On Academic Dishonesty

On Sunday, it was doom-gray outside by 3pm. There was snow, and then hail, and finally thunder. “Thundersnow!” Everyone in the library rushed to the window. I made a joke about the apocalypse, no one laughed, and I was too excited to care.

A long time ago, I seriously considered having someone write a paper for me.

It seems absurd now, as my godlike writing talents have won me literally several nice emails, but at the time, I doubted I could impress anyone with words.

I've never been the best student. In middle school I was at the top of my class, but homework gave me hell; I’d just sit at the dining room table for hours on end, thinking about god knows what, until the guilt resurfaced.

In high school, my GPA plummeted. The material got harder, and I used the same strategy as always: Skin of your teeth. Do well on tests. It wasn’t enough.

And yet I eventually conned my way into Carleton, a place where Type-A personalities came to make love on piles of books. I had to change. I had to learn good study habits and rhetoric, a language I’d heard in bits and pieces from my parents but had never been forced to speak.

But for the first time, I was surrounded by people who seemed smarter than me. The day before deadline, I only saw one solution. Find someone who knew what they were doing. Ask them to help me out, just this once. I couldn’t afford to screw up my second college career.

Never mind that I could write. I’d been writing creatively since I was fifteen. There was an untraversable rift between that and my damn Linguistics paper.

Why does this happen to so many of us? Why do papers destroy us? Why have there been seventy cases of academic dishonesty in the past three years?

Let’s go back to the 18th century. People spent less time physically alone, so reading was considered the most private activity you could do. Conversely, writing was the most spiritually demanding. You were inviting someone to watch you think.

But this hasn’t changed. In an essay, you take things you’ve read and pit them against each other, and yourself. For the first step it’s easy to cite dead men the way Chicago wants you to. But inside, where you’re watching yourself think, you should be citing everything you’ve ever experienced.

That’s where ideas come from. They come from 7th grade AIM conversations, from the buttery French horn in an old sci-fi film, from your dog's pointless dewclaws, from that invincible feeling you get when the sun passes behind a thin layer of clouds and you can look straight at it. Academic writing is unsettling because you use your soul, but you're not allowed to use the word "I."

This might seem like a minor concern. If you play sports or music, you're already resilient. You get to say, “I” every time you sing. But chances are you still put off a few papers that should, in a perfect world, be fun to write.

For a year, I boycotted writing. It seemed like a waste of time not to read instead. But the more I read, the more I realized that good creative writing and good academic writing had something in common. From the love-struck Austen, to the outraged Orwell, to the reluctant Darwin, the basic belief that we deserved their insights made precise language the only option. They were all brilliant, but more importantly, they were sincere.

In an Aesthetics course last winter, we were struggling through a dense reading by a contemporary art scholar when a frustrated senior (it's always a senior) picked up his book and held it in the air like a stale sandwich.

"This was the most offensively meaningless article I’ve ever read. Every sentence made me so angry that I had to stop several times because I was getting physically ill.”

This delighted me, of course. But I think it will help us to forgive The Man. This term I'm in Visual Studies, a course not so different from Aesthetics. Our professor reminded us that while some of the readings are intense, that’s kind of the point. “When the rubber band of your mind snaps back, you’re able to see things you couldn't before."

Academia is loving you the only way it knows how. You can forgive bombastic writing the same way you’d forgive a smirk on a stranger. Maybe that’s the best smile they can give you today, and maybe they’ve read so many research papers they can’t help sounding a little silly. It isn’t a reason to copy them. Read between the lines. Listen for thundersnow.