"I'd just as soon be hung for a cow as for a calf," my father is fond of saying. He says this in the spirit of "go big or go home," of course; there is not a lot of livestock theft in the Newfoundland suburbs. The real meaning behind the phrase is that when the risk is no greater, why not double down on the potential reward? If your video store charges a flat penalty of a dollar for not returning an item on time, why not keep it two more days?
The problem, of course, is that the risk is often greater for transgressions more conspicuous. Drive five kilometers over the limit, and a cop will wave you by; drive twenty more, and you are sure to get a ticket.
I could not help but think of this very thing as innocent Iranian protesters were being shot in the street last week. What began as a certain landslide for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad apparently tightened as the vote neared, and then anger erupted as the incumbent was returned with nearly two-thirds of the vote. Some districts returned more ballots than they had registered voters. Recounts have only widened Ahmadinejad's margin.
I will assume that Mirhossein Mousavi won that election. Why else would Iran refuse to demonstrate to its citizens, and to the world at large, that it was fair? But if the results were doctored to benefit Ahmadinejad, why did the Iranian establishment have to give him such an unbelievable percentage of votes cast? Might opposition leaders have accepted that they lost by two or three points and shrugged in resignation? Perhaps not, but you cannot help but conclude that the audaciousness of the fraud came back to haunt the hucksters.
It is the same with academic offenses. Cheaters on assignments seem never satisfied with a purloined fact or two: student miscreants will cut and paste huge sections from the internet, drawing attention to themselves. But, unlike the scenario my father often imagined, the penalty is far more harsh as the transgressions grow more bold.
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