I just read this New York Times article about "contract cheating."And then I wrote a really long post about all the demoralizing stuff in higher ed today.
And then I read what I had written and I deleted it because it was so long and yet it was barely even the tip of the iceberg.
--Southern Bubba, Ph.D.
Southern Bubba, please reconstruct it and post it anyway! You'll find plenty of kindred souls here, I'm sure.
ReplyDeleteOh, dammit. I couldn't recreate it. I don't know if I would want to. It was about as coherent as the first page of Finnegans Wake, but written by a slightly inebriated and disenchanted American proffie. I really was rambling all over the place, mixing metaphors, and throwing in ideas about regression to the mean and recalibrating norms to a lower equilibrium, and so on. Sometimes I feel like I'm spewing truth. And perhaps sometimes I actually am, but this time I couldn't find a thesis statement. Of course, I'm one who thinks it's entirely ok not to have a thesis statement. But the desire is never to riddle things with confusion and gaslight the reader. I don't know. I felt confused myself, and couldn't sew it all together, so I just deleted it.
DeleteBut I do keenly recall what was at the core of what triggered me--although I still might not be able to articulate it. . . .
When I was in college, my standards were instilled very much by the words and actions of those few dozens of people who were in a certain social province within a radius of seventy-five yards from me. We had norms and an honor code. Today, my students can have 5,000 Facebook Friends around the world, many more Instagram "friends," and so on--perhaps millions of people they feel are their peers. And so many of those peers are cheating or cutting corners. Even my faculty colleagues are cutting corners and lowering their standards and tolerating outright incorrectness. When just one of those people shares--and celebrates--a new iPhone app that radically facilitates cheating, then it spreads like wildfire. And standards get lowered again and again and again.
And I just feel like I have ten thousand fingers in the dike. It's not sustainable.