Cheating to Get Ahead

There is no greater harm to intellect or the education process than plagiarizing.

When you steal or purchase the thoughts of others and claim them as your own -- the entire salvation of the world crumbles to ash.

We were thrilled to learn this week that Google have refused to accept advertising from Paper Mills as reported by Chronicle.com:

Term-paper and essay-writing services join prostitutes, firearms dealers, and hacking sites in Google's forbidden-advertising zone, the company announced yesterday. Academic paper-writing services, or "paper mills," will no longer be able to buy search terms in the Google AdWords program, and thus their ads will no longer pop up in the "sponsored links" sections of a Google search-results page. (Links to those sites could still be found among the results on the main part of the page, however.) The paper mills, which offer buyers papers written to order for a fee, have been the subject of sharp complaints from universities, which view them as sources of plagiarism. But the companies themselves have a different view.

We here at Boles University believe it is vitally important to protect original thoughts and to demand from our students their own unique ideas.

It is only in the free discussion of ideas that thought gains purpose over emotion and instinct.

We are humanized by our minds and the facts of our shared human memory.