Academic honesty and integrity is an old subject with a new urgency. It's old because honesty has always been central to teaching and learning, central to the trust that binds students and faculty together in the university. It has a new urgency because plagiarized work is growing, much of it downloaded from the Internet. With a few clicks, students can cut-and-paste sentences from online encyclopedias, buy answer books for their assigned texts, or purchase entire papers.

The problem is compounded by another fact of university life: larger class sizes. Although large classes save money, they make it harder to supervise student work. It's much cheaper to teach with lectures and teaching assistants than with seminars and faculty tutorials. The savings are important at a time of such high tuitions, but the consequences for student honesty are predictable and unhappy. In small seminars, professors can work with students individually, offer comments on draft papers, and supervise work-in-progress. In large lectures, that's simply impossible. When students have less contact with faculty, they often come to see assignments cynically, as mere transactions for grades.

Deans of students know these problems all too well. In college after college, they report rising problems. National surveys say the same thing. They show marked increases in cheating and plagiarism over the past decade. On anonymous surveys, many high school and college students acknowledge that they cheat, at least occasionally, and that they know many others who do, too.

This rise of academic dishonesty threatens our most basic educational values. Occasionally, the threat is accidental. Some students simply don't know the rules. They don't understand what honest work is, or they don't know how to cite sources properly. Often, though, the threat is deliberate. Students working on history or English papers might drag and drop some Web text without citation. For organic chemistry, they might copy a classmate's answers to a problem set. For computer science, they might "borrow" someone else's programming code and present it as their own. Worst of all, they might buy whole papers from sleazy Web sites. It's even possible to buy papers about ethics and pay for them by credit card—with no surcharge for irony. In each case, the student hopes to escape undetected and win good grades without doing the work or giving credit to those who did.

To staunch this rising tide, educators need to recognize the problem, underscore its gravity, and address it squarely. Faculty, deans, and advisers need to restate our commitment to academic honesty and our shared educational values. That is not just a matter of catching and punishing violators or using threats to deter cheating. That needs to be done, of course, but we need to do more. We need to explain what honest work is. We need to say why it matters so much. And we need to promote the bedrock values of academic integrity. They are essential to our common enterprise of teaching, learning, and research.