THE SHADOW SCHOLARS (Eloise King, 2024)
What makes something “fake”? Can anything be fake if created by a real person? And what happens if “fake” is a billion-dollar industry running out of Kenya, powered by students around the world?
These are all questions posed by Eloise King’s The Shadow Scholars, an exposé of the secret world of essay-writing by university students, or rather, the Kenyan academics that students are hiring to write their essays. In the capital city, Nairobi, there are roughly 40,000 people working within this industry, working night and day to meet impossible deadlines, writing on every subject under the sun. From journalism, to criminal law, to medicine, these people cover them all, given only a few hours at times to complete a full essay. But how has this industry been created? Why has this happened? That’s what protagonist, Professor Patricia Kingori, set out to find out.
The documentary delves into every aspect of why this may have happened, giving the audience a wide look at Kenya’s history, especially during its colonisation by Britain. While British rule ended in Kenya in the 1960s, the effects are obviously still felt today. One stat given by the film: one million people graduate from university in Kenya every year to complete unemployment. This is where the “fake” essays come in. In a country filled with highly educated, yet unemployed people, the line of work almost makes complete sense. The film reveals the daily lives of some of these people, seeking to find out how they feel about the work, do they consider it unethical as people in the UK or America might find it? To the shock of Kingori, the answer given is a unanimous no. The writers find the work to be fulfilling academically, they are given a chance to learn new things and earn money while doing it. As a viewer in a privileged position, it’s hard to understand this perspective as we learn that the writers sometimes earn as little as one dollar an hour, and often have to use white profile pictures with different names in order to be “trusted” with the work by the actual students.
Another possible reason given, specifically for American students, is that failing isn’t an option when university costs so much. One girl interviewed tells us that in order to afford to hire a “shadow scholar” she had to sell her own nudes, or fail all her classes and lose her chance at getting a degree. With America being the highest users of the service of shadow scholars, could this be why?
The film does its best to explore the morality of these issues. Do people who use these services deserve their degrees? How can it be fair for these students to claim this work as their own, while the people actually doing the work get no recognition? And while these are real issues, how do you think about this while the people in Kenya say they don’t find it unethical, and are happy to do it? While the film spends a lot of time exploring all different aspects of these issues, I found that it failed to really dig deep into any of them, instead providing a surface-level look at many different issues, which was maybe the best thing for it to do. This is a broad issue, and a topic that many wouldn’t even be aware exists. How can we begin to think about the ethics of something we don’t know is happening?
Ethical or not, the business of shadow scholars is slowly dwindling, as students turn to AI to write their essays for them, instead of hiring someone else to do it, or, you know, doing it themselves. AI is discussed briefly in the film, and we are shown how easy it is for it to write an essay with lots of information wrong, and how harmful this could be. It was then disappointing to realise the film itself was using AI to conceal participants identities. For a film which is, on a basic level, about unemployment, its hard to see AI utilised for a job a human could have completed.
Overall, the film is completely fascinating. A look into a job that is entirely unique, with its own challenges and dilemmas. The most touching moment of the film, I found, was when Kingori asks what could Kenya look like, if the essays, the research, the degrees were given to the people who wrote them, if they were allowed to take the credit for their own work. With this documentary, a light is on these people, and perhaps this is the first step to getting them the credit they not just deserve, but are entitled to.
