Thirty years ago, I was on faculty at one of the U.K.’s elite Russell Group universities. As the least important person in my department, I was assigned the administrative role that nobody else wanted: exams officer, in charge of overseeing all examinations, from the timetable to the grading. A colleague alerted me to a student paper that had been plagiarized word-for-word from the Encyclopedia Britannica. This was an era before students could easily access such texts online, and so he had done it manually, creating the odd result that the text was a verbatim copy but had multiple errors in punctuation.

Following university procedure, I filed an official charge and went before the university’s committee for academic standards, consisting of some of the top academics at the institution. I opened my case for the prosecution by distributing copies of the student’s paper and the encyclopedia article, stating simply: “If you compare the student’s paper to the encyclopedia article, you will see that it is a verbatim copy, and I find that unacceptable.”

At that point my life changed forever. One of the senior panel members interrupted me: “Why do you find that unacceptable?” I remember the moment clearly because it was one of only a few occasions in my academic life when I was at a complete loss for words. Read more»

Carl Trueman, “How The Therapeutic Killed Academic Standards,” First Things (August 13, 2026).

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