Julian Delasantellis: Cheating still beats real work

A colleague recently relayed a story about her experience as an observer at a faculty/student disciplinary hearing for a pre-law undergraduate charged with cheating.

Apparently, this young man had come around to the belief that, when it came to engaging in conduct that could get him expelled, in for a dime-in for a dollar. Just in the space of a single term, his teachers had found him copying from a test, rifling through the course's graduate assistant notebook looking for a test, and, word for word, punctuation mark by punctuation mark, lifting without attribution a large section of a Wikipedia entry on "jurisprudence" for a research paper.

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"Well", the student said, and locked his eyes on his personal Roland Freisler, the Nazi German judge. "Beats working, doesn't it?"

With that, I would have voted to let him off. For it is so self obvious that, just through a perusal of the business section of any American newspaper in the two-plus years since the financial and economic crisis commenced, the ideology contained in the defense statement was so blindingly accurate as to, indeed, provide its purveyors with a lifetime "get out of jail free" card.