Am I missing something in the story. Maybe I missed it in the myriad of posts, but that last I could tell was that he sent the paper, got the money, didn’t cash the check, emailed the President and…what?
Do we know for sure she turned it in? Was she punished? Part of me is thinking this guy did a good thing, but there is another part of me that think it is distasteful. Not condoning the girl’s actions in the slightest, but the consequences of his lesson are …who knows. Ideally I hope she obviously fails the class, gets some sort of Academic sanction, etc. but some of the messages seemed to think she should be stoned in the public square and forced to do penance on a remote isalnd.
The name “Laura K. Krishna” is an ironic pseudonym. The blogger originally used her real name and her real college. After the tearful conversation with Laura K and her mom, he changed the name and the college name in a belated effort to preserve her anonymity. Belated - and futile, since the original entries were discussed by other bloggers that did not make the change.
No college has changed its name. The BLOGGER changed the name. A bit of work with Google, if you are so inclined, will reveal the girl’s real name and her real college.
Within the last 15 minutes I have managed to find out that this person went to my hometown’s university and one of my friends was on a retreat with her (though did not know her well). I won’t give details, but it sure puts a face on the person.
Ehhhh I see now. Yes, I admit a bit of confusion there. I uh, blame my job, for making me work too hard and thus leaving little mental resources available for doping. Yep, thats it.
So a confession of my own: even though it’s been almost 20 years and I wasn’t in college at the time but even so I won’t give details, but when I was very, very broke (i.e. the most hard edged dean on Earth would, if he knew the circumstances, at least consider forgiving me) I wrote a paper or two (or more) for stupid rich kids. To this day it still burns me that they were so unappreciative of their opportunity to go to college without financial worries and with a nice apartment/functional cars/etc. that they spent it skipping classes, getting drunk on Daddy’s credit cards and saying “I’ll just get some fat schlub to write my papers for peanuts… this crap ain’t important anyway”. Having to anonymously sell your intellect makes you feel as cheap as any prostitute. (In fact the reason I hate JFK has little to do with his presidency and more to do with the fact that he took credit for Profiles in Courage when it was born of another man’s research and sweat.)
At least as opposed to Laura K. Krishna (whatever her real name may be), they did keep the payment end of the bargain. And today the kids can go to the Internet at any of a thousand secure web sites and get the paper e-mailed to them instantly- arrggghhh… first thing we do let’s kill all the plagiarists (yeah Biden, I’m talkin’ to ya…)
Of course I also wrote a paper for an employee when I worked in a hotel and desperately needed weekend coverage. The paper was on Medea and as she requested it the employee (a beautiful African American woman) asked me to “be sure and write it from the perspective of a modern day African American woman” (she attended a mostly black school). The only trick I pulled (thinking that she would at LEAST read the damned title page, especially since she knew I had a warped sense of humor) was that I entitled the paper “No Man My Equal: Race and Gender in Eurpides’s Medea”, but above that one I tacked a fake title page reading “MEDEA: One Messed Up Bitch”. She turned it in; the professor wondered why she did that, but (may I live to be a hundred years old and never set foot outside of Alabama as long as I live if I am lying) she called it “brilliant”, had the student read it aloud, gave it an A+, and the student now has a role on Broadway in a play everybody here has heard of. When I heard that, I was one proud black woman. Sorta.
I was sort of siding with Laura up until now (yeah, she made a mistake, but the punishment was far exceeding the crime), until I learned that she never had any intention of paying. THAT burns me.
Really? Geez, I’ve done it many times (always with music, never with prose), and I just considered it a sign that I had a marketable skill. There are worse things in the world for a musician than getting paid to write music. Not getting paid to write music, for example. But what made me feel like shit was when I would do someone’s work for them, and then they would decide that my time and effort and skill was not worth paying for after all. And yet the fruits of my labor were something I was obligated to provide on demand. Of course they would change their tunes (no pun intended) really fast when I would threaten to destroy my own work rather than give it away for free.
I disagree. Not paying for the stuff was incidental. If she’d been a good customer, paying promptly and accurately, would she then have committed a lesser offense? I don’t think so.
All that not paying shows, for those who need to be persuaded, is that her character is questionable. But to those who made that call already, based on her eagerness to defraud the university, it’s almost superfluous.
She would have committed one less offense. Soliciting someone to do your work for you is bad enough, but at least it’s an honest transaction (with the person you conspire with). But to then cheat the person who actually did the work for your lazy ass? Yes, far worse. It’s the difference between lazy and lazy thief.