Blum points to the digital revolution as one obvious factor in plagiarism’s rise. With the temptations of Wikipedia a click away, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the resource is ‘now the primary source for students’. Time management is another issue: students’ punishing social schedules and enthusiastic drinking and partying, she argues, give them less time for originality.

Fortunately, Blum isn’t content to round up the usual suspects. Drawing on her anthropological background, she provocatively speculates that younger, social media-savvy generations are distanced from their professors by their having experienced a profound social change surrounding the concept of individuality. Blum traces a fairly recent transition away from the concept of the ‘authentic self’, which is ‘characterized by solitude’, towards the ‘performance self’ with a ‘tendency towards joining’. Because less emphasis is now given to isolated indi-vidual achievement, ‘the performance self is more prone to cheat and plagiarize than the authentic self’.

Blum’s remedies are hefty but sensible. Students need to be told in detail exactly what plagiarism entails, when exceptions are permitted, and how to incorporate sources. Nothing can be assumed. Bringing the conflict of worldviews into the open is the only way of breaking the deadlock. Tough but fair.