As I mentioned in my previous post, we do get a fair bit of hate mail here at Unemployed Professors. “Custom essay writing is immoral you jackass!” “Students won’t graduate if they pay someone to write their essays!” I’ve heard it all once, and I’ll hear it all again. As an academic who has a relatively good position at a top-flight University, one might ask me why the hell I’m writing custom papers, and how I can possibly rationalize being an academic ghostwriter. Let’s step back to grad school…
When I was in graduate school myself, it became very apparent that most of my new “colleagues” were from wealthier families, and likely never had to pay a penny for educational expenses in their entire lives. Shit, a few days in, one of them told me that he had bought almost all of his essays throughout his undergrad career. I was bemused by this and asked him where the hell he did that? I then found out about this whole custom essay writing business. The dude basically said: “man, you can just pay someone to write your essays.” I honestly couldn’t believe it for two reasons. First, how the hell did someone who had never even written his own work get into grad school ?(he has a PhD and a tenure track position now btw) Second, considering how much student loan debt I had at that time, I wondered how much writing custom essays paid. I quickly found out that being an academic ghostwriter would go a long way in supplementing my meager teaching stipend, and would help pay off my student loans. That’s how I got started in the custom essay business.
That makes sense – grad students are dirt poor and live like monks. Taking a custom essay writing side-gig made a ton of sense back then. But why, with a damn good income, am I still doing this? The fact of the matter is that academia is rigged. I have a great day job, but I certainly can’t say the same for at least half of my grad school friends and colleagues. The PhD market is over-saturated, with schools admitting too many grad students just so that they can have cheap labor to teach classes. So the market really does have too many Unemployed Professors. Beyond this, education has become a commodity; both Universities at which I have taught have had football coaches making a higher salary than their President. Does that sound right? This is supposed to be higher education, right? So while student tuition is going up, the fat cats in the administration buildings and the heroes of the football field are pocketing mad cash.
Education is a commodity. Ergo, a paper is a commodity as well. We live in a capitalist democratic society where you can buy and sell almost anything. Custom essay writing is legal in almost every jurisdiction (we sure as hell don’t operate where it isn’t) and, with this, there’s no obvious reason why a talented professor can’t get in on “da game.” If the market dictates that the client wants the best possible product, shouldn’t a professor be writing custom academic essays? Considering that I know of at least five other professors who supplement their incomes as academic ghostwriters (two of them tenured), and that according to counsel, this does not violate our employment contracts, it seems that this perception exists in academia itself. My thoughts? Any professor condemning this is either in denial about how far the commoditization of education has gone or a true old school idealist who will soon be replaced by a younger and rabid Unemployed Professor.
Is this all one big cop-out? Does the fact that I write custom essays make me a horrendous person, and an even worse academic/professor? Sure, if that’s what your moral code says! But it’s no more of a cop-out than that which is put forth by the critic who claims that (s)he got through school without ever doing anything like this. Those of us who write custom essays, who call ourselves academic ghostwriters, we do this because there’s a demand for it – and one hell of it at that. What does this reflect? Reality. So, again, “don’t hate da player; hate da game.”
This really helped me to see the UP point of view! “Education is a commodity”.
Hello! Just want to say thank you for this interesting article! =) Peace, Joy.
, there is an implicit aussmption that there exists a One True Meaning and that all others are absolutely wrong. Given the frailty of human wisdom, it seems the height of arrogance to presume that there can be.A broader concern I have is this: why do we need an interpretive theory or reading strategy for text anyways? Given the vast marketplace of interpretive approaches available to us Intentionalism, Objectivism, Textualism, Originalism, Strict Constructionism, Living Constitution, etc.- I often find myself asking what the point of all this is. We are stuck quite often enough in intractable debates about these theories themselves at the expense of actually reading the text. This is what I really enjoyed about Prof. Foy’s article- maybe we should set aside our intellectual commitment to reading theories and just read. That would lead judges to be more honest, and we wouldn’t have insane results like the one Prof. Foy describes in the Chapman case. (But, Prof. Murphy, I do share your concern if judges are urged to be more “honest” about their discretionary choices, maybe this is an invitation to bring ideology to the forefront of the inquiry. Would this be bad?) Perhaps it’s also a function of the way in which law is taught. We teach law in this country at the margins and not at the core. The cases we read in casebooks are freakish outliers with serious, serious issues. As Llewellyn said in Bramble Bush, these cases bear about as much resemblance to ordinary cases as do axe-murderers to average citizens. Because of this, judges and lawyers, inculcated with theory from the Academy days turn to elaborate reading approaches when faced with statutory difficulty because, well, they aren’t trained in anything else, nor are they trained to be wise.True, it is important that one think about one’s thinking. You have to do this in order to expose your own biases and smoke out any inconsistencies. If post-modernism, deconstruction, and hermeneutics have shown us anything to be farcical, it is the Cartesian notion that the reader approaches a text and just purely “analyzes” it, free of bias and outside influence. This does not happen. I suppose the takeaway is that judges ought to judge more conscientious in their decision-making and less committed to theory. I like that, lots.Wow ok I wrote much more on this than I ever intended to. Time to stop now.Loved this paper. Thanks!
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I would not buy any of your products because I do study for my self cognitive development, however, your blog is really interesting to read. You might sometimes forget that education is not a game and should not be taken as game, but you focus on a practical view of the world and given your environment, you might argue that it could be legit to act so but then again, at the end of the day, you go to bed as a dirty capitalist like the ones you seemed to hate before. Good luck your the inner you !
Like I said in a later post, yo, I do admit that I’m a dirty little academic whore. I love it.
luhhhh that.
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