Crackdown on Fakes

Sunday, 8:15 p.m. A junior at the University of Miami walks into the dingy third-floor office of "Universal International Termpapers Limited, Inc." He scribbles out his order and hands it to the clerk. "I'm sorry," she says, "we don't have that paper in stock. We'll have to order it." The clerk dials the firm's main office in Boston and then attaches the telephone receiver to a copying machine. A few minutes later, page after page of an impressively researched paper, transmitted from Boston, rolls off the copier . . .

From a modest beginning in the Boston area a year ago (TIME, April 19), the buying and selling of fake term papers has grown into a nationwide, multimillion-dollar business. Ads in major campus newspapers have attracted thousands of students, who pay the going rate of $3 per page on any subject from Donne's Holy Sonnets to the United Auto Workers. Although there are no reliable figures on the number of fakes turned in every month, many educators agree with Robert Laudicina, a dean of students at Fairleigh Dickinson University: "At this point, these term-paper mills are beginning seriously to threaten the whole educational system."

For months, the universities and the police equivocated on how to combat the threat. Then, last month, the counterattack began in New York, where State Attorney General Louis Lefkowitz began court action to close down Termpapers, Inc., one of the largest purveyors of ghost-written reports in the state. By dealing in term papers, Lefkowitz's office charged, the firm has subverted the educational process. Shortly thereafter, State Assemblyman Leonard Stavisky, who teaches American history and government at the City University of New York, announced that he is introducing legislation to make the sale of term papers a misdemeanor punishable by fine and imprisonment. Now Lefkowitz's office has subpoenaed the corporate records of another New York firm, Minuteman Research, Inc., which the state claims received 23 term papers stolen from Harvard professors.

The New York moves have spurred legal action in other states. The Massachusetts attorney general has started an investigation of term-paper mills. California's State Colleges Chief Counsel Richard Grey has prepared legislation aimed at putting them out of business. At Harvard, General Counsel Daniel Steiner is considering suits against all term-paper companies for breaching "an implicit educational contract" between colleges and students.

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