Michael Opest

Research Essay

-7-9 pp. double-spaced; plus Works Cited
-Draft Due: 11/19
-Peer Workshop: 11/21
-Final Draft Due: 12/3

Prompt:

Write a 7-9 page argumentative essay in response to Farah Stockman and Carlos Mureithi’s article “Cheating, Inc.: How Writing Papers for American College Students Has Become a Lucrative Profession Overseas” (https://nyti.ms/2A0J0C4). Your essay must have a clear thesis that engages one of the article’s themes (e.g. academic integrity, pressures of college, the influence of a globally-connected world on higher education). In addition to citing the article, you must research and cite 3-5 additional sources, one of which may be from our syllabus. Wikipedia and open-web sources such as blogs are neither authoritative nor valid. Your essay must follow the formal conventions we have discussed in class, have an original title, adequately defend your argument, anticipate counter-arguments, and be in MLA format.

See the model essay, below, for an example of how you might approach this assignment. Although this sample’s form is stronger than its content, you can reference it in order to decide whether the essay you purchase online answers the prompt before turning it in. You can even share this with the academic writer with whom you contract to do the work. Essays that simply turn the sample in under the student’s own name will receive a failing grade.

Sample C. Student
Dr. Michael Opest
English 101: Introduction to Composition
11/19/19

Integrity Today: Why Enterprising Students Should Buy Their Papers from Essay Mills

As long as professors have given essay assignments, concerns about academic integrity have been linked to student learning. For example, the founder of an Academy in ancient Greece, Plato, worried that his students would “put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others” (551-552). He was afraid that writing things down would cause them to forget the course material. Even worse, they might plagiarize, using other writers’ words or “signs” as their own. Today, the Internet has changed how we think of academic integrity. A recent story in the New York Times highlights what any student worth her smartwatch already knew: you can purchase original essays from an “essay mill,” written for specific assignments. The journalists Farah Stockman and Carlos Mureithi present this entrepreneurial development as “contract cheating,” comparing it to plagiarism. Their article, however, misses several other developments in higher education. In this essay, I will argue that “contract cheating” should be allowed, and encouraged, as “laissez-faire learning.” I will show that laissez-faire learning is a perfect fit for American university education, that it follows standard business practices and ethics, updates historical patterns of global trade, and finally, acknowledges the difficulties and priorities that today’s students face. Students should be free to learn with all of the tools available to them. To punish “contract cheating” is to cheat students of their real education.

The “contract cheating” business is simple: a student can go to one of several websites (such as Academized, UvoCorp, or EssayShark), upload his assignment, pay a fee based on the length requirements and deadline, and then receive “a top quality and 100% plagiarism free essay that is written just for you,” as the website for Academized puts it (Stockman and Mureithi par. 12). A paper from an essay mill is not a case of plagiarism, in which a student copies and pastes information from a website without citing the source, and the journalists say these “are generally original works.” Their issue is that the essay is “written by the wrong person” (par. 22). Tricia Bertram Gallant of the University of California, San Diego, calls this “a huge problem.” According to Gallant, “If we don’t do anything about it, we will turn every accredited university into a diploma mill” (Stockman and Mureithi par. 9). Gallant thinks that if a student contracts someone else to write an original essay, she will not actually learn the material, meaning that the diploma she eventually receives would not be backed up by knowledge. This fear is misguided for two reasons. First, responsible students will read the essays they have purchased before turning them in, learning the material that way. More importantly, Gallant is confused about the purpose of higher education, which is the first step in understanding why we need to think about contracted writing as laissez-faire learning, not cheating.

Because a diploma is necessary for a well-paying job, universities must free students to finish their degrees quickly and practically. Otherwise they will fail the core mission of higher education: supporting the economy. Universities exist because employers need employees. That mission is apparent in the leadership positions on universities’ Boards of Regents and Trustees, which are almost always filled with entrepreneurs, lawyers, consultants, and executives. Anyone who can run a successful mining operation, pharmaceutical company, or real estate investment trust will naturally have the wisdom to oversee a college’s curriculum and balance its books. Universities are big businesses, so they need to keep people with practical experience in positions of authority over their faculty. Successful business leaders know that their products face stiff competition in the market. Diplomas are no different, and knowledge is useless if it is not marketable, and so buying and selling essays fits perfectly into today’s business of education.

Stockman and Mureithi do not understand this practical side of education, resorting to extreme examples in their bias against laissez-faire learning. They interview Bill Loller from Turnitin, a company that makes anti-plagiarism software. Loller claims to have “worked with some colleges that have students who have never shown up for class or completed a single assignment. ‘They’ve contracted it all out,’ he said” (par. 21). Loller may misrepresent the issue because his company has a financial stake in defining academic dishonesty very broadly. Regardless, his concern is overblown, since a student contracting out her work simply follows the standard business practice of outsourcing. The student becomes an entrepreneur, securing financing from family, a part-time job, a work-study position, or a student loan, and then directing it to the cheapest source of labor. Education is an investment, and like any other company financing its products through investment firms, banks, or venture capital, the student helps money flow efficiently through the market. Contracting inexpensive labor is so unremarkable that, according to full-text searches, the word “outsourcing” does not appear even once in six of the most popular business ethics textbooks (DesJardins; Hartman; Hoffman; Paliwal; Schwartz; Thomas). If a practice were even remotely unethical, it would have to be mentioned in at least one of these. Outsourcing an essay is not just a lesson in good management, it resembles the careers of our most important thought leaders and businessmen. One can hardly imagine Tim Cook assembling an iPhone with a screwdriver any more than Jeff Bezos closing a box with packing tape. Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel have more important matters on their minds than actually writing code all day. This example of vertical reporting, in which the professor solicits a product from the student, who then compensates the contractor for the production, is good business sense.

The essay-writing websites that Stockman and Mureithi reference are based overseas. The outsourcing encouraged by laissez-faire learning therefore extends the established practice of exchanging goods and services across the globe, to the advantage of all trading partners. Since the 1500s, global trade depended on physical commodities moving between primitive and advanced countries, such as from Africa to the United States (“History”). By the 1900s, it led to the development of such essential business practices as double-entry bookkeeping, the tracking of data to understand the depreciation of assets, the use of personal property as mortgage collateral, and early forms of collateralized debt obligations (Desmond pars. 12; 13-15; 27-28). Today it is not just travelling cotton or sugar that connects the globe, but services such as call centers and information products such as software and college essays. Social progress has always depended upon the free transfer of goods, and nations such as India and other former British colonies owe their functioning governments to trade within the British Empire (Ferguson xxv). That process has given us the technological marvels and unparalleled lifestyles we enjoy today, which is why students must be liberated from professors’ stifling regulations.

There is a personal level to the global business of education. Stockman and Mureithi interview two academic writers in Kenya, whose lives have been transformed by the hard work they have put into this opportunity. One of them, Roynorris Ndiritu, “has earned enough to buy a car and a piece of land,” which means that he has achieved the American Dream in Africa (par. 27). Material wealth and happiness are not the only results of this business diplomacy, however. Mary Mbugua “began carrying a notebook, jotting down vocabulary words she encountered in movies and novels to make her essays more valuable,” in an effort to avoid “British spellings or idioms that might raise suspicion about an essay’s authorship” (par. 30-31). Professors should embrace the global engagement with American popular culture and “idioms,” which are not only less pretentious and more democratic than their British counterparts, but which also benefit the American film industry. Students who purchase their essays from academic writers in developing countries promote the American Dream and spread the pleasures of American culture, in the same virtuous cycle of mutual benefit that we see in all global trade.

The most important reason to embrace laissez-faire learning is that it answers the changing demands that are placed upon college students. A generation or two ago, when a four-person family could thrive on one parent’s income, and when stable middle-class jobs providing benefits, pensions, and basic dignity were available, students had a quieter and easier lifestyle. Because they did not have the Internet, they could laze away in the physical library (some campuses still have such spaces as evidence of this era). Today, however, keeping up with all of the crucial information that comes through social media is almost a full-time job. A typical student juggles multiple invitations to keep Snapchat-streaks going, while texting her friends via WhatsApp, while checking the Twitter accounts of celebrities and thought leaders, all while watching her school’s basketball team play on a live stream. While some people—such as professors—might say this is all a waste of time, social media represents networking at its best. That is why the Internet used to be called “the net” for short. The whole point is to get caught up in an influential person’s web. College is the time for students to build their brand. Writing old-fashioned essays is slow and difficult, eating up hours that would be put to better use on a well-edited Instagram feed. According to the dictionary, “influence” comes from Italian for “influenza” and Latin for “to flow” (“influence”). Today’s students cannot get bogged down, they must be flexible and free to flow if they will become successful Influencers. Whether the assignment is about a dead white male writer, a forgotten episode of history, or a professor’s lame attempt to have students approach an “edgy” topic, whatever information would go into a typical essay is already old. Just like asking students to purchase a textbook, or asking them to remove their headphones during a lecture or while taking an exam, essays have become one more unreasonable demand. Students must adapt to what is new, and what is new this semester will already be old by next. Networking and brand-building are essential entrepreneurial skills for students in the business of education.

Stockman and Mureithi call contract writing “cheating” without mentioning that contractors mostly serve students in humanities courses, which have more written assignments. Humanities professors would probably agree with Tricia Bertram Gallant, who believes that laissez-faire learning is unethical because a student might not learn the material (Stockman and Mureithi par. 10). They might say that a student who contracts an essay has devalued his education. In fact, universities themselves devalue education. According to an organization called the American Association of University Professors, in 2015, 70% of all instructors in American university classrooms were “contingent faculty,” who are part-time contractors, not normal professors (AAUP). Most universities staff their highest-enrolled classes, in freshman composition, with temporary instructors. At many institutions, over 90% of such courses have contingent faculty, who can gross less than $3,000 per course, even in major metropolitan areas (“Opest”). If a course contained anything worth knowing, the market would reward its teachers with at least a living wage, not to mention other types of support that students usually think their tuition dollars provide to professors. It is hypocritical for a university to hire part-time contractors to do 70% of its work, but not allow students to do the same. Concerns about students knowing the material miss the mark, because the educational market has already indicated that the material in essay-heavy classes has no value and is not worth knowing. A university that forces students to mindlessly produce essays of their own while denying them rich networking experiences and the freedom to build their brand is closer to a “diploma mill”: students will have only earned a piece of paper saying they can write papers. The current situation contradicts an important truth that is often mentioned in debates about the costs of college: you only value what you pay for. Because they must pay their contractors, students will value contracted writing more than old-fashioned essays. Laissez-faire learning will give graduates one more reason to cherish their diplomas and to support their alma mater financially for the rest of their lives.

In conclusion, essay mills are an exciting new business opportunity through which enterprising writers can earn a good living by working for entrepreneurial students. Essay mills create jobs and spread wealth by applying time-tested practices, including outsourcing, the division of labor, and global trade, to one of the biggest businesses of the 21^st-century: education. Most importantly, embracing laissez-faire learning will keep universities’ own customers happy, by acknowledging their priorities and challenges. Finally, faculty members will come to appreciate receiving contracted essays as a form of bonus compensation, because they might be so well written that they will at last have something interesting to read.

Works Cited

American Association of University Professors. www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/Academic_ Labor_Force_Trends_1975-2015.pdf.

DesJardins, Joseph. An Introduction to Business Ethics, Ebook, 5^th ed., McGraw-Hill, 2014.

Desmond, Matthew. “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.” New York Times, 14 Aug. 2019, https://nyti.ms/2OVcThK.

Ferguson, Niall. Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, Ebook, ProQuest Central, Basic Books, 2004.

Hartman, Laura P., Joseph DesJardins, and Chris MacDonald. Business Ethics: Decision Making for Personal Integrity and Social Responsibility, 3^rd ed., Ebook, McGraw-Hill, 2014.

“History of Capitalism.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_capitalism.

Hoffman, W. Michael, et al., eds. Business Ethics: Readings and Cases, Ebook, ProQuest Central, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014.

“influence, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2019, www.oed.com/view/ Entry/95519.

Opest, Michael. “Re: question, what is contingent faculty?” Received by Sample C. Student, 15 Oct. 2019.

Paliwal, Manisha. Business Ethics, Ebook, ProQuest Central, New Age International Ltd, 2006.

Plato. Phaedrus, translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, Plato: Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson, Hackett, 1997, 506-56.

Schwartz, Mark S. Business Ethics: An Ethical Decision-Making Approach, Ebook, ProQuest Central, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2017.

Stockman, Farah and Carlos Mureithi. “Cheating, Inc.: How Writing Papers for American College Students Has Become a Lucrative Profession Overseas” New York Times, 7 Sept. 2019, https://nyti.ms/2A0J0C4s.

Thomas, Rosamund, et al. Business Ethics, Ebook, ProQuest Central, Ethics International Press Ltd., 2011.