Business as usual

Anyone who says the Puritan work ethic is dead has not spent sleepless nights muttering expletives and begrudgingly finishing essays. After all, if we dare turn in someone else's work as our own, the IU "Code of Student Rights, Responsibilities and Conduct" warns that we could be given an F on our transcript or potentially even be expelled from the university. Now, these rules are in place on the assumption that hard work pays off, but this is set in an outdated mindset.\nNow, we live in a globally-connected, on-demand, free-market economy. Some believe that the United States is leaning away from being a service-based economy and turning into an intellectual property-based economy.\nBuying and selling ideas is the wave of the future. Ideas are just as much a commodity as the pen and paper we use to write our essays. Why can't we buy and sell essays, too? After all, we're plugged-in to the global marketplace!\nWhat today's educators need is a paradigm shift -- outside-the-box thinking. The ultimate recipe for success is buying somebody else's work and passing it off as your own.\nLook at how things work in the real world. Microsoft bought the rights to NCSA Mosaic and used it to build Internet Explorer, the most popular web browser in the world. Apple paid to use MPEG 4 Advanced Audio Coding in iTunes and purchased exclusive rights to the tiny hard disk drive found in iPod, both of which have been runaway successes.\nThe university can't seriously expect us to be as successful as Microsoft or Apple by studying! As Woody Allen told Jason Biggs in his last movie, "Anything Else," we should "always strive for originality, but if you must steal, steal from the best." You might think it is virtuous to do your own work, earn your own reputation and stand on your own two feet. Who wouldn't admire that? But that's what we would have said in the globally-disconnected, off-demand, closed-market economy of yesteryear. Why produce your own work when you could be a consumer of someone else's?\nBuying and selling academic work could potentially create a booming new industry. With millions of students attending America's colleges -- struggling to balance out their studies, jobs and social lives -- the customer base is there to build an industry that easily adds billions of dollars to our gross domestic product every year.\nJust look at the first sentence of an essay by "Loadstone" at www.cheathouse.com: "When looking at 'To The Lighthouse' we see the conventional usage of feminism's challenged." With a lead like that, who needs to read the rest of the essay? That paper spells \nS-U-X-C-E-S-S to me!\nBut buying essays is only the first step. After that, we should kick it up a notch and start buying exams. How else do you think Enron dominated the energy industry for so many years when it didn't have any money? The company bought all the people who evaluated its business practices, from \naccountants and auditors, all \nthe way up to the federal \ngovernment.\nIn the past, when society chafed under the tyranny of over-regulation, these accountants, auditors and government officials would have given Enron a big fat F on their report card, but not today! Now, we're chafing on the straps of Thomas Friedman's golden straitjacket, and that means more money for everybody! Well, that is, everybody who doesn't feel guilty about cheating in an uninhibited free-market economy.\nIU's policies on academic honesty are a stumbling block on the road to progress! By using Enron, Microsoft and Apple as role-models, our university could become a school of the future! After all, it's not as if the path to success is paved in the virtues of hard work.