Reflecting on my first year as a faculty head of house in The Commons for first-year students, these are a reasonably representative sample of the questions I’ve fielded from inquisitive (and sometimes concerned) colleagues at Vanderbilt. Sometimes the assumption appears to be that as a live-in professor, you’ve become a sort of cross between Steve Martin in Cheaper by the Dozen and Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society.

Mark Dalhouse (holding son Braden); his wife, Mary Ellen (holding son Teddy); and their dog Bailey, are joined by a few East House cohabitants.

Whether encouraging our sons to take that first step across the apartment floor or watching East House residents take those first steps away from their parents as they said goodbye that August weekend, I’ve lived through a dizzying array of “firsts” that seem to touch upon some of life’s most basic transitions.

As my friend and dean, Frank Wcislo, said to me as we watched parents move their children into East House while my sons scurried about, “This is you in 17 years, Dalhouse.”

As a new parent and new faculty head of house, I have found it to be a remarkable trek.

I came to the job with some inkling of what to expect. As a newly minted Ph.D. in a tough job market 18 years ago, I had taken my first professional position as a residence hall director and part-time faculty member in a first-year residence hall at Miami University of Ohio. In that job I was responsible for managing a student resident staff and handling discipline. I lived through a gamut of experiences ranging from the tragic—a student arrested for drug dealing during the first week of school, to comic—my residents petitioning the dean for academic credit in astronomy because a faulty fire alarm had them evacuating the building and gazing at the stars at 2 a.m. on successive nights. (Yes, they really did petition the dean, and no, their entreaty was not successful.)

So I felt reasonably prepared for experiencing The Commons. My residence hall experience also left me with an abiding respect for the student life professionals at Vanderbilt who so ably run the halls and work tirelessly to promote student development.

This time, however, I was being asked to serve in a completely different role. I was the faculty head of house, the intellectual presence and mentor for 96 students beginning the most important academic journey of their lives.

What did that mean for my professional life at Vanderbilt? My days had, until then, a reasonable approximation of a beginning and an end. Now I would be living at work. And my work now would mean cultivating the life of the mind outside the usual comfortable confines of classroom and office.

More to the point, what did this mean for my students? In living out the answer to those questions during the past year, the single most important thing I have learned as a faculty head of house has been the power of presence.

I began the year with an ambitious programming plan that now, from the vantage point of a year out, seems almost quaint. I seemed not to have remembered that somewhere during the day, my students needed to eat, do laundry, participate in social life and study. What I saw instead, as my packed programming scheme gave way under the realities of student life, was the emergence of something much more meaningful. I didn’t need to create a second curriculum. I needed to be there.

The inaugural year of The Commons coincided, happily for a historian of American politics, with the most riveting election since 1968. Opening up our residence and watching with students as Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain gave their acceptance speeches; watching the candidates debate throughout the fall; and finally sitting with my students on that climactic election night when history was made—these all spawned innumerable conversations about what all of this meant collectively for us as a nation.

It also, more often than not, led from the global to the local. “How is that class going?” “How are your parents?” “How are you and your roommate getting along?” Around the time of the election in the fall, we also began what became the single most successful program in East House: our weekly Fireside Chats (remember the American politics angle?). Every Wednesday night at 9, we put hot chocolate and cookies out in the lobby. It was a very simple concept, yet a very profound one.

Out of those weekly conversations grew relationships, one student at a time. And out of those relationships came the intellectual mentoring—the sharing of a book, discussing a news item, offering advice on a research paper—that I wanted for my students. The Fireside Chats became a community staple for East House. Wednesdays we came together, and through it I began 96 relationships that continued through the year, and that continue today. We became a family.

I could not write about this memorable year without paying tribute to the nine other people who also became faculty heads of house. All accomplished scholars, all burning to make a difference in the lives of students, these nine remarkable colleagues, friends and family became wonderful companions on this journey. We felt ourselves a unique fraternity on campus—a band of brothers and sisters. We were the first heads of house. I cannot imagine this journey without them.

Much like my sons have done during this past year, my residents also taught me.

Through their eyes and experience, I felt the excitement of Election ’08, I felt the anxiety as our nation’s economic woes deepened, and I felt the sense of accomplishment as we finished the year together. The first-year experience encompassed all of us—both students and heads of house.

So I am holding up very well. I don’t mind loud music (and actually, there is less than you might think). I welcome the knocks at the door. I have learned that some of the most significant learning this year happened not in the classroom, but in the serendipitous moments that no amount of curriculum planning could have anticipated or planned.

My “family” has grown and expanded in ways I scarcely could have imagined a year ago, and it is a journey I would not trade for the world.

Jenny is an outgoing, always smiling 40-year-old who has been badly crippled with rheumatoid arthritis since her early 20s. Despite gnarled, twisted hands, crooked feet, and such neck pain that she often can’t sit up for more than a few minutes at a time, she has made it clear that her disease is not going to control her life. She simply refuses to give up, and her spirit is a source of great inspiration to her friends as well as to her doctors and nurses. I always look forward to seeing her. Besides, for the past couple of years she has finally begun to respond to some new medicines, and at her last visit three months ago she was feeling better than she had in years. However, when she returned last week, it was quickly apparent that something was terribly wrong.

After a smile and a feeble “hello,” she suddenly began crying, and through her tears she told me about her unrelenting pain and about the humiliation of having to rely on her friends to help her eat, bathe, and tend to her bathroom needs. After she partially regained her composure, Jenny told me that a couple of months ago, she had been unceremoniously dumped from TennCare, the state of Tennessee’s health-care insurance program, because she was no longer Medicaid eligible. She had previously qualified for TennCare because she was medically uninsurable, but the fact that she has a few meager assets like an old car got her kicked out of the program.

www.uninsuredwristband.com

Jenny is a college graduate and has held a number of responsible jobs in the past, but her only income now is her disability check. The drug regimen that had finally brought a measure of relief costs almost a thousand dollars per month, so when she was dropped from TennCare, she literally had to choose between food and medicine. She stopped her medicines, and within a couple of weeks her disease roared back.

We pride ourselves on our health care in this country, and it is true that our technology outstrips the rest of the world. However, people like Jenny would be better off if they lived in any other Western-style democracy because all the countries of Western Europe plus Canada, Australia, Japan and many others have decided that access to decent health care is a right of citizenship.

Among the world’s industrialized democracies, we alone have huge numbers of people without health insurance. That number is now around 46 million and probably growing as states struggle with budget shortfalls. It is sometimes difficult to put things in perspective while history is being written. I remember one of my daughters studying segregation in the South when she was in junior high school. One night she looked up at me and asked, “Why did people let it happen?” I had no answer.

As one who grew up in the segregated South, I realized at a pretty early age that black people were treated unfairly, that “separate but equal” was a sham, and that no moral justification existed for the status quo. Yet I, and nearly all white people, went about our daily lives giving little thought to the situation.

The fact is that contact between blacks and whites was minimal, and what little there was almost always had the black person in a subservient role. Later on, when I was in college at Vanderbilt, I had late-night dorm discussions with friends from the Deep South. They insisted that they “knew” black people because they had been around them all their lives, unlike me. But when I questioned my friends further, I learned the black people they were talking about were almost always children of domestic workers or the like. Meaningful relationships were rare.

So, despite the fact that millions of people were suffering from our laws, we whites managed to live with ourselves by the usual techniques or rationalizations. We dehumanized black people by using ugly words to describe them. We joked about them, with the jokes usually ending up with the black person looking stupid. We told stories that blamed blacks for their situation by implying a poor work ethic, dishonesty or other faults. I can even remember my grandmother, a devout Christian, telling me that if God had wanted the races to mix, He would have made us all the same.

Today’s young people just don’t buy all that. They look at me and ask how in the world we allowed segregation to exist for so long. And in reality, I have no acceptable answer. However, I sometimes ask if they can think of an analogous situation in America today. Are there people who are suffering unjustly because of our current public policies, similar to how blacks suffered under segregation?

They usually stare blankly, smugly confident that their generation would not tolerate such injustice. And then I remind them of an ugly, uniquely American fact: Alone among industrialized countries, the United States allows a huge proportion of its people to go without health insurance. More than 15 percent of the population—46 million people including as many as 10 million children—do not have access to adequate health care. And the consequences are very real, resulting in poorer care for children with asthma, diabetes and other conditions, much less the lack of preventive care, higher death rates and even financial ruin.

That’s when the conversation gets interesting. “That’s just not the same,” they say, or, “We just can’t afford it” or, “How can we insure them if they won’t take care of themselves?” I point out that the answers remind me of the things white people said in the 1950s. By implying that the problem is just too big to solve, and even worse, by implying that the uninsured are somehow responsible for their predicament, we deflect the conversation from the real issue.

In many ways the problem of the uninsured is even more complex than segregation. While most of the time meaningful contact between blacks and whites was rare, we knew who they were. With the uninsured, we can’t even see them. When we go to the grocery, chances are huge that some of the people checking out in front of us are terrified of their next illness, or are being denied good preventive care for their high blood pressure or diabetes, or face bankruptcy because of medical bills, and we don’t know who they are. They are truly invisible. An invisible nation of 46 million people lives within our borders, and we don’t even know who they are.

Maybe part of the problem is statistics. Numbers, even big numbers, don’t tell the whole story. In fact, they may actually blur the fact that every number represents one individual, and by focusing on statistics we don’t clearly portray the degree of pain and suffering these individuals are experiencing. In fact, we may even be pleased when we read that removing people like Jenny “cleans up” the TennCare rolls.

Like segregation, the issue of health care for the uninsured is fundamentally a moral one. We can argue this and that about the details, but one thing is certain: Just as our children don’t understand how we tolerated segregation, our grandchildren will wonder how we could have allowed this to happen. What will we tell them?

A week later the man returns to his physician—still with symptoms of atrial fibrillation, and now with extensive bruising caused by excess warfarin.

Fast forward to October 2020: Different patient, same symptoms. While the physician and patient discuss atrial fibrillation and its potential treatment, the computerized medical information system interrogates the patient’s DNA sequence, which was obtained and archived on his personal medical Web site in 2012. The interrogation identifies variants that likely pre-disposed the patient to the abnormal rhythm. Based on the specific genes involved, a medicine with more than a 95 percent chance of suppressing his symptoms is prescribed. The interrogation reports variants in the genes responsible for degradation of warfarin, and a safer starting dose, 2 milligrams a day, is suggested.

It is axiomatic that not every patient responds to drugs in an identical fashion. Similarly, we vary in our susceptibility to most diseases like infections, Alzheimer’s or cancer. The idea that this variability lies in our genes has been widely accepted for decades—but which genes? And can knowing which genes help us better to care for patients?

Vanderbilt is positioned to be a leader in answering these questions and moving the 2020 scenario to reality. In 2004, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, recognizing the opportunities as well as the challenges in implementing a genome-based view of 21st-century medicine, committed to the creation of a large DNA databank—a project now termed “BioVU.”

The university now has, by far, the largest DNA biobank in the country. During the course of the next several years, it will grow into one of the largest worldwide. BioVU’s overriding aim is to serve as a very large clinical laboratory in which questions like those posed above can be addressed.

Building such a capability is a team effort, and VUMC is uniquely poised to bring that team together. Translational science, the idea of bringing advances at the laboratory bench to the bedside and vice versa, has been a traditional strength of ours. The Division of Clinical Pharmacology has had a decades-long interest in the mechanisms underlying variability in response to drug treatment in humans and is a world leader in identifying genetic causes for such variability. Vanderbilt’s Center for Human Genetic Research has become a leader in the application of new genomic technologies to understand disease susceptibility.

Nationally and internationally, Vanderbilt’s capabilities in the discipline of biomedical informatics are second to none. Vanderbilt’s Department of Biomedical Informatics is the largest in the country by far, reflecting a commitment to information technology and medicine made almost two decades ago.

Before we delve deeper into Vanderbilt’s plans, though, a quick refresher on genetics and DNA may prove useful.

A Primer in Modern Genetics

The classic pea-cultivation experiments of the Bohemian monk Gregor Mendel in the late 19th century established the basic ground rules for modern genetics and how diseases can be transmitted in families. Mendel had no idea how this process worked at the molecular level. Indeed, it was not until the 1950s that the mechanism for transmitting genetic information from parent to child and from cell to cell was identified and represented accurately in the now-familiar model of the DNA double helix structure. Cells use the 3-billion-letter-long biochemical code to manufacture proteins—the molecules that determine virtually all cellular functions.

The discovery of DNA as the carrier of the code led quickly to identification of very small changes in its sequence—termed “mutations”—that cause thousands of rare diseases like sickle cell anemia or cystic fibrosis. For the family affected, the consequences of a mutation can be devastating. A huge effort has gone into identifying mutations, understanding how they affect cellular function, and developing methods for early diagnosis and treatment.

But genetics determine common characteristics as well: You look like your grandfather; your uncle had high blood pressure, and so do you; people in your family react badly to some medicines.

As a medical student in the 1970s, I was taught that common diseases like cancer, atherosclerosis or Alzheimer’s disease include a “genetic component,” but that’s about as far as things got. The notion of actually naming those genes was far-fetched. In the 1980s, however, two apparently unrelated events spawned a revolution in modern genetics that is now identifying those genes and many others that contribute to the ways we differ in our disease susceptibility or drug responses.

The first event was development of the “polymerase chain reaction,” a simple method to rapidly generate large quantities of DNA that can then be analyzed in myriad ways in the laboratory. The second was the very rapid acceleration of information technology.

The merging of these two advances 

allowed researchers to generate and share DNA sequence—from humans and other animals down to bacteria. So during the 1980s it became increasingly clear that each human being carries millions of DNA variants.

Only a few variants, however, cause diseases like sickle cell anemia. One reasonable idea is that those millions of others, which we term polymorphisms, contribute to variability in the way we respond to our environment: to viruses, drugs or toxins, for example.

This change in emphasis from rare disease-associated mutations to common polymorphisms was accompanied by a change in terminology. Studying one gene at a time is one way of thinking about “genetics,” while studying large collections of genes in a patient or a population is now termed “genomics.”

Amazing new technologies that can generate precise sequences of very long stretches of DNA have enabled genomic experiments. The first full sequence of a human genome (the “Human Genome Project”) was completed in 2000, took three years, and cost about $300 million. A next step, the creation of a catalog of several million common polymorphisms—ones shared by 1 to 50 percent of all humans—has been largely accomplished. Since 2005 this catalog has allowed researchers to identify regions of DNA, and sometimes specific variants, that increase risk for dozens of common diseases by 50 to 100 percent.

But that resource pertains only to the common variants; each of us also harbors millions of rare (less than 1 percent frequency) variants. The technology to find these is also on the horizon. Within five years (some say as soon as two years), we will be able to generate a full DNA sequence from any individual in less than 15 minutes. The cost to do so will be $1,000 or less, and because one’s DNA doesn’t change, it will be a once-in-a-lifetime expense.

Data Isn’t Information, and Information Isn’t Knowledge

The idea that we all harbor both rare and common DNA-sequence variants that make us like our grandparents, predispose us to disease, or cause us to have unusual drug reactions is at the heart of modern medicine. We are now at the threshold of actually knowing those variants and applying them to routine patient care.

Huge obstacles must be overcome, however, before that vision can even approach reality. How can we translate billions of pieces of raw data into useable information? Which of these DNA-sequence variants makes a difference? Does a large group of patients fare better if a disease is treated with drugs prescribed based on individual DNA sequences, or if everyone is given the same dose of the same drug? How much better? Is it cheaper? How much cheaper? How is that best measured? Is there a likelihood of discrimination (for jobs or insurance, for example) based on genetic sequences? Does a genetic sequence guarantee a disease or abnormal drug response, or does it merely predispose? How do multiple genetic variants interact with each other and with environmental stressors to which we all are subject every day? Can lives be saved by avoiding life-threatening drug reactions that are genetically determined?

During the next several years, it should be possible to begin answering these questions—to begin to use the raw data we can generate right now to create the knowledge that will impact patient care.

BioVU

The BioVU project entered a three-year planning phase in 2004. Focus groups were conducted, sample handling and storage mechanisms were developed, and a plan for sample accrual was put in place.

Our electronic medical-record systems support all patient care at VUMC. They can be “mined” for information, such as outcomes of drug treatment, and can provide a platform for delivering patient-specific information—such as drug interactions (now) or genetic information (soon)—to prescribers.

Patients receiving treatment at VUMC now sign a new “consent to treat” form that features a prominently displayed box that allows a patient to opt out of participation in the BioVU project. Only samples that are left over after being obtained for routine clinical testing, and that also include a signed consent form without a mark in the opt-out box, are accrued into the databank.

Because of this unique design, the project is reviewed and has continuing oversight at many levels, including by Medical Center and external ethics boards, the Institutional Review Board that reviews all human-subjects research at Vanderbilt, the Medical Center’s legal department, the federal office responsible for human-subjects oversight, and a community advisory board made up of patients and lay representatives.

The opt-out approach has advantages and disadvantages.

The only information available about the diseases of a particular individual or drugs used by that person is the data contained in the electronic medical record, so new computer methods are in development to mine this information effectively. If a researcher needs information that is not in the electronic medical record (details of food intake or extensive family history, for example), BioVU may not be the most suitable platform for their work. Privacy and data security are continuing focuses of the project; indeed, propelled largely by BioVU, Vanderbilt is developing into a national center of excellence for work in this area.

One major advantage is that the resource is “real world,” with records containing many different diagnoses and drug therapies. Another advantage of the approach is scale: The project began collecting samples in spring 2007 and, by June 2008, had surpassed 40,000 samples—making it easily the largest DNA biobank in the country. 

What Could BioVU Accomplish?

Just getting the DNA databank project off the ground has been an enormous undertaking. It already has generated national and international recognition for Vanderbilt Medical Center because of its vision and commitment to the project. BioVU and the Department of Biomedical Informatics are key partners in a network launched by the National Human Genome Research Institute to explore the utility of DNA biobanks linked to electronic medical-record systems. Most recently, the federal government awarded VUMC $1 million to purchase a robot for sample handling.

BioVU will be a crucial national resource in understanding how to get new genome science to the bedside to improve patient care. The databank will be invaluable to studies of the role played by genetics in the development of complications like kidney disease or amputation in diabetes, drugs used to treat common diseases like HIV or depression, survival of cancer, and many other diverse scenarios.

BioVU also is serving as a platform for the development of new science in the study of data privacy and security, and will be an integral partner in electronic surveillance to identify side effects of both new and old drugs.

We are only beginning to realize the promise of the BioVU DNA Databank Project. The ability to generate very large sets of records with defined diseases and controls offers us opportunities to understand not only how genetic variation affects outcomes in VUMC patients, but how that information can be coupled to advanced information technology to actually deliver improved health care. The July 2020 vision will become reality, and VUMC will have played a huge role in creating that reality. 

Dr. Dan Roden is a professor of medicine and pharmacology, director of the Oates Institute for Experimental Therapeutics, and assistant vice chancellor for personalized medicine at the 

Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. He is the principal investigator for the BioVU Project.

A few years ago I taught a non-majors chemistry course at Vanderbilt. I wanted to make the class relevant, so I had the students write a paper about the application of chemistry to everyday things. Students wrote about Dead Sea salts, Gatorade, NASCAR tires, and the chemistry of love. It was exciting to read these nuggets. Some of the papers were so good that I wanted to use the material for future courses. So I googled the references, and there in front of me were paragraphs of plagiarized material. After three instances I began to look for the plagiarized material and was shocked at the enormity of the problem. Fully one-third of my class had handed in plagiarized papers.

What had I done as an instructor to make these students believe that the only way they could be successful was by cheating? What was my responsibility in this charade? Was the assignment clear? Was it meaningful? Did they really understand plagiarism? I was distraught because I felt that I had failed my students.

In its mild form, plagiarism is quite prevalent. Every student has a few sentences here and there that are inadvertently plagiarized or too closely paraphrased. However, it is widely believed that plagiarism is on the rise and, depending upon the institution, anywhere from 38 to 76 percent of students admit to the practice at least once during their college career.

As recently as 15 years ago, gathering research information meant physically going to the library and searching though antiquated card catalogs, flipping three-by-five-inch index cards for hours on end to find just the right book. As you searched for one item, you inevitably came across 10 more items that caught your eye. Getting information was hard work and required skills that had to be learned through trial and error.

Today every piece of information you can imagine is on the Web. Librarians and instructors have become tour guides of information. We are no longer the gods, the keepers of all information that is worth knowing and remembering. Our students now have access to all of the same information as their instructors. It is both wonderful and terrifying. One hour of Internet research is worth several days of old-style searching. Students now download papers directly onto their laptops, cutting and pasting important material into a Word document. The process is easier, more efficient–and more prone to inadvertent plagiarism.

At Vanderbilt we have begun using a tool called SafeAssign, an electronic plagiarism-detection technology available to all instructors. Students submit their work to the SafeAssign portal, and the technology crawls the Web in search of text that matches the submitted paper. The technology is not perfect, as it only accesses electronic material, not images and not books in print form. Several versions of SafeAssign are available, and each uses specific database search engines, so it is entirely possible that some plagiarized material will go undetected. An “originality report” is generated that shows any suspect material along with its source.

The question then becomes how to use the technology. We could be covert about it and attempt to catch cheaters by submitting their papers without their knowledge and then confront them when the report is generated. But students generally dislike this approach, and it promotes an adversarial relationship between the instructor and students. The best relationship between a student and instructor is one of trust, and this approach destroys that trust. On the flip side, others argue that if students are cheating, then they deserve to be caught, and it should not matter how they were caught.

What I choose to do in my Freshman Writing Seminar is to use SafeAssign as a teaching tool. I explain the purpose of SafeAssign to students at the onset of the course. We discuss its use as a deterrent to plagiarism, as a means to check for inadvertent plagiarism, and as a tool to teach about paraphrasing and the appropriate use of quoted work and referencing. Students submit their work to the SafeAssign portal and can then view an originality report and fix any problems without penalty. They resubmit their papers for a second and final time to the SafeAssign portal. If plagiarized material is still discovered in this version, students are aware that they will be penalized. We also rely on a rigorous, open peer review of each other’s work, which creates a sense that knowledge generation is a community affair. Students are critiqued on everything from grammar to argumentation skills. SafeAssign is simply one part of a community effort, which gives a very distinct form of feedback. Use of SafeAssign in this manner acts as both a deterrent and a teaching tool.

The students’ initial reaction to the technology was mixed. They welcomed the leveling of the playing field but were wary of the professor’s motives. To allay their fears that I was “out to get them,” our class had a discussion about peer review, the generation of new knowledge, and the unique way in which we can combine and interpret information. Lastly, we discussed the originality report for a paper that I was writing. In the end, students were very comfortable with the new system.

As the semester progressed, the amount of plagiarized material in each rough draft dropped dramatically. Students were beginning to learn good note-taking practices, proper paraphrasing and, more important, they were learning how to express their voice.

Vanderbilt takes a two-pronged approach to academic integrity. At the institutional level, instruction in academic integrity begins during freshman orientation. The Honor Council speaks with students about plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty, and students are required to demonstrate understanding in an online quiz. At the instructional level, the education continues with a first-year writing seminar where faculty teach research and writing strategies.

Another way to deter plagiarism is to understand why students plagiarize and then develop a prevention plan. The most common reasons given by students are that they are afraid to fail, have poor writing skills or poor time-management skills, may not understand the assignment, or may see the assignment as meaningless busywork. In addition to discussing plagiarism, we must provide clear guidelines for writing assignments and use transparent criteria for grading. It has been demonstrated time and time again that the single most important factor in preventing cheating in the classroom is the clearly stated views of the instructor.

Nationwide, 40 percent of professors do not report known plagiarism for fear of poor student evaluations, lawsuits, administrative reprimands, or unhappiness with the outcome when the occurrence is reported. For others who suspect plagiarism, the time involved in tracking down references is prohibitive and the plagiarism is not pursued. At Vanderbilt if a case of plagiarism is detected, it is to be reported to the Honor Council for further action. The Honor Council comprises students whose charge is to uphold the Honor Code. If found guilty, the student could receive the minimum penalty of an “F” in the course or the maximum penalty of expulsion. Some professors still choose to deal with plagiarism quietly and one-on-one with the student, often allowing for a rewrite, additional work, or perhaps a zero on the assignment.

Vanderbilt is struggling with the same issues that every other university wrestles with when it comes to prevention, detection and action regarding plagiarism. Like many institutions, we are using the carrot and the stick approach. The carrot is prevention in the form of intense education concerning the creation of meaningful academic work; the stick is the threat of SafeAssign and tough punitive repercussions.

What happened to the students in my non-majors chemistry course? As a class we had an hour-long, in-depth discussion about plagiarism. Students were given the opportunity to resubmit their work. I took a long, hard look at the types of assignments I was giving, paying close attention to making them more meaningful. Paper assignments now come with grading criteria upfront, and we use SafeAssign. I am happy to report that I still derive great pleasure from my students’ papers and have had not one instance of plagiarism since that time.

Michelle Miller Sulikowski is senior lecturer in chemistry and director of education of the Vanderbilt Institute for Chemical Biology.