The Shadow Scholar

by Dave Tomar

  “Hey. Thanks again for doing this, bro. I really need this.”

  “No sweat, man. Business is business.”

  “Yeah, but I appreciate it. I mean, this shit’s so unfair. I don’t see why I should even have to take this class. I’m going to work in my dad’s firm either way.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah, dude. Maybe we can get you a job, like, writing legal-type shit for the firm.”

  “Yeah, that sounds really great, man.”

  I knew exactly who Sid was through and through. He was a sign of the times. My higher education was happening in simultaneity with the Bush administration, with the War on Terror, with the proliferation of reality TV, and with the collapse of corporate America; on the cusp of a spike in oil prices, just before Hurricane Katrina, at the onset of baseball’s steroid scandal, and in anticipation of the meteoric rise of pricks like Mark Zuckerberg and the precipitous fall of pricks like Ken Lay. We put Donald Trump and Paris Hilton on television to be the first impression we make on the alien races many galaxies away who might stumble upon our satellite transmissions.

  Ah, the hideous faces of the fabulously wealthy in the last era of American privilege.

  George W. Bush always reminded me of one of my customers, the kind who paid for their assignment and handed it in without bothering to read it. CEOs, chairmen of the board, and presidents of the United States pay others to do their research and writing. Then they stand up there and say stuff like “I’ve always believed… America… freedom…” and some crap about family values.

  We know they aren’t writing this stuff. We know they haven’t done the research. We know they probably don’t mean it and possibly don’t even understand it. But these people are preordained to sit in the corner office with potted plants, big windows, and an incredible view while a staff of nerdly underlings scampers about gathering clever factoids and synthesizing comprehensive business reports. Schools are highly feudal. Legacies, mentorships, and cost-prohibitive hierarchies of learning denote that many people with considerably less ability than you and I are destined for a better life. I mean, sure, they may feel terrible on the inside (they also may not), but school is not a problem for them. It’s just another corporation.

  And it’s a corporation that wants them to succeed in order to justify its own enormity. We promise that No Child will be Left Behind, so we nudge them through the shallow waters of public school education until they find themselves in the deep end of the pool, their lives of comfortable indulgence tied to them like ballasts of concrete.

  We are raised to believe that we can be whatever we want to be, we can have whatever we want to have, we can do whatever we set our wallets to. Of course, we are also raised to compete. As Marx notes about a capitalist society, in order for one to have, another must have not. The grading curve is an excellent demonstration of this principle. You can’t get a good grade unless you’re better at something than your classmates. So there is a basic, obvious flaw in the idea that everyone is entitled to a good grade if they work for it. My customers are people whose work ethic (and often intellectual tools) should make them have-nots, but whose aristocratic means convince them otherwise. Nobody bluntly confronted these people with their own limitations or found a way to encourage them to overcome these limitations.

  That’s a real shame, because the challenges before this generation will be truly humbling. A generation that insists on updating its online status every time one of its members takes a dump doesn’t know the meaning of the word “humble.” So it lives in denial, expecting that it can always spend the dollars, make the purchases, and be awarded the customer service to succeed in life.

  Later on in my career as a paper writer, I would come to know intimately this sense of entitlement, which came spewing out of the occasional disgruntled client.

  Here, an unhappy customer asks for a revision of an assignment I’ve completed.

  The paper is not Master’s level, is poorly written, does not follow APA format and does not include all the necessary criteria that I submitted… Sentence structure is awkward and reads as if written by someone whose first language is not English… APA format is not followed, see sources cited within the paper… The structure of the information is disjointed and difficult to read…

  It goes on for a while, actually. She really takes the time to write a well-thought-out, rationally organized, and essentially accurate essay about how my essay sucked. All of a sudden, she was this brilliant writing critic. And her response to my work revealed her to possess the traits of another of Generation Y’s great archetypes: the pragmatist.

  The values, the ethics, the feeling of satisfaction that one is supposed to have in a job well done? These exist. But they are simply factors in a decision that every student makes. They are not everything, they are not encompassing, and for many students, they are in the minority, grouped with other reasons not to cheat, such as the fear of getting caught and the lost opportunity for personal enlightenment. In the majority are the pressures to get good grades; the need to hide one’s deficiencies; the importance of receiving a degree; the necessity of justifying the considerable expense of one’s education; the need to compete for a job in a difficult market; the desire for the attainment of status; the aim of achieving personal freedom; the perception that ethics are secondary to success; the pressure placed upon one by family and friends; excessively heavy workloads; sheer laziness; and a greater interest in sports/drinking/ recreational drugs/promiscuous sex/Magic: The Gathering/fill-in-the-blank than in one’s studies. Naturally, these are not all of the elements of the equation, but this is the nature of the decision that all students make when they determine how they will approach their studies, if at all.

  Sid was at least somewhat pragmatic, which is why he needed me. He would not see his transfer to a better school sidetracked by a basic compositional writing course. Rutgers is on the Raritan River, a primary source of drinking water for the region and a historically popular dumping ground for toxic and industrial waste. I imagine that rowing on it is a harrowing experience. Sid needed this transfer. Expository writing, and school in general, would not stand in the way of his future.

  He was destined for a more reputable school. He was destined for a higher professional post. He was destined to row on a river more water than feces.

  I had already written three papers for him, and, of course, he was totally hooked. I think Sid was probably giving his TA a lot of credit in assuming that he was actually reading the assignments, but I wasn’t about to blow it with a repeat customer.

  “I’ve been getting pretty good grades, bro. Keep up the good work.”

  “Don’t mention it, buddy. I’m happy to help.”

  “Yeah, so, how much would you charge for a little tutoring, then?”

  “Like, what kind?”

  “Well, I have to do an in-class writing test at the end of the semester, and it’s supposed to show my progress.”

  “Have you been making any progress with the in-class stuff?”

  “No. My peer-review partner is a fucking bitch.”

  “Hmmm.”

  Sid pulled a wrinkled sheet of loose-leaf from his folder and handed it to me. It had been savaged by the red ink of disapproval.

  “Here! Look!” He thrust it into my hands and smashed a particularly dense cluster of red markings with the tip of his index finger. “Now just what the hell is wrong with this sentence? What does she mean, ‘Fix phrasing’?”

  I read the sentence over a few times. I had no idea what it meant. No idea. At all.

  This guy was beyond my help.

  But I did my best to help him anyway. I continued to write his papers, but I also trained him for his in-class final. I charged him for both. I taught him the standard formatting for an expository essay. I broke it down in simple terms. I told him how to write an introduction by funneling down from a general statement on his subject to a specific thesis argument. I told him to use the thesis to outline three
pieces of evidence from the text to support his argument. I explained that he should use these three pieces of evidence as the basis for the three supporting paragraphs. I told him to use a quote from the text in each paragraph and showed him how to cite the source text. I explained that the conclusion should be a restatement of the main idea and an explanation of how the argument was either confirmed or refuted by the supporting paragraphs.

  He said, “Nobody ever explained it like that to me before.”

  I doubted that it would really matter, though. He’d gotten this far without ever learning how to write. It was all a means to an end, anyway. That end is different for each student, but it is rarely the accumulation of knowledge for its own sake.

  So suggests a recent cheating scandal making headlines in Sid’s own backyard. In September 2011, Great Neck North High School graduate Sam Eshaghoff was arrested on charges of falsifying his identity in order to take the SAT college entrance boards on behalf of paying customers from his affluent Long Island region. Also arrested were a number of his customers. Since then, according to an article in the New York Times, “the Nassau County district attorney’s office has broadened its inquiry into suspected cheating on college admissions exams to at least 35 students in five schools, including students believed to have paid for a stand-in to take the ACT, a standardized test that is growing in popularity in the Northeast, as well as the more common SAT.”3

  The scandal, which at the time of this writing was still under investigation, demonstrates both students’ sense of the importance of performance in college entrance exams and the kind of emphasis that they place upon it. First, to the sense of importance, it is evident that students who were willing to invest various large sums of money and risk personal and professional ruin felt that they were under significant pressure to succeed. Second, as to the kind of emphasis, the students perceived that a score that might make the difference between a poorly funded state school and a vaunted private university was easily worth the investment of several thousand dollars.

  According to a 2011 news report, Eshaghoff’s prices started at fifteen hundred dollars and went up from there. The report also notes that “on an exam whose perfect score is 2400, he delivered the goods for his customers. ‘Some of the scores,’ Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice said at a newsconference, ‘were 2220, 2180, 2170.’ “4 Most of the students accused of paying for Eshaghoff’s services defied the odds of their poor classroom performances during high school and went on to prestigious colleges. And according to an article produced by Reuters, the highest reported payment accepted by Eshaghoff was a sum of thirty-six hundred dollars.5

  That the widening inquiry on this subject envelops a region filled with wealthy, high-performing student demographics demonstrates the infiltration of certain consumerist principles into the process of college entrance. And because higher performance on college entrance exams does carry significant and potentially lifelong implications for one’s earning potential, both the investment made and the risk taken by the offenders ensnared by this inquiry—as well as by those countless others who have most assuredly exploited without ever being caught the vulnerabilities of a system too highly staked on standardized testing—can be defended, if not as ethical, at least as rational and pragmatic.

  For many people of the Millennial generation, there is a rational pragmatism to cheating that did not exist for previous generations. Certainly the accessibility created by the Web strengthens the argument in favor of cheating. But quite frankly, there are a good handful of arguments in favor of cheating that speak to the logic of this generation’s experience. Its experience suggests to many of its members not only that they are entitled to certain outcomes but also that this entitlement makes pragmatic and arguably necessary certain behaviors that traditional ethics tell us are wrong and evil.

  Sid never for a second questioned the value of my services. And I suspect there was no reason he should have. The last time I saw him was at a party the week after our tutoring session.

  “Yo, bro! Come have a drink with me. You are awesome!”

  “Hey man, I take it your in-class final went well?”

  “Oh, fuck that shit. I already got my transfer, man. Found out the day before. Shit, I don’t even know what I wrote. Hah!”

  Suddenly, I knew the gratification that Sid’s teachers must feel.

  So Sid went off to NYU the next year, and probably, thereafter, to a reputable law school and a job in a corner office with potted plants, big windows, and an incredible view. I stayed at Rutgers, where the view could be described as gritty at best. But at least I was getting my career off the ground.

  Pragmatism abounded at Rutgers. By my senior year, I had developed a pretty streamlined system, including a set of rules that I stated to all of my clients at the outset. I was to be paid in total up front. The assignment would be delivered by the requested due date and according to the specifications made by the client. Cost would be determined per page and based on how long I had to complete the assignment. If the client received the work and was not satisfied that the specifications had been met, I would be willing to grant an edit. However, once the work was handed in to a professor, all bets were off. I could not personally endorse the act of plagiarism and therefore would note that I did not recommend handing in the custom-written “study guide” for a grade. Thus, I did not guarantee grades. No refunds would ever be issued on the basis of a grade.

  I began receiving phone calls from strangers who had heard of my service. I received the calls with total professionalism. I posed a standard line of questions to each individual. How long is the paper? When is it due? What is the subject matter? Are any specific source texts required? Can you provide said texts? Based on these answers, I would quote a price, and we would set a meeting time and location for the exchange of materials.

  During one such phone call, which occurred in the moments before the start of my Basic Acting elective, I leaned on the edge of the stage recording the details of a new assignment. When I hung up the phone, a pretty blonde girl from the class approached me. How exciting. What could this lovely lady want?

  “Do you write papers?”

  Oh. Of course.

  “Sure. What do you need?”

  “No, actually, I don’t need a paper.”

  Oh? Sweet.

  “No. I wanted to tell you, my boyfriend…”

  D’oh!

  “… my boyfriend works for a company online that writes papers for students. He makes, like, thousands of dollars a month from it.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. You should e-mail him. There’s a lot of money in this.”

  Indeed. It was the fall of 2001 when I entered into the nerdly realm of the academic underground. By the approach of my graduation in the spring of 2002, I had long since dispensed with any illusions about doing my own work. I showed up for and passed tests. That was all. I was far too busy doing other people’s work. Perhaps my wealthier classmates had the luxury to care about their grades. I cared about getting by with the only marketable skill that I had. We’re a generation of pragmatic opportunists, and I would be damned if I was going to give away the only thing I had for free.

  3

  The RU Screw

  I am not a homicidal maniac.

  But I swear, in my weaker moments at Rutgers, I would be cruising through the parking lot, and I’d see one of those meter maids out there with his dumb-ass badge and his pad of tickets, and I’d think to myself, “There’s nobody here. It’s just me and him. All I have to do is jerk the steering wheel to the right, swerve into him, and mash him up into that Ford Taurus he’s about to write up.”

  No one would know. No one would miss him. But then, of course, another one would just spawn from the oozing sludge he left behind. I never did kill a parking attendant at Rutgers, but I might have been a folk hero if I had.

  I wish this were a tangent. I wish that parking tickets had less of a defining role in my experiences at
college. Problem is, Parking and Transportation Services was the most efficiently run department in the entire university. It was as if all of the school’s resources had been dedicated to punishing scofflaw parkers, and the manpower and resources left for meaningful academic assistance, quality control, and psychological counseling had been utterly depleted.

  No department was as well organized as Parking and Transportation. The school couldn’t issue you a schedule without two overlapping classes. It couldn’t approve your financial aid without losing your paperwork. It couldn’t print your transcript without accidentally faxing your medical records to the student listserv. But if your meter had expired twenty seconds ago, you could be damn sure that a parking attendant was already writing your ticket out nineteen seconds ago. Such graceful efficiency.

  Rutgers is big, old, and unfriendly. It’s like going to school in Dick Cheney.

  Rutgers is also, like most colleges, a business. And that’s fine and important. But colleges are a special kind of business. It’s not simply that some colleges are structured more like corporations than like places of learning. It’s that many colleges are shitty businesses that don’t give a crap about customer service or quality assurance. They function like your conglomerated cable providers and your giant cell phone carriers and all those other companies that happily take your business but also let you know in no uncertain terms that you need them more than they need you. And when a whole oligarchy of these shitty businesses gets together and agrees to keep prices prohibitively high, classes vastly impersonal, and opportunities for entrance locked into a universally streamlined admissions process, the result is a college experience not unlike a five-year afternoon at the DMV.

  Rutgers University treated its students like it didn’t really need their loyalty or affection. Those who gave it freely must have found what they were looking for at the sprawling, ghetto-bound school. I can’t speak to everybody’s experience there. And quite honestly, some of my friends even reflect warmly and nostalgically upon their time there.