Speed baking

The Journal follows a third-generation master baker, Wolfgang Schäfer, into the bread aisle of Aldi, a German discount supermarket, where he puts 15 cents into a giant machine labeled “Backofen” (“baking oven”). He pushes a button, and out pops a warm wheat roll:

“Not even two seconds,” says the 55-year-old Mr. Schäfer, who had switched out of a white shirt embroidered with his family bakery’s insignia into a less conspicuous checkered button-down for the stealth fact-finding mission. “Whatever goes on in there, it’s certainly not baking.”

The German Bakers Confederation is actually suing Aldi Süd, owners of Aldi (and, incidentally, of Trader Joe’s here in the United States) for false advertising, saying that the machines can’t really be baking the bread. Aldi Süd, meanwhile, maintains that, though the bread is partially baked somewhere else, a “lengthy build-up of heat” inside the machines “allows the flour to gelatinize...therefore a baking process is taking place.” The stage is set for a legal argument about what “freshly baked” means. Is it about the process, or the product?

Confessions of a college ghostwriter Each fall, college professors dutifully warn their students about the dangers and temptations of plagiarism. Lately, though, worrying about plagiarism has started to feel quaint, even naive. The real cheaters don’t plagiarize anymore — instead, they get their term papers custom-written for them over the Internet. Who mans the dark, satanic mills of academic ghostwriting? Apparently, disaffected and dissolute nerds like “Ed Dante,” who writes pseudonymously in The Chronicle of Higher Education about his role as a “shadow scholar.”

Dante’s luridly self-serving article in the Chronicle is like an academic version of Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground”: It’s the tragic story of a gifted, mopey dork who turns to a life of crime after his university refuses to let him revise his novel for credit. Spurned and disillusioned, he ends up turning tricks for “Miller-swilling” jocks. “Imagine you are crumbling under the weight of university-issued parking tickets and self-doubt, when a frat boy offers you cash to write about Plato,” Dante explains. The temptation is too great, the fateful choice is made: “Word of my services spread quickly,” Dante writes. Today he claims to produce about 5,000 pages of “scholarly literature” each year, earning around $66,000 and working for a company that employs 50 other writers. Business, he says, is booming.

Predictably, Dante defends himself by arguing that he’s just part of a corrupt educational system which is basically uninterested in whether students learn anything. (“As far as I know,” he writes, “not one of my customers has ever been caught”). He laments the “focus on evaluation over education” which he says made his college experience a “tremendous disappointment.”

He’s not entirely delusional. In the same way that the banks fueled a mortgage bubble, universities seem to be fueling a degree bubble. Dante’s job is made possible by institutions that are determined to feed America’s addiction to credentials and certifications. Global demand has to be satisfied, too: Almost every academic ghostwriter who’s written about the experience talks about writing for students who lack English skills. Dante says that he helps his students “master” English.

He’s right, too, to say that the increasing impersonality of education helps his business grow. Witness the recent kerfuffle at the University of Central Florida in which a business professor, Richard Quinn, uncovered widespread cheating among his undergraduates. His emotional gotcha! lecture has become a YouTube hit — but it’s on YouTube in the first place because many students simply watch the lectures from home. In fact, many of Dante’s customers are distance-learners: They give him a username and password so that he can do assignments, take exams, and even participate in online discussions under their names.

In the end, of course, and despite Dante’s protestations, the fact that lots of people cheat doesn’t make cheating less bad. Just the opposite is true: The more people cheat, the more worthless everyone’s degrees become. The whole system weakens from below. When the bubble bursts, everyone will suffer together. For their own good, American universities need to toughen their standards, lest they find their degrees downgraded to “junk” status.

Joshua Rothman is a graduate student and teaching fellow in the Harvard English department and an instructor in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He teaches novels and political writing.