Trahison des Clercs

Le trahison des clercs is an expression referring to situations where members of the intelligentsia, or indeed intelligent people in general, compromise their intellectual integrity for reasons of political or social expediency. I thought this expression was particularly apposite when reading an article about the increasingly common practice among students to pass off work lifted wholesale from the web as their own. My grouse here is not so much with the students themselves, though of course their behaviour is beneath or beyond contempt, as with the less than  outright condemnation of such practices by those in positions of authority. Some teachers, for example, gently reproach their students for failing to credit their sources. Talk about missing the point! If your intention is to pass off somebody else's work as your own, your are hardly likely to give chapter and verse, are you!
That's bad enough, but the real scandal surely is the tendency among many teachers to relativise and "explain" what is after all nothing less than blatant cheating (an anagram of "teaching", I've just noticed!) by saying that today's students are not really aware that what they are doing is wrong. In short, they ask us to believe that young people who have been deemed intelligent enough to get into university can no longer be expected to understand that stealing another person's work constitutes theft and makes a mockery of the whole purpose of university. Unless one contends that the point of a university education is to show that one is proficient at the technique of cutting and pasting!