>The professor asked if I plagiarized, saying 'my paper was too
>good'.

Ughhhhhhh. I can't lie. I've had this reaction to a paper before, but "too good" is just a red flag. Not proof. There's a creepily lucrative business in plagiarism-identifying software for professors that exists for this purpose. I kind of hate that it exists, but in order to say that I do my due diligence- anytime I suspect something, I just pick a particularly well-written line in a paper, google it, and see if anything pops up.

As a weird side note, this is how I discovered a pretty fun demographic of student. Kids from other countries who aren't native English speakers and are therefore not very confident talking at length in class, but who, as a result of their efforts to learn English and the increased confidence that comes from taking the time to craft your own writing have (and use) INCREDIBLY impressive vocabularies in papers. It took me a few semesters to realize this was a thing, but I see it with regularity - a student of absolutely unknowable intelligence in classroom discussion who drops SAT words by the dozens in their totally unplagiarized papers.

>I replied that all my sources were cited and that
>writing itself was not plagiarized. She asked for me to turn
>in my sources so she could analyze them, hoping to catch me
>lifting from them. I happily turned over my sources, but when
>it came to meeting with the Dean, the professor said she
>didn't have time to review my sources and so I would be given
>the choice of either taking an arbitrary 'C', or failing the
>course.


And double ughhh. That's not part of the deal. She can pursue the issue or not pursue the issue. You don't get to be too busy to uncover cheating AND make students suffer for suspected cheating. I'm sorry that happened to you.

>I thought it was criminal how they railroaded me at the time,
>but had I just used the sources the professor provided for the
>class, I would have avoided all the accusations to begin with,
>despite probably hating the subject twice as much at the end
>of the semester.

Eh. You were right to call it risky, but only if the professor is both extremely rigid AND extremely lazy. I warn students about going off-book for their research, but the objective of any of these classes is to get students to initiate and follow through on their own research. Like, that's the fucking point.