Academic personnel and services are reacting to the recent surfacing of www.unemployedprofessors.com, a Montreal-based website through which students can pay unemployed professors to write their essays. Students use the website to post their essay on a bidding forum, and the lowest bidding ghostwriter wins the project.
Established in the fall of 2011, unemployedprofessors.com currently involves approximately 30 professors. The website helps potential plagiarizers avoid the challenges posed by anti-plagiarism websites, such as turnitin.com, by offering high quality, original papers—although A’s are not guaranteed.
“This business is a result of the overproduction of PhDs, as cheap labour, by the contemporary university system,” a public relations representative for the website, who asked to remain anonymous, said in an email to the Tribune. “Unemployed Professors fills a void in the market for custom private sector research solutions.”
“Given the overproduction of doctorates, specifically in the Humanities and Social Sciences, there is a glut in the number of reasonable research and teaching jobs available to well qualified individuals holding PhDs,” the representative continued. “As such, in response to a university system that shunned them, [unemployed professors] have begun doing this.”
Websites such as unemployedprofessors.com underscore the growing problem of academic integrity in colleges and universities today.
According to Associate Dean of Arts (Student Affairs) André Costopoulos, McGill confirmed approximately 136 cases of cheating last year. This pales in comparison to cases in other universities. For example, Concordia University had 400 reported cases of cheating last year, while at Harvard University, 125 students are currently under investigation for collaborating on a take-home exam written this past spring, as reported in the Montreal Gazette.
“Students are here to learn,” Costopoulos said. “I don’t mean to sound preachy, but professors design courses with the students in mind, and ultimately, [the students] are only hurting themselves.”
McGill has several policies and services in place to help students avoid plagiarism and to learn to cite material properly, such as the McGill Writing Centre. Located on the first floor of Redpath Library, staff at the centre work to review students’ papers to ensure ideas are cited correctly and structured appropriately.
Furthermore, professors are required to remind students of McGill’s policies and procedures by including them on every class syllabus. The McGill Library website also offers access to online citation managing software, such as EndNote and RefWorks—programs that allow students to store citations while conducting research.
Professors can also invite McGill librarians to come to classes and conduct workshops for students on how to cite, paraphrase, and conduct research properly.
“There are two types of plagiarism—accidental and purposeful,” Megan Fitzgibbons, liaison librarian at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, said. “The intent is different with accidental plagiarism and that is where a librarian can help.”
Despite widespread criticism from the Montreal academic community, the spokesperson for unemployedprofessors.com insisted that their business is perfectly ethical.
“We do not engage in plagiarism,” the public relations representative said. “We provide custom research to any individual willing to and capable of paying for it … the ethical burden lies squarely on the shoulders of the student.”
The website also offers essay-writing tips for students experiencing difficulties writing their own papers.
A U3 McGill arts student, who wished to remain anonymous, feels the issue was trivial, because users of unemployedprofessors.com ultimately lost out on their educational experience.
“It seems to me that the students who write their own papers have the advantage because they can [use] that skill [in the future], whereas an essay purchaser may not.”
