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An anonymous essay by a guy who claims to make a living writing academic papers for students is kicking up some dust over at the Chronicle of Higher Ed — forty comments and counting over the course of the weekend.

What’s really dismaying to me about the kerfuffle is how quick many professors have been to disclaim responsibility for addressing this problem. Four of the first six commenters on the Chronicle essay are teachers who say it’s beyond their powers to put a stop to this kind of cheating in their classrooms, that because of their class sizes or their administrations’ policies, they’re just not able to do anything about the problem.

I just don’t believe it. I just don’t believe that there’s no way for them to address the issue, that they’ve tried everything there is to try and been stymied at every turn. That just doesn’t ring true to me — not on the basis of my own experience nor in light of the comments left by other aggressively anti-cheating professors in the thread.

Combatting cheating and plagiarism takes inventiveness. It takes dedication. It takes flexibility. But it absolutely can be done.

But let’s say I’m wrong. Let’s say that some professors are teaching under circumstances in which they have no ability to resist certain kinds of cheating. There’s still a simple solution to the problem: Don’t use assignments that can be gamed. If you’re not competent to detect and address plagiarism in a term paper, don’t assign term papers. If you can’t stop students from cheating on quizzes, don’t give quizzes. It’s really that simple.

Because if you, as a college professor, create a classroom environment in which students are able to cheat without consequences, you’re rewarding cheating and punishing honest work. You can wring your hands all you like about declining ethical standards, but the situation you deplore is one that you’ve helped to create.

To put it another way, if you’re a teacher or a professor then finding and punishing cheaters is your job. It’s your job in the same way that grading is your job. It’s your job in the same way that facilitating class discussion is your job. It’s your job in the same way that crafting appropriate tests and assignments is your job.

It’s your job, professor. Do your job.

Students in Britain are staging a massive protest against huge fee hikes and staggering cuts to government aid to higher education.

• The country’s National Union of Students estimates that as many as fifty thousand student activists are marching in London at this hour.

• Some 200 students took over the lobby of the Conservative Party’s national headquarters earlier today. Police sources report two cops were injured in clearing the lobby, and protesters remain on the HQ grounds.

• Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democratic Party leader who accepted a senior post in a Conservative-led coalition government earlier this year, has cancelled a planned speaking visit to Oxford University next week. Clegg campaigned on a platform of opposition to student fee hikes, and has been blasted by students for abandoning that position since joining the new administration.

Updates below…

2:30 PM London Time | The Guardian says some twenty student protesters have forced their way back into the Conservative Party HQ after that building was cleared by police. Reports on Twitter say that UK news media are showing footage of a large and growing bonfire outside the HQ building.

3:30 PM London Time | Students are “occupying” the roof of the Conservative Party Headquarters building, according to the Guardian. Their website now carries a photo of a banner hung from that roof reading “FIGHT EVERY CUT — DEFEND EDUCATION.” A reporter on the scene earlier stated that some of those on the roof were throwing objects down at the police below, leading protesters on the ground to begin chanting “stop throwing shit!” The president of Britain’s National Union of Students has repudiated the riot.

3:45 PM London Time | Some background. The Labour Party was in power in Britain for more than a decade until turned out in elections held earlier this year. Labour finished second in a tight three-way race in those elections, and the other two parties — the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives — formed a coalition government, with the right-wing Conservatives taking the lead role. (The Conservatives are also known as the Tories.)

The new coalition announced massive budget cuts throughout Britain’s government last month, including the complete elimination of some university subsidies. Higher education in Britain has traditionally been extremely cheap for British students, but under the new budget tuition fees are slated to rise to as much as $15,000 a year.

The occupation currently underway is at the Conservative Party headquarters building in London, known as Millbank. Millbank and #demo2010, the official hashtag of today’s demonstrations, are both trending topics on Twitter in the UK right now.

4:00 PM London Time | Thanks to a follower on Twitter for a link to this analysis of the government’s “Browne Report” on higher education, the centerpiece of the plan being protested today. Here’s the key passage from the introduction:

Essentially, Browne is contending that we should no longer think of higher education as the provision of a public good, articulated through educational judgment and largely financed by public funds (in recent years supplemented by a relatively small fee element). Instead, we should think of it as a lightly regulated market in which consumer demand, in the form of student choice, is sovereign in determining what is offered by service providers (i.e. universities). The single most radical recommendation in the report, by quite a long way, is the almost complete withdrawal of the present annual block grant that government makes to universities to underwrite their teaching, currently around £3.9 billion. This is more than simply a ‘cut’, even a draconian one: it signals a redefinition of higher education and the retreat of the state from financial responsibility for it.

This approach should be familiar to anyone who’s been following developments in US public higher education recently.

5:00 PM London Time | Reports from Twitter suggest things are calming down at Millbank, though there’s still a large crowd gathered. It’s not clear what’s happened with the the demonstrators on the roof and inside the building. Police are reporting that eight people have been injured, other accounts say most of those were demonstrators.

The research group CIRCLE has a new report out on youth involvement in the 2010 elections, and it’s full of fascinating data, but a few demographic stats thing out at me when I read it:

• Among young voters, 14% of the electorate was black this year. (Just 10% of over-thirty voters were.)

• Seven percent of young voters described themselves as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, compared with 4% of over-thirty voters.

• Young Latinos represented 15% of the youth electorate, but only 14% of the young population as a whole.

What does this all mean? Well, for starters, it’s another nail in the coffin of the “only 4.7% of blacks voted” myth that swept Twitter last week. Blacks voted roughly in line with their proportion of the country’s population, and young blacks — the exact demographic that was so upset about the 4.7% stat — were as likely to vote as young whites.

More generally, it means that the generation of voters coming up now is more diverse — and more progressive — than the ones who came before. Young voters saved the Democratic party from an even more dismal November this year, and the party would do well to remember that going forward. The youth vote is a powerful asset to the Dems right now, but it’s not one they can take for granted.

Yesterday University of California officials announced that they intend to seek an 8% increase in student fees for next fall, bringing the cost of in-state, off-campus attendance to more than twelve thousand dollars a year. This new hike comes on the heels of the 32% fee increase, implemented last fall, that sparked massive student protests throughout the state.

As noted here yesterday, in-state tuition, room, and board in the UC system is already several thousand dollars a year more expensive than average out of state costs nationwide, making it cheaper for California students to study in other states than to stay at home.

The proposal will be voted on at a meeting of the UC Board of Regents next week. Expect fireworks.

Tuition, room, and board for out-of-state students at the University of California at Berkeley topped $50,000 this year, the first time that any public university’s costs have broken that barrier.

But Berkeley, which charges out of state students who live on campus a total of $50,649 in fees, isn’t just the most expensive public university in the country — its rates top those of all but 87 of the nation’s more than a thousand private colleges and universities.

Attendance at Berkeley costs $27,770 for in-state students this year. With the average total cost for out-of-state students at American public colleges and universities standing at $23,526 this year, that means that California’s home-state students are paying more to attend Berkeley than they would to attend a typical state institution at out-of-state rates.

Oh, and Berkeley fees are slated to rise another eight percent next year.