The Tartuffe Effect or a Theatre of Ethics* ∗ Professor Marian Popescu University of Bucharest marianpopes@gmail.com This intervention is a pointer to the actual dilemmas of institutional responses to the question of Plagiarism and, in general, of academic misconduct. Despite number of books and articles, academic policies, European regulations and calls to question Plagiarism many times the result is a growth of the phenomenon. Or maybe the growth is independent of these? I’ll try to demonstrate that the efficiency and effectiveness of decisions to stop this negative trend highly depend on something missing from our present academic practices and way of consider the human factor involved. Character and...Technology. One of the premises which structures a major dilemma of institutional responses to Plagiarism is that our institutions and policies in Education rely more and more on digital technologies than on character. Blunt as it may seem, this premise is observed developing since a long time when the search for Integrity has been seen as obvious in human relationship and as a response from ”interior” to “interior” heavily influenced by external means. And one of the most exercised means is “imitation or annexation of something belonging to another” which is one of the exterior elements to be considered when establishing Integrity (ONG 1968: 267). Which comes to one of the most usual definition of Plagiarism. A definition that evolves around the idea of Text being imitated (i.e. “copied”) or...annexed (i.e. “unauthorized taking”). The emergence of antiplagiarist softs animated a debate about the efficiency of these tools, their potential to help academics frame accordingly and rightly different types of plagiarists. Softs are simply not enough and, sometimes, not reliable to do the job a human being could do. (This might remind of Steve Job’s often quote, now a Silicon Valley cliché: Technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing. ∗ This article is a reviewed version of my intervention from the 2018 Conference of the Society for Romanian Studies organized at Bucharest