THE PLAGIARIST IS LAZY AND IGNORANT.  And hence, self-identifying.

Neither the panic-stricken nor the calculating plagiarist possesses a notion of prose style.  He might know that his in-class prose, which he cannot plagiarize, receives low marks; he might even know, from instructor-comments, that his low marks have to do with his lack of grammar, restricted vocabulary, and hopelessness in forming arguments.

He will know those things, however, only as verbalisms, as explanations that for him clarify nothing.  Supposing even that he examines a paragraph from Silas Marner or from a critical article on George Eliot, he will not be aware that Eliot’s prose or the article-writer’s differs from his own. On a less exalted level, the plagiarist cannot tell the competency of an editorial-page newspaper column from the incompetence of his blue book scribbling. One written page is much like another, as he sees it.  The quality of his incompetence, if not the judgment about it, remains opaque to him.

The plagiarist has likewise no sense of the social distribution of knowledge, of what someone in this stationas opposed to that is likely to know; nor has he any sense of the character of the professional allusions and references that differentiate, let us say, the language of an historian of strategic bombing from that of a Shakespeare scholar.

Most tellingly, in selecting passages to copy, the plagiarist cannot distinguish between what he is wildly unlikely to know and what might pass muster.  How could he?  He has never grasped the connection between knowledge and formal study, between the act of reading and the sequel of knowing.

It never occurs to the plagiarist, therefore, whether panic-stricken or calculating, that submitting someone else’s prose under his own name might alert a wary reader that shenanigans are in play.  It never occurs to him that a vapid three-sentence paragraph of his prose, with simplistic sentences, bad grammar, and misspellings, when followed by a paragraph in a competent writer’s professional prose will create a sense of disjunction in the very party whom the gesture aims at defrauding.

In today's world, the lazy man's technology actually makes the diligent professor's job easier.

It is easy to forget that as recently as ten years ago, proving plagiarism required of the instructor-plaintiff a good deal of clerical effort.  Even on a small campus with a restricted library, where the possible sources of cheating were limited, thirty bound years of the Proceedings of the Modern Language Association or an equivalent scholarly journal meant hours of investigation. Probably a good deal of suspected plagiarism escaped confirmation simply because the instructor foresaw that the labor necessary to prove the charge outweighed the value of pursuing it.

A punitive grade might still be justified on the grounds that the suspect essay did not really address directly the given assignment, or that it lacked references.  I remark, however, that in those cases the original plagiarism itself required a certain amount of work-like diligence.  With technical progress, plagiarism has become the most alluring of the lazy student’s probable academic misdeeds.

The Internet, as already mentioned, offers a cornucopia of downloadable temptations.  In the meantime, the typical prose-competence of the typical first-year student at a state college—as report after report testifies—has continued to decline. The opportunities for becoming panic-stricken have multiplied many times over.

Although I cannot give scientific evidence for it, I believe that the percentage of calculating plagiarists has also increased, but the calculation remains as unwise as it always was.  It still rests on the plagiarist’s ignorance of his own ignorance, his inability to recognize the specificity of his own incompetence.  At the same time that plagiarism itself has become easier, the ability to detect plagiarism has also become easier, another reality of which the plagiarist himself has not the faintest inkling.

The plagiarism is a symptom of higher education's E-T-T-S moment, not the moment itself.

Plagiarism is one more index of the long-heralded Decline of the West.  More and more students go to college; fewer and fewer of them are actually capable of rising to the higher learning.  Colleges and universities, operating by the enrollment economy, actively seek students and bend or ignore admissions criteria to recruit them in numbers.  Aggressively cynical and uncivilized, the popular culture promotes crass self-interest and narcissism.

And somehow, an increase in college completion rates becomes the key to broadly shared prosperity.