Mr. Papers arrived promptly at the appointed hour, and we drove to his office for an early morning interview.
Mr. Papers was a big man, standing six feet and weighing more than 200 pounds. Carefully avoiding specifics, he presented a brief account of his past. He said that he had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from "one of the ten best colleges in the country," where he lettered in football and tennis and was editor of the school newspaper. Then, he recounted, he went on to graduate school, obtained his M. A., and moved to California to work towards his doctorate. There he supported himself by teaching at college, and, he said, established a reputation as "a tough teacher who would not tolerate plagiarism."
Last September, Mr. Papers came to Boston. He bummed around here for six months, he said. In February, he spotted several advertisements for term-paper writers in the Phocnix and BAD and began writing papers for Termpapers-Unlimited-which started last fall and was for a while the only term-paper company in Boston other than International. Mr. Papers claims that he turned out as many as 35 papers a week for Termpapers Unlimited.
At the end of the month, he started his own company, a one-man operation, and it was an immediate success. In early April, Mr. Papers took on a business partner, Chris Frazier, and moved to a new office on 334 Beacon St.
"I can't believe this is happening to me," Mr. Papers kept repeating. "Last October, I didn't have enough money to wash my own laundry, Now I'm earning more money than Nate Pusey."
According to Mr. Papers, Universal gets little business from Harvard, and none from Radcliffe.
"A while back," he said, "some students from Harvard had to write papers for some crazy Indian course, and they came flocking down. But I'd say that only four people ended up buying papers. We get most of our business from average students at average schools, like B. U. and Northeastern."
At the end of the interview, I asked Mr. Papers if he had any long-range plans.
"Sure," he replied. "Someday I'd like to be a professor at a college in the Boston area."
THE fourth term-paper service in Boston, and the most unusual, is Quality Bullshit (QBS). Since opening on Feb. 16, QBS has been swarmed with customers, but has been barely able to break even because it charges such low prices. QBS sells papers for $1.50 a page and has sold custom-written papers for as low as $2.25 a page. QBS also gives away one free paper a week to students who are in a particularly desperate situation.
In addition, the company pays its writers handsome fees. A professional writer for QBS receives 75 per cent of the selling price of his paper and pockets a 33 per cent residual on every used paper which is sold.
One of the founders of QBS, Dick Marin, tried to explain just what QBS is trying to do.
"We went into this business for two reasons," Marin said. "First, students were really getting ripped by some of these other companies. Nobody should have to pay $6 a page for a term paper. Second, we wanted to make the colleges around here examine their own faults. Hell, term papers aren't assigned as learning techniques. You can just go into the library, paraphrase a few books, write a lot of footnotes, and you have an A paper. Now, thanks to these term-paper services, maybe the universities will wake up and take a close look at what they're doing."
QBS's low prices and generous attitude have attracted numerous Harvard students. Bob Roth, Marin's co-worker, estimates that more than 100 students from Harvard have bought papers from QBS so far, making Harvard QBS's largest customer on a per capita basis.
"Hell," says Roth, "the idea that only students from B. U. and Northeastern buy term papers is a lot of shit. Harvard students need papers just like everyone else."
The students contacted offered many different reasons for buying papers. Some just didn't want to spend the time researching a topic, while others were honestly afraid of flunking.
A Northeastern senior said that he was buying a paper because of "sheer laziness. When I first came to college," he said, "I actually tried to learn something, so I wrote all my papers, but now I'm married, I've got a part-time job, and I really don't want to hassle a paper on money and banking."
A freshman at Connecticut College described his predicament in this way. "I took Economics 112 and got absolutely lost. I flunked the first test, and I knew I just wasn't going to be able to write any 20 page paper. So when I saw an ad for QBS in the Phocnix I just got in my car and drove straight to Boston."
Writers offer their services for one main reason-money. In the words of one Harvard graduate student, who works for QBS, writing papers is "a damn good way to pick up some extra bucks. Once you learn how to dish out the shit successfully, the whole thing becomes pretty easy," he said.