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"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

The Future of Plagiarism



Every now and then, UD likes to try her hand at predicting the future (recall her post of 4/2/04, for instance, on the future of the college syllabus). She is now prepared to make another prediction, this one about the future of academic plagiarism cases.




Because so many professors now employ legions of assistants to write the books the professors pretend to have written, UD predicts that eventually plagiarism battles and lawsuits will take place exclusively among various competing teams of anonymous drudges, while the professors who employ the drudges will disappear from the story altogether.

The sequence of events in such plagiarism cases will go something like this: One squad of assistants steals three pages of prose from a book written by someone else's squad of assistants. The second squad of assistants, on discovering the theft, will call the first squad on it. A major tiff will ensue, but hostilities will remain underground, as it were -- the front men, the professors who signed their names to the work of these teams, will stay above the fray, since none of it, after all, has anything to do with them.

If things do get at all public and begin to embarrass the employers of such teams, UD further predicts that a new entrepreneurial opportunity will open up - management consultants for professors. These people would specialize in helping professors choose their writers, and would give the professors tips on managing their staff so that plagiarism is less likely to occur.