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To me it meant that there were contradictions about what we did and what we said in our culture about who we looked up to and who we made pay for our sins. It also meant that authorship and authoring were far more complicated than could be taught—I myself was about to see this, live it.

Because she had a disciplinary file in the dean’s office, she decided against graduate school and didn’t take the GRE, though she was thinking about graduate school in business. More importantly, though, her self-image as a good girl had been crushed.

I told Haley a bit about how her plagiarism had affected me. How I took it personally, and trusted students a little less; I made sure that assignments were plagiarism-proof. But what she couldn’t know was how I became more confident in spotting an opportunity to instruct, and less interested in policing boundaries—which were, after all, mine to teach. She also couldn’t know that at one point, I’d considered designing a course that would focus on rewriting, rephrasing, riffing, and appropriation as real tools of the writer’s trade. It wouldn’t teach anything that would get anyone in trouble, but unlike other writing courses, it would be honest about where ideas and language come from: well, who knows where they come from, but not from angelic transmissions into our minds.