It’s too bad universities have to spend any amount of money on computer technology to catch academic plagiarism, but in the computer age, there seems to be little alternative.

News that Kansas University no longer would subscribe to a plagiarism detection service called Turnitin drew a chorus of protest from faculty members in academic areas, such as political science and religious studies, with heavy writing demands. They were informed the service would be discontinued on Oct. 3 because of copyright concerns and its $22,000 cost.

It’s unclear what the copyright concerns were, but $22,000 seems like little enough to pay for a service that helps maintain a university’s academic integrity. In this computer age, faculty members need all the help they can get to expose plagiarized work.

Although the KU provost hasn’t responded to the outcry about discontinuing Turnitin, it seems unlikely that some other means of plagiarism detection won’t be provided to KU faculty members. Perhaps there is a service that is more effective or less expensive, but going without doesn’t seem like an option.

Students “borrowing” the work of others and presenting it as their own is nothing new. But files of term papers maintained by living groups have given way to an endless supply of academic work available through the Internet. Online sources are a staple for any student doing research, but the Internet also presents a mighty temptation to students who might like to take some shortcuts.

Many faculty members see plagiarism as a serious problem at KU. The same probably can be said of most universities across the nation and around the world, but it’s a problem that can’t be ignored.

Academic plagiarism hurts everyone. It hurts the plagiarist who misses out on the learning experience involved in researching and writing a paper. It hurts students who don’t plagiarize by devaluing the original work they turn in. And it hurts the academic reputation of the institution that advances and graduates students based on work that was not their own.

The outrage of KU faculty members at the loss of the plagiarism software is a positive sign because it shows that they take this problem seriously and want to remedy it. To that end, it’s the university’s responsibility to invest in tools that give KU faculty members the best possible opportunity to detect plagiarized work presented by their students.