THE SOFT INTEGRITY OF HIGH EXPECTATIONS


or, it's getting deep in durham.

For our latest example of how so many people in higher education are so full of shit, we turn to the second-to-last paragraph of a CNN.com story about college students using iPods to cheat on exams:

The music players proved to be invaluable for some courses, including music, engineering and sociology classes, said Tim Dodd, executive director of The Center for Academic Integrity at Duke. At Duke, incidents of cheating have declined over the past 10 years, largely because the community expects its students to have academic integrity, he said.

It is difficult to know whether Mr. Dodd actually believes that, or whether he merely hopes that we'll believe it. And in truth, it doesn't matter. Because whether Mr. Dodd is delusional or merely dismissive does not change the rampant absurdity of the statement. Duke may be doing some good, positive, developmental things on campus. They may be admitting a better, more ethical class of students. They may be failing to police, and so to prosecute, a new, tech-savvy generation of sophisticated cheaters. They may be enjoying some combination of all of these factors. But they sure as hell are not reducing the number of cheating incidents on campus by the sheer force of community expectations. The campus is in Durham, not in Stepford.

If you require proof of that assertion, look no farther than this Rolling Stone article, to which I first directed you a little less than a year ago, in which it is painfully clear that, whatever its expectations for academic integrity, Mr. Dodd's community does not expect of its student body nearly enough moral integrity. Or propriety. Or chastity. Or sobriety. Perhaps he and the rest of Blue Devil Nation could work on those qualities next.

If they do, and if they manage to produce a decline in those sorts of incidents too, then I will, in this same space, issue a public apology to Mr. Dodd and the rest of the university's expectation police. And I'll be happy to do so. If only because they will have by then perfected a radical new technique for solving all the social and cultural ills of our time.

Just think of the possibilities. We could end the War in Iraq by expecting the insurgents to have ideological integrity. We could end the War on Terror by announcing to the world that we expect all IslamoFascists to have some jihadi integrity. We could even end all the partisan bickering and bullshit in Washington by declaring that the American community expects its public servants to have moral and political integrity. And once we get all those big-picture issues out of the way, we could start concentrating on the power of positive expectations for our own personal tastes.

I, for one, would expect the Penguins to have some Stanley Cup integrity. And the Eagles to have some Super Bowl integrity. And the Pirates to have at least one summer's worth of winning-season integrity. But I'd begin by expecting all university administrators to have some rhetorical integrity. And maybe even some student-service fidelity.

Posted: Sat - April 28, 2007 at 04:40 PM          

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