The Chronicle: "Fending Off a Plagiarist"

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Kim Lanegran writes about the experience of discovering someone had plagiarized her dissertation, presenting it as his own.

Eventually, her efforts to establish her own innocence (to prove that she wasn't the plagiarist) caused him to lose his degree, his job, and his reputation.

When she shared her story with her students, they were supportive, but she feared that they misunderstood her. They related her saga to her college-wide reputation as a professor who was the terror of campus plagiarists. She feared that the students thought she took some kind of perverse pleasure in checking sources and detecting plagiarist:

Clearly they think it was outrageous that Mr. X plagiarized my work. But they do not yet see that Mr. X got away with what he did precisely because he did not have a professor who checked all of his sources. They do not yet see that I check their sources so that I can teach them a skill and a principle that could keep them from someday losing a degree, a job, or a reputation.