"The Shadow Scholars": Tale of Kenyans Who Ghost-Write Academic Papers for U.S. and U.K. Clients Is Full of Ironies

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, September 17) I went to the First Unitarian-Universalist Church on the cusp between Hillcrest and Mission Hills to attend a film screening of a quite compelling 2024 documentary called The Shadow Scholars. The film was written and directed by Eloïse King (though her imdb.com page deletes her umlaut), described in the screening notes as “a Queer, London-born, Caribbean filmmaker who adopts an interdisciplinary approach to telling complex stories that foreground marginalized perspectives within mainstream and popular culture.” The Shadow Scholars is about the $15 billion per year industry that has arisen in Kenya in which Kenyan students with bachelors’, masters’, and even Ph.D. degrees ghost-write everything from college term papers to theses and dissertations for mostly white students from the U.S., Canada, and Europe. The main on-screen presence is Professor Patricia Kingori, who was born in Kenya, moved as a child with her mother to the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, then moved again with her mom to London in her early teens. While there she read a book on sociology left behind by one of her mother’s friends, was fascinated by the discipline, and determined to study it and make it her career. Kingori found out about a night course in sociology that she could enroll in at age 14, but only if she found a “responsible adult” to co-sign her application. She asked the class’s teacher to be her co-signer, and the teacher turned her down. Then she went back to her mother (also named Patricia), who was not surprisingly upset that her daughter hadn’t asked her to co-sign. Mom said she would co-sign as long as Patricia agreed to use whatever knowledge she gained from her coursework to help her people achieve power. Kingori ultimately made it into the British academic establishment and won a full professorship at Oxford, though her claim to be “the youngest Black Oxbridge professor and one of the youngest women to ever be awarded a full professorship at the University of Oxford” has been disputed. Her Wikipedia page states, “According to the official UK Companies House register, Patricia Kingori's date of birth is November 1977. She was appointed to a full professorship in December 2021, meaning she was 44, not 28, at the time.” (Certainly, from her appearance in the film, she’s more believable as a 40-something than a 20-something or 30-something.)

Kingori has made a specialty of studying fraud and fakery in medical research, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa but also in the Caribbean and in the developed world, and according to the film her own masters’ thesis was stolen by someone else in 2012, though she couldn’t do anything about it because the alleged thief was higher up in the academic hierarchy than she and adopted the defense, “Why would I need to steal from her?” Ironically given her background and especially her research specialization on academic fraud, Kingori’s presentation of the material in The Shadow Scholars is remarkably fair-minded. She depicts the professional paper-writers in Kenya with a great deal of sympathy, especially since they’re trapped in a system in which they’ve been promised a bill of goods – work hard and get a college education, and they’ll have a good life – only to find that there are virtually no jobs for them. (This is increasingly a problem for college students in the developed world as well, especially American students who graduate with five- or six-figure student loan debts and then find that the only jobs available for them pay far less than they would need to repay those loans.) The Shadow Scholars is a fascinating story in many respects, including the irony that in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries Europeans philosophically justified the practice of enslaving and colonizing Africans by saying they were mentally inferior to whites, and now we’re expropriating their intellectual brilliance for our own profit. Director King makes the point by juxtaposing early 20th century footage of Black American sharecroppers working on cotton plantations (as well as including an aside about how cotton processing equipment actually invented by slaves became, like everything else they did, the legal and intellectual property of their slaveowners) with modern-day scenes of Kenyan contract writers cranking out paper after paper for the benefit of the well-to-do clients who can afford to pay them. There’s also an ironic wrinkle in that the Kenyan writers often speak to their clients via voice filters that make them sound like American or British English speakers and thus conceal from the people paying them that they’re actually speaking to someone in Africa.

It’s also fascinating that the only people who use the morally loaded term “contract cheating” to describe the practice are white First World academics, including a woman professor from UC San Diego who actually met with Kingori to discuss the issue. My husband Charles noticed the above and said that the Kenyan writing industry has actually taken over the market from white Americans and Europeans who used to do this sort of work. He mentioned author Nick Mamatas, who recalled ghost-writing term papers for mathematics and engineering students who were actually far smarter than he was but were from non-English-speaking countries and therefore couldn’t write the English class papers required of them to graduate. One of the many ironies that abound in this film is that the writing industry is functioning like every other developing industry under capitalism: the assignments come from supervising editors who farm them out to mid-level managers before giving them to the people who actually do the work. One interviewee talked about working his way up through the management chain so he can be taking the bigger cuts without having to do the grunt work of actually writing. Another writer, a woman, recalled doing two term papers in one night on two totally different subjects, which had audience members wondering just how she pulled it off. (I can remember from my own days as a college student in my 20’s pulling all-nighters I can’t imagine myself being able to do today.) And the final irony in The Shadow Scholars is that the entire term-paper industry is being threatened by technological change: in this case by artificial intelligence (A.I.), which has the capability to ghost-write acceptable papers, theses, and dissertations itself without human intervention. Some of the writers interviewed in the film (adding to the ironies, King said she used A.I. herself to disguise their identities and make it harder for people to find out who they are) talked about adapting to the threat of A.I. by devising ways to edit A.I.-composed papers to add human touches to them so they will seem less like A.I. products and more like the work of human beings.

One young man said he had ambitions to study in Europe and obtain a masters’ degree, though he’s already done enough work for 10 masters’ degrees – he’s just done it under other people’s names. All that’s holding him back from an academic career in Europe is the money, though I couldn’t help but wonder if he actually did get the funding to study abroad, if his masters’ thesis will be red-flagged by an online plagiarism detector which would note its similarities … to a paper he himself wrote under contract to someone else. The post-film discussion had some interesting points; most of the people in the audience were retirees who’d worked in academe and therefore took the whole challenge the writing industry poses to academic integrity seriously. The film itself made the point that you might not know, when going into surgery for cancer, that your doctor essentially bought an unearned degree from a Kenyan term paper mill. One woman in the audience who’d earned a masters’ degree legitimately for a paper she wrote found herself wondering how many of the other papers she cited as sources had actually been ghost-written by Kenyans or others. The Shadow Scholars offers fascinating insights into the fundamental corruption behind academe, and in particular how we as a society decide what are the “good” schools and which (and whose) credentials we will accept as “legitimate” and therefore establish who we let run things, including operating on our bodies. The film briefly mentioned the scandal surrounding actress Felicity Huffman and 30 other celebrities who got caught using a service that promised to get their children into top-notch Ivy League institutions, and the relentless competition to get into America’s supposed but largely fictitious meritocracies has reached so far down that even at pre-school level parents are fighting each other like mad to ensure that their children get into the best pre-schools, which will get them into the best grade schools, which will get them into the best high schools, which will get them into the best colleges, which will get them into the best jobs. And yet all this is happening in a country whose ruling elites are filled with people who pride themselves on being anti-intellectual and announce they’re basing their decisions on idiotic prejudices masquerading as “common sense.”