Is self-plagiarism academically dishonest?

On the desk, next to a frantically typing student, a clock reads three in the morning.

This student has been at work all day and once at home, has been putting the finishing touches on a Fredrick Douglass paper for a history class, due in a few hours.

Additionally, this student has yet another paper due in a few hours. A paper that was assigned in an African-American studies course. The topic? Fredrick Douglass.

This example will be a familiar story. A student spending a few weeks researching, outlining, and then finally writing the paper for a course, polishing the order of citation and arguments for an A, while balancing work and the workload of other courses.

Eventually this tired and completely burnt out student has an epiphany: submit the same paper to two classes.

If caught, at the least, Roosevelt University decrees that this student will receive a failing grade for the paper and the course.

On the other end of the spectrum this student will not only fail the course but will have a permanent red flag placed in the student's file.

While students and faculty both agree that traditional plagiarism is a capital crime that should be punished swiftly and without remorse, self-plagiarism is met with more ambivalence.

It inhabits a grey area of ethics, where the clear distinctions of right and wrong that apply to regular plagiarism are not unanimous. How can a student who has a full course load, a job, and quite possibly extra curricular activities be expected to write two distinct original papers on the same topic in the same time frame and not be tempted to recycle his or her own work?

True, academic laziness can be called the root of all plagiarism.

And arguably, students who habitually recycle papers cheat themselves out of the chance to become more knowledgeable from the research that goes into writing a paper.

These courses have been basically assigning and then reassigning the same assignment. In this repetitive wilderness of academia, creating a versatile paper is akin to owning a reliable Swiss army knife in the bush.

If the University truly wanted to prevent the academic sin of self-plagiarism and have students consistently create original work for courses offered, then it should eliminate curriculums that have assignments that are nearly identical and do not seem to be fully original, which in and of itself, may be considered a form of plagiarism.

In a unscientific, random survey 45 students were asked if they have ever self-plagiarized in their academic career at Roosevelt. Nineteen admitted they have plagiarized and twenty-six said they have not.