The newest issue of The Blue and White will be landing on campus soon. In the meantime, Mark Hay investigates Craigslist and the black market for academic essays.

Editor’s Note: To protect confidentiality, names marked with asterisks have been changed.

On any given day this past summer, a student trawling Craigslist.com would have found numerous ads for school essay writing services. This Blue & White reporter monitored the New York area’s site on 20 randomly selected days from July through August, and found on average nine to 10 ads explicitly offering to write a student’s essay from scratch — not to mention scores of posts for dubious and vague “editorial/tutoring services.”

One such apparently aboveboard ad posted by a student at NYU’s Tisch School boasted, “I tutor a various array of people from all over the world in Manhattan and Brooklyn and have helped many students to better their grades and understandings in and about writing and English in its various forms.” When asked if his or her services included full essay writing for a fee, the student responded, “Yes…I do a lot of that.”

Combined with the broad ads masking essay services under tutoring or editing (roughly half of those opaque advertisers contacted for this piece offered to write a full essay when the service was requested), it becomes near impossible to tell how many essay writers are active at any given time. One may roughly estimate, though, that well over 100 are active just on the New York section of Craigslist.com—some recent graduates trawling for a quick buck, and a couple dozen hardened professionals who have turned this practice into a job, at times banding together in individualized essay writing firms, the latter constituting approximately 30 percent of advertisers.

The simple answer is to blame this bounty of unethical services on the wild frontier of commerce that is Craigslist.com. But much as with the escort or narcotics services advertised in stealth on the site, anonymous postings have just re-popularized ancient trades to a new market, which previously relied on word-of-mouth advertising in the years before Craigslist first extended its services to New York in 2000. We’re no more devious now — just more efficient.

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Look at how we caught your eye with that headline!

Remember that sub-plot in V116 about Dean “Double D” Denburg’s Big Bear/Little Bear initiative? The one where DD matched Barnard first-years and upperclassmen in a binding friendship contract and Jenny couldn’t sneak out and meet Yonatan at 1020? That sucked for both of them, but then (SPOILER ALERT) everything worked out OK in the end.

The 2011 Class Council, is doing something eerily similar in real life, but they didn’t plagiarize anything and we were just making a little nod to current events. The council is launching an initiative: “Senior Pals.” Here’s how it will work: CC 11ers will be paired up with incoming CC 14ers so that our new fresh-friends will have someone to ask questions like “should I buy the grapes at Cafe 212?” (no!) or “EC, Heights, or Campo?” (rap about it!) or “where is the 9 train?” (it doesn’t exist anymore!) What’s in it for you, wizened, tough guy CC senior? Free lunch! There will be a welcome luncheon in the fall for Big Pals and Little Pals.

Pals will be matched according to residence hall (if you lived in John Jay, you’ll be paired with a current JJ resident) and hometown, althouh Udell acknowledged that it will be difficult to get both those matches for all Pals. Udell, who started the initiative, explained its existence to Bwog: “during the campaign I had a lot of people lament the ‘cold’ nature of Columbia, and this seems one way to warm things up a bit.”

Udell and Learned Foote, CCSC President, will send out an email in July to the incoming 14ers saying hi and explaining the project, and they expect that about 500 eager-beaver first-years will sign up to be Little Pals, so that means they need about 500 Big Pals by July. Sign up here, and cross your fingers for those chocolate-chip brownies (and not those grilled veggie wraps) at the Pal Luncheon.

Update, 2 pm: Although it’s a CC initiaitve, SEAS and BC seniors are also eligible/encouraged to become Senior Pals.

To All Columbia College Students, 

Dean Yatrakis will know if you plagiarize any of your final papers, which you most certainly will. And when you inevitably try to pass someone else’s work off as your own, she will remove you from your precious leadership positions and probably expel you. And then when you try to get a job, she will tell your future employer how dishonest and awful you are.

And by the way happy holidays!

After the jump, an absolutely terrifying email sent to CCers, which we admit is not our own work but that of Dean Yatrakis! It is in quotes demonstrating such!

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Good morning, Columbia, hope you’re all set for some more Madonna Constantine updates. Oh good, let’s get started. First, according to last night’s AP report, Constantine has decided to appeal her termination, claiming that she was fired because of the noose incident and that the plagiarism charges are “baseless.” 

And speaking of nooses, it’s finally time for the Village Voice‘s sequel to its exciting series on “Knotty Noose Problems”. When we last left off, a bunch of people accussed Madonna Constantine of plagiarism, so she made one of them organize some stuff in her office over winter break, which was mean. Meanwhile, Darlene Bailey, VP of Academic Affairs at TC, launched counter-investigations against a women who wanted to look into the allegations against Constantine.

So now that we’re all caught up, on to this week’s article, and we’ve once again distilled everything you need to know in reader-friendly bulletpoints.

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Today, the Village Voice ran the first part of a billion part article that’s something like the definitive account of everything that happened surrounding Madonna Constantine. You might recall October’s noose-hanging incident and the whole multiple charges of plagiarism thing, for example. Anyway, we’ve distilled everything that’s new and important in the article in easy-to-digest bullet points below (Spoiler Alert: She plagiarized.) 

• “As many as 10 people complained about Constantine over several years, and these sources say the college did little to intervene.”
• “Constantine attempted to silence her accusers in the spring of 2007 by sending them letters threatening to sue unless they dropped their claims. She used college stationery and the college mailing account.”
• “Despite [former student Karen Cort's] accusation [of plagiarism], Constantine never pursued official sanctions. Instead, as punishment, she ordered Cort to cancel plans for the January break and come to her office. Constantine had her mark each book in her office with the professor’s stamp. The shelves in the office held hundreds of books. The job took several days to complete.”
• This particular plagiarized text was a second-year research paper written by the aforementioned former student, Karen Cort. Constantine told Cort to list Constantine’s name as the primary researcher, despite Cort actually writing and researching the paper. For whatever reason, Cort agreed.
  
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Howard Dean comes to Columbia, rips on McCain, and tells you to run for office: We don’t need no stinking think tanks!  Yeaaaaaaaaah!

“That’s What God Said.”  Did you hear that Scott Stringer?

From Butler chairs to the USenate: GS Housing circus comes full circle.  At least the Senate chairs look more comfortable.

TC students, burned by plagiarism, fight back with words. 

Criticizing Critical Reading, Critical Writing.

For those of you who get caught plagiarizing on your finals or otherwise, here are some essays you can write about why plagiarism is bad.

The one Bwog used:

Plagiarism
(missing works cited)
By Bwog

Plagiarism is a distinguished sounding word. One would almost think that it sounds like some lofty philosophical ideal named for the great Greek teacher Plagiarus, something to be aspired to. This is not so. Plagiarism is in fact a moral misdemeanor, and an academic felony. By definition, plagiarism is “a piece of writing that has been copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work.” Socrates, Plato and Aristotle would have frowned on such a practice, and “Plagiarus” would have been kicked out of the academy. Such is the fate of many college students today.

The Opal Mehta scandal continues! Apparently not satisfied with plagiarizing from Columbia grad Megan McCafferty, Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan also lifted passages from Salman Rushdie’s 1990 children’s novel Haroun and Meg Cabot’s Princess Diaries. At least she chose well with the Rushdie.

Learn all about it from our good friends at the Crimson.

When college-authored Young Adult Chick Lit scandals emerge, who better to comment than Barnard ’08′s own Robyn Schneider. Herself the author of two forthcoming Young Adult books, Robyn (B&W profile) is taking it personally.

Kaavya Viswanathan must have an industrial strength photographic memory.
Why, you ask? Because only someone with a mind like a steal (ha) trap
could unknowingly plagiarize Megan McCafferty’s novels more than forty
times and do so unconsciously.

McCafferty’s publisher, Steve Ross, called the Harvard sophomore’s debut
novel, already a New York Times bestseller, “Nothing less than an act of
literary identity theft.” He claims that it is “inconceivable” that
Kaavya was not aware of what she was doing.

But what I think is that Kaavya still isn’t aware of what she’s done.
Many of the litblogs I read are blaming Kaavya’s plagiarism not on her
lack of morals but on her age. Apparently, if you give a teen a book
deal, they won’t know better than to plagiarize. It’s sentiments like
this that make me want to gouge my name out of the LA Times article that
featured Viswanathan and myself as young chick lit novelists. Do I have
to listen to sweeping generalizations that all young writers don’t take
stealing seriously because our generation downloads illegal music files?
Just because James Frey lied doesn’t mean I automatically assume all
memoirists are “embellishing” the hell out of their unremarkable lives.
And just because Kaavya apparently plagiarized doesn’t mean that all young
novelists should be blamed. Can the world please leave the rest of us out
of this?
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The publishing world has been all abuzz the past few weeks over Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan’s new book How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. Even the Blue and White fell under the spell of a peer with a $500,000 book deal and reviewed the book in this month’s print edition.

Well, frustrated authors, rejoice! It was all too good to be true. The Harvard Crimson published an article tonight claiming that Kaavya plagariazed portions of fellow young adult chick lit (yes, that’s a real genre) author Megan McCafferty’s first two books.

Does that name sound familiar? Here’s the Columbia twist– Ms. McCafferty was the gentle vision in a red sundress who graced Columbia’s bookstore last week with a reading (Bwog was there). Her third book takes place at Columbia, but we doubt Kaavya will get a second novel to work that into.

Textbook plagiarism after the jump and more in the Crimson article. Read more…