Dear Commons Community,

My colleague, Stuart Ewen at Hunter College, forwarded a URL of an article that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled, The Shadow Scholar:  The Man Who Writes your Students’ Papers Tells his Story.  The article describes how Ed Dante (a pseudonym)  has a full-time job writing papers for a custom-essay company.    In the past year, he has been paid to write  “roughly 5,000 pages” of scholarly material for students.  He has written everything from admissions essays to masters theses and doctoral papers.  While all types of students use his services, he specifically mentions ESL, “hopelessly deficient” and seminary students as regular users of his services.  Perhaps the best line in the article is:

“I do a lot of work for seminary students. I like seminary students. They seem so blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction in paying somebody to help them cheat in courses that are largely about walking in the light of God and providing an ethical model for others to follow.”

In sum, the article is humorous but also a sad commentary.

Tony

The article can be found at:

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/