“Absolutely not,” the vice president said. “We are not selling term papers. Our product is intended as an aid for research.”

The speaker was a vice president for one of the new companies responding to accusations that her industry was churning out essays for college students to hand in to their professors as their own.

She denied their service was committing plagiarism.

“We offer a learning tool,” she insisted, and her company merely provided ideas and sources. How college students ultimately used the tool was up to them. But her expectation was that they follow their teacher’s instructions, their school’s policy and the law.

She was addressing me and the rest of a small audience in an office building on LaSalle Street in downtown Chicago, all of us there for “orientation.”

The year w

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