (or have someone else completely generate it) and sign your name to it, because anyway, the author is dead - Foucault said so." Um, no.
IP law may be mutating in ways that we don't sanction, and commodification may well be rampant, etc. - but today, in this world, there still exists the notion of authorship; it is still inscribed in our Constitution and our system; and we do compensate creative individuals for many of their creative works; and even the relatively left-leaning IP scholars (Lessig, Boyle) would agree that overall this is a Good Thing; and by corollary, plagiarism - that is, wholesale copying - isn't.
So yeah, I do see it as a "grand failure of ethics" on the part of educated, adult-age students not to recognize that while we debate the nuances of creative ownership in the community, we don't allow those parameters to be completely discarded, or disregarded, in the individual case. That is, a student might get carried away with fair use - quote too much of a book - and have an argument that she misjudged. She might try to peddle an insight as her original thought - and have an argument that there's no copyright on ideas, so no need to attribute. But no one student gets to transgress utterly and buy, borrow, or steal a work that is not her own. There is no nuance to wholesale appropriation; and no IP argument (other than, "there should be no IP at all") to come close to justifying it.
If not ethics, what is it that tells us that what holds for the community's interest must be applicable to us?
Once more, as to the remedy: I don't think public shaming is the "right" solution that is "required"; but it does seem to be the default solution that has arisen. If it's effective, I feel the remedy is not worse than the crime. But I don't think that is "vicious", nor do I intend to villify; I just think that the act itself was unjustifiable, and calls for our rethinking not of the message, nor of the messanger, but of the recipient and her lack of moral sense. (I'm trying to take out the sense that this might be mere expediency, however probable that seems to me, so we can keep it to the dubiously higher ground.)
You know, while I was writing this, Bitch (and others) must have posted - I just saw her comment. Why don't I just wait 1/2 hr. before posting and let her say it better, and in fewer words? Oh well...
Cheers, Tiger
Bitch, with this post you have let your inner Republican shine through.
I am most dumfounded by all the people in Nate's comments who clearly don't see anything Laura did as very wrong. I don't know if the punishment fits the crime or not. But I'm amazed that people can defend this person.
Maybe it is because my dad's a professor. I see cheating as a cancer on education - unfair to the other students, disrespectful to the professor and the college, and just generally unprincipled and lazy.
And this incident wasn't glancing at another student's paper in a moment of temptation, either. She sought this guy out, propositioned him, apparently intended to not even pay him. It wasn't a "mistake," it was premeditated and willful.
I hope it does scare some future kids straight, anyway.
Plagiarism is bad. But it's not as bad as all these narrow-minded, self-righteous, vengeful academics are making it out to be. Oh no! She has degraded the sanctity of the institution! Get some perspective.
One the scale of immoral acts, plagiarising a college paper ranks very low.
How is this a Democrat vs. Republican issue? Is the implication that Democrats support plagiarism?
Franz,
What the fuck is your point, dude?
There's a lot of stuff that is low-ranking in the "bad acts" category. So? We are not allowed to consider the ramifications of one particular bad act that is particularly problematic for our institutions?
I'm a former lawyer, and I have seen a lot of petty wrangling among corporations for a lot of $$ and sometimes not a lot of cause. Now, that's a place where vengeful, self-righteous (and so on) stuff really gets spewed.
I believe that thinking it's just fine to solicit, buy, peddle, and expect approval/a grade for a piece of scholarly work is truly bad. That is as reasonable as thinking it is bad to defraud, to trade on insider information, to check kite, or to penny ante.
Tell me where my reasoning is wrong. And hey, tell me what in your actual life you consider a bad act (not, like, "Hitler was bad"). Let's hear your perspective.
I'm not saying what she did wasn't bad -- I'm saying what she did wasn't so monumentally bad that she should have her name attached to it for all time for an audience of millions (or at least hundreds of thousands) when a million (OK I'll stand by my million claim on this one) students have done the same thing and gotten away with it, or at least had the confidentiality of their academic/disciplinary record respected. It's not just public shaming, it's public shaming on a grand scale, it's the intersection of public shaming with celebrity culture, and it all makes me sort of ill. What if she were to commit suicide over it? How would everybody feel then? Would you go on about how she thought she could get away with something because she had the money to pay so it serves her right? It's not like she was offering a thousand dollars here. She was offering $60, then $75. A working-class kid living at home and working at McDonalds and going to community college might have that much money on hand and feel desperate enough to use it. She's not NECESSARILY a spoiled child of privilege.
And Tiger, as for
no one student gets to transgress utterly and buy, borrow, or steal a work that is not her own
ever heard of Sherrie Levine? How does she get to copy Walker Evans photographs wholesale and call them her own? Cultural privilege, that's how.
But that's the beginning of a conversation on issues of ethics and honesty, not the end. Which is why I think that if we teach Discipline and Punish we should ALSO have a conversation about why government-sponsored torture isn't OK with us. I don't think "Thing X is culturally/ideologically constructed by institutions of authority, but Thing Z isn't because [the authority of] the teacher says so" is a very good model. I don't expect it's the model of pedagogy you're actually using, anyway, Dr. B.
Rabbit,
I am indifferent as to whether or not she is economically strapped or privileged. Her circs notwithstanding, the act was wrong. I'd be sorry if she hurt herself upon being discovered and chastised; but I'd still think she should have been chastised. & you?
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose, quite a few other scholars have suffered the consequences of their plagiarisms (and rightly so, in my view). They are the true public examples; but students don't often follow such cases, nor are they likely to see the relevance to their own lives. Sometimes it takes catching a student to point out the parallel.
You're right - it shouldn't just be her. But perhaps it should be lots of students. I'm not sure what would be so wrong about that. And really, I don't see "celebrity culture" status here. When I see her face on tv, or read about her in the Times, I may recant. But her 15 seconds of infamy aren't really reverberating through the spheres, I believe.
Finally, it seems that these days schools spend an awful lot of time/resources informing students what is/isn't acceptable vis-a-vis plagiarism. You're right in that it is an authoritarian dictate to tell them so. But so is "serve alcohol to a minor at your frat party and you'll get expelled" a dictate. It might be the basis for a lot of cool discussions about social drinking and its sometimes unnatural constraints; what constitutes acceptable paternalism at institutions; etc. Notwithstanding the discussions, the precepts still apply.
In some cases, with community behavior, "this is what you can and can't do" has to be said, reinforced, and consistently enforced. Of course in a classroom we can talk about and work through those standards. But really, in the meanwhile, plagiarism can't be ignored...
So Rabbit, do you teach law? (you don't have to answer that, of course)
tiger
Tiger, I was responding to Professor B's post re: money issues. I didn't expect you to care. I should have made clear who I was responding to where.
Frankly, I think people who put themselves forward in the public eye can expect to have their work held up to public scrutiny. And I would not have had a problem with Nate turning the student in, or posting the story without the student's name, or doing both. And I don't think he foresaw the consequences -- he didn't necessarily expect this to become such a tenacious meme. I just think that the glee with which people are responding to those consequences is misplaced.
As an ethical matter I would not talk about one student's disciplinary record with another student, let alone post the student's name on a blog for all the world to see. Nate's not her teacher, so he doesn't have the same responsibility toward her. But I do think anyone here who is a teacher or future teacher should think twice about their enjoyment of the idea of the consequences of this event on a 19-yr-old kid.
Your drinking analogy would only make sense if students were learning in the classroom some version of the following: it's ok to drink before age 21 if you're a famous drinker and have the proper drinking technique. (Actually, a lot of them get some version of that at home...)
And no, I don't teach law. I teach in the humanities.
Rabbit,
Oops, sorry, should have realized you were responding to bitchphd (I mean, I do know it's not all about me!).
You make a very thoughtful point about not making known the identity of a student who cheated in your class. I am going to have to work on reconciling that with my position. Hmmm.
I guess I just don't want you to think it's with enjoyment, glee, or general plaudits that I am responding to this situation (I know you don't mean me, see above, but anyway, wanted to be clear). It's with a kind of exasperated despair, if that's not too dramatic (maybe just something milder, like unhappy consternation and dislike?). Once more, it's not my ideal solution. But why don't institutions come down with a heavier hand on this (and I don't agree with Linnaeus that people should get a second chance - it's just not that hard not to cheat, is it)?
One sad part is, I think I'm seeing it (disregard for the consequences of plagiarism) in law schools, too. The legal writing class I taught was an eye opener. I guess I should come to grips w/it...
Um, folks? Laura K. KRISHNA from INDIA Community college, plagiarizing a paper on Hinduism?
I didn't have the energy to read through all the comments to find out, but please tell me I'm not the only one to think this is a little absurd...
Vigilante Justice, or just more Bad Boy Behavior?
The vehement support for the public humiliation of Ms. K demonstrates the disempowerment of teachers within the academic community.
Most educational institutions have a structure for dealing with breaches of academic honesty. For plagiarizing a paper, the punishment is usually expulsion, or at the very least failure in the course in question. That administrations have been increasingly uneven in enforcing these punishments has eroded the system, and thus the community has turned to vigilantism and bloodlust.
Ms. K is guilty of extreme academic dishonesty and deserves expulsion. However that is a matter for the university administration to dispense. It is not our business to help in the shaming process. If we feel that justice is not being served then we need to hold administrators accountable.
________
Now for our hero, Mr. NK. He has demonstrated complete lack of integrity. If he wished to play whistle blower, and report Ms. K's intention of cheating to her professor or the administration of her university, fine. However he took it a few steps further, totally disgracing himself in the process:
1) He engaged in plagiarism himself.
2) He engaged in entrapment: purposefully using texts which would trigger suspicion, and embedding obscenities for an additional thrill.
3) His purpose was not to bring justice (to have her expelled), but to have her humiliated. He explicitly stated he had no intention of turning her in.
4) He was willing to accept money for services he promised and had no intention of providing. That it was criminal in origin is no excuse. He should not have accepted an offer he knew to be criminal in nature. He stated he was not in it for the money. Irrelevant. He still negotiated a price, and demanded payment from her.
5) He used the whole scandal as a way to draw readers to a site: He has some sort of performance he is advertising, and stated explicitly that the traffic from the "prank" would help with publicity.
6) He was completely manipulative throughout, reveling in her anxieties, and seeking to provoke more by stringing her along on numerous occasions during negotiations and after the scandal broke.
7) Exploitation: He got off on it, wanting to, even after the scandal broke, humiliate her more by keeping her on-line and typing so that he could share it with his now very wide readership. He says this just before admitting that he did feel sorry for her, and for the amount of harassment his outing brought to her.
I find his behavior completely revolting.
While it is satisfying to see a plagiarist caught and punished, I'm genuinely surprised to see so many of you drooling with blood lust over such a sadistic and repugnant display.
The short version: BOTH parties warrant serious punishment, but not on the public forum. Though at this point I'm sufficiently inspired to start screaming for blood m'self.
Very well said KL. I am linking to it.
Tiger: If you don't agree with my position on second chances, that's completely understandable. I've never plagiarized, but I've made poor choices in my life from time to time. I did suffer consequences, but I was also given a chance to rectify my mistake. I wouldn't feel right if I didn't offer the same to others.
I'll throw my lot in with those who think that Nate went too far with this one. Trust me, I've nailed a few plagiarizers in my day, and while it made me very angry, I knew that my displeasure could influence my judgement as to the appropriate penalty.
The appropriate action would have been to 1) refuse to do the paper and 2) report the incident to the instructor or institution, whichever was more feasible.
Let me make it clear though, that I don't take the position that this was "no big deal"; I just feel Nate's action was disproportionate.
Quick response to rabbit's point upthread: I'm not saying plagiarism isn't culturally constructed; of course it is. I'm saying that knowing it's culturally constructed isn't a get out of jail free card: any student in college knows that this kind of thing is wrong. And Franz's response is, I think, representative of how everyone who *isn't* in academe pretty much sees this kind of thing: as no big deal. Which is why I just really do not agree that posting her name on the internet as having tried to buy a paper is some kind of outrageous punishment.
Now, having said that, I wouldn't do it to my own students, no. But as someone already pointed out, she wasn't Nate's student: he doesn't have that obligation of confidentiality to her academic records that a professor does.
Basically, for me, it boils down to: the problem with cheating isn't that the professor's don't like it or the institution has rules against it. The problem is it violates a fundamental, tacit principle underlying the very idea of education. So yeah, I do think that a little embarrassment and shame is an appropriate punishment.
I taught a class at university where a student plagiarized his midterm; I handed it back with a C, clearly marked, and had a discussion with the student about it. On the final exam he did the same thing, so I gave him an F and failed him for the class (he wasn't doing well in the rest of the assignments, no surprise). Thank God I had the support of my dean, otherwise I'm sure this student would have been able to get away with it. However, many, many professors do not have such support, and IMO it's getting worse. So reading about Laura and her comeuppance made me smile from the depths of my cold, black heart. I truly hope that she fails the course at least (I can't believe the little snot was STILL trying to get out of her tight spot at the end. Obviously she learned nothing from the experience). And I hope that future plagiarists suffer the same fate.
Wow... I can't believe how many people think that Universities only contain english profs and film classes. Would those in the "Laura isn't so bad" camp still feel the same way if she were in biology, pre-med, or engineering?
As it stands, Laura appears to be in their education program... talk about potential for long term harm. How many here would want a person like her teaching their kids and passing on her (lack of) moral values?
Linnaeus,
I thought about this last night, and realized I have been guilty of being rather harsh (judgmental? moi??) - perhaps second chances could work, if handled with discretion, clarity and firmness. If Nate had been her teacher - perhaps this would have been a different ending (or our verdict might have been different).
I guess knowing the student's state of mind, insofar as one can, might have to be taken into account, too. Obviously, Nate was in no position to do so...
One more thing is that I, at least, am still surprised by the strange power of the internet. Things can spread so, so quickly; and people can become notorious - that is, their actions can become known to such an astonishing number of readers - to an extent that we don't always realize ahead of time. Witness all those folks who have written silly or inappropriate emails, only to see them broadcast to the world at large. Gives you pause, doesn't it?
I expect part of the lesson in this story is that a new kind of public sanction is indeed available through this relatively new medium. Perhaps knowing how fast and broad the ripples are will compel us to consider "publishing" our actions online. If I were anyone following this saga, I'd be doubly careful not to put any word to keyboard that I wouldn't want the whole world to read...
Tiger,
Your point about the ubiquity of information on the Internet is well-taken. I can't really add to that.
I also agree with you that any second chances need to be done with firmness: any rectification must be clear, non-negotiable, and coupled with an appropriate sanction of some sort.
I concur with the belief that the long-term solution is to not only have a clear plagiarism policy, but have consistent enforcement mechanisms and accountability when those responsible for enforcement fail to do so. While I can understand Professor B.'s sense that public shaming is appropriate for this student, I will respectfully dissent from that. Shaming may give us a fleeting feeling of glee over someone getting his or her comeuppance, I question its constructiveness in maintaining academic standards in the long term (although I don't think anyone here is really advocating that).
Nate Kushner is a scumbag and a retard.
I am so revolted by the behavior of Nate Kushner that I can't even look at the plagiarist at this point.
Ms K.'s conversations with Kushner only reveal that she must really have either subpar intelligence or some type of mental issue--how could anyone not read an essay they will turn in? You need to be way too foolish, or really high on something, to engage in that kind of behavior. If makes me wonder what the hell is this girl thinking or going through?
For some strange reason, however, I find myself a lot more angered by Nate than by the dumb student, and I think Nate should be punished as well. He is so self-righteous as to broadcast the girl's name, school and the entire situation, then proclaim he had to teach "the bitch" a lesson, as she didn't know she was messing with a "comedy writer"? As if a third tier comedy writer was something to be proud of?!!
How about a lesson for himself, too?
For this, I found KL's list quite appropriate (6 posts up) and I quote him:
1) He engaged in plagiarism himself.
2) He engaged in entrapment: purposefully using texts which would trigger suspicion, and embedding obscenities for an additional thrill.
3) His purpose was not to bring justice (to have her expelled), but to have her humiliated. He explicitly stated he had no intention of turning her in.
4) He was willing to accept money for services he promised and had no intention of providing. That it was criminal in origin is no excuse. He should not have accepted an offer he knew to be criminal in nature. He stated he was not in it for the money. Irrelevant. He still negotiated a price, and demanded payment from her.
5) He used the whole scandal as a way to draw readers to a site: He has some sort of performance he is advertising, and stated explicitly that the traffic from the "prank" would help with publicity.
6) He was completely manipulative throughout, reveling in her anxieties, and seeking to provoke more by stringing her along on numerous occasions during negotiations and after the scandal broke.
7) Exploitation: He got off on it, wanting to, even after the scandal broke, humiliate her more by keeping her on-line and typing so that he could share it with his now very wide readership. He says this just before admitting that he did feel sorry for her, and for the amount of harassment his outing brought to her.
How exactly is someone teaching a lesson when his behavior is by far surpassing the behavior of the initial offender, both in legal and ethical violations? Great lesson, Kushner, both for her, and for yourself. And he is the 'college grad' of the story.
Nate Kushner should be brought to justice and prosecuted. How more stupid can he get, writing his full name along with his list of crimes for everyone to see?
It seems that in his trying to punish the student, he had no choice but to drag himself through the mud, ending up with a big lesson for himself, too.
All a big joke folks. Laura K. Krishna, at India CC wants to know about "Hindu". How much more obvious could it be. (Although if it were true it would be cool.)
Keep reading the threads. He changed her name and the name of her school after speaking with her and her mother.
Um...made this twerp a public figure? No. Understand this folks: plagiarism is stealing, something outside the law. It is also a violation of copyright law - you know, those pesky federal laws designed from the very inception of the US to protect you from intellectual theft (and to encourage creativity)? If you get a bloody parking ticket, you are considered a lawbreaker and your name shows up the police log in the paper. Court records are generally public records too. So, if you break the laws of the land (not to mention ethical standards), you should get what you deserve. To quote the sage: Stupid should hurt!
There's no defending this woman. No sirree.
There is no defending the stupid fucking idiot who roams under the name Nate Kushner either... no sirree.
As if fraud, lies and deceit are OK to overcome fraud lies and deceit!
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