The English department at one big state university has a written departmental policy that regards hiring a grammar and sentence editor to be academic dishonesty, whereas at the same time, in the Education department, with the huge number of foreign graduate students, hiring a copy editor for one's dissertation is standard practice with the professors giving recommendations for good editors.
Hell, >>I<< hired a editor to do the final assembly and ref check on MY dissertation! The editor was an English prof herself. I had her combine individual .doc files into one big (REALLY BIG at 500+ pages) master document, so the "smart" page numbering, generate a TOC, and do a final check on the citation and reference formats. I could have done all of this myself but it saved me a month that I didn't have and was well worth the $300 or so it cost. BTW, this stuff which might have taken me a month, took her less than a week.
I don't see how there would be any principled way to distinguish this from the sort of editing that many advisors engage in. I see this as similar to that time in the dark history of sports (anyone see Chariots of Fire?) when hiring a coach to help you train was consider shady and dishonest.
BTW, at my Japanese SLAC, where our grad students have to write a thesis in English, I have mixed emotions about the use of a proofreader. In principle I have no objection to having someone "clean up grammar errors" but occassionally my Japanese grads students write such horribly convoluted sentences that the only sort of "correction" possible is to rewrite virtually the entire sentence (often requiring significant alterations in wording). I guess I feel that they English should generally represent the global English competency of the student since they are graduating from a Language and Culture program -- and will often become EFL teachers at the high school level.
Having written and published numerous articles in Spanish myself, I can better understand the dilemma facing people writing in a language other than their first. I ALWAYS used a native-speaking proofreader (paying about $10 per page) and I can't see how that in any way would constitute "dishonesty" in a commercial context. Of course, if would have been dishonest if I had been producing papers to submit for a grade in a Spanish course.
In the end, like LarryC points out, we need to be able to differentiate between "Johnny copying from Wikipidia the morning the paper's due" from international students who may have legitimate problems that need to be addressed.
Finally, over my 25 years of teaching EFL more and more I've come to feel that speaking a language is a lot like quilting. People just learning to quilt sew together large squares of "borrowed fabric" is a rather crude and boring pattern. Master quilters do the same basic thing, but use much smaller bits of fabric and combine them in ever more complex patterns. In short, it's not about grammar, it's about creative cut 'n paste! We are ALL plagiarists -- some of us are just more skilled than others.
