From the "We are so boned" file.

California higher education epitomizes dysfunction.

Victor Davis Hanson on Higher Education.

Things that can't go on, don't go on.

By 2011 we all know that faculties are overwhelmingly liberal. That in and of itself would not be so alarming if they were not activist as well. By that I mean academics are not just interested in identifying supposed past American sins, but also in turning disinterested instruction into political advocacy, especially along race, class, and gender lines. Rosie the Riveter, the Japanese internment, and Hiroshima all deserve study, but they are not the sum total of World War II. Today’s average undergraduate may know that African-Americans were not integrated into American units during World War II, but they have no clue what the Battle of the Bulge, a B-29, or Iwo Jima were. They may insist that global warming is real and man-caused, but would have trouble explaining what exactly carbon is.

And:

As the economy cooled, cash-strapped parents increasingly had little money to ease the mounting burdens. What was once a rare $10,000 student loan became a commonplace $50,000 and more in debt. Living at home until one’s late twenties is in part explicable to the mounting cost of college and the accompanying dismal job market — and the admission that many college degrees are no proof of reading, writing, or thinking skills. (Note as well that the themes and ethos of the university were not “life is short, get on with it”, but rather population control, abortion, careerism, metrosexism, etc. that contributed to the notion that one’s 20s and even 30s were for fun and exploring alternatives, but most certainly not to marry, have children, get a job, buy a house, and run the rat race.)


I noticed about 1990 that some students in my classes at CSU were both clearly illiterate and yet beneficiaries of lots of federal cash, loans, and university support to ensure their graduation. And when one had to flunk them, an entire apparatus was in place at the university to see that they in fact did not flunk. Just as coaches steered jocks to the right courses, so too counselors did the same with those poorly prepared but on fat federal grants and loans. By the millennium, faculty were conscious that the university was a sort of farm and the students the paying crop that had to be cultivated if it were to make it all the way to harvest and sale — and thus pay for the farmers’ livelihood.

How could a Ponzi scheme of such magnitude go on this long?

Lots of reasons. The university was deeply embedded with a faux-morality and a supposed disdain for lucre. “College” or “university” was sort of like “green” — an ethical veneer for almost anything imaginable without audit or examination (Whether a Joe Paterno-like exemption or something akin to Climategate or the local CSU campus where the student body president recently boasted that he was an illegal alien and dared authorities to act — to near unanimous support from the university.) Since World War II, a college degree was rightly seen as the key to middle class upward mobility. That belief was enshrined, and so we forgot to ask whether everyone was suited for college, or whether the college educated per se were always more important to the economy than the self-, union-, or trade-schooled welder, concrete finisher, or electrician.

Another depressing look at the arc of our culture through the lens of higher education.

Thomas Bertonneau on the "amazing colossal syllabus":

The same syllabus also explains for students, most of whom have never heard of it and who suffer torments on account of it, the custom of dates “BC” and “AD.” It explains that the first century AD begins, not with the year one hundred, but with the year one. It explains that in the period “BC” we count down as we move forward through the years. The first day of class is usually devoted exclusively to going over the syllabus, reading portions of it aloud, so that everyone grasps that it is the effective daybook and calendar of the semester.


Some of this effort—and much of the hypertrophied syllabus—is precautionary. It is precautionary on behalf of students, who, from day one, will know in advance every requirement and assignment of the course. It is also precautionary on behalf of the syllabus-writer, who seeks protection from petulant students claiming they never knew the schedule or failed to receive procedural knowledge concerning the semester. Syllabus in hand, no one can plead ignorance.

Instructions for formal written work in my teaching have also grown more explicit, more detailed and copious, over the years. Mostly, that is due to my increasing awareness of how badly prepared for serious writing almost all contemporary college students are. In 1974, a professor would simply have told his students that they should write an essay comparing Madame Bovary and Maggie, A Girl of the Streets. Only a few of my students would have any idea how to respond to so minimal a request.

I now write instructions for formal essays in such a way as to do a good deal of preliminary thinking for students so that they can write their papers by continuing a discussion that I have begun.

But precaution also plays a role. My instructions nowadays run to the extremely specific both in framing issues and in stipulating what the response should include, again on an almost paragraph-by-paragraph basis.

That is an anti-plagiarism gesture. Plagiarism is rampant on college campuses. The Internet has made it easy to download chunks of the Wikipedia or ready-made “essays” from cynical websites that enable students to avoid every literate commitment. Framing issues narrowly and making micro-specific demands put obstacles in the way of the downloadable “theme” and make plagiarism easier to detect when it occurs.

In sum, the idea of the higher learning has withered away. Students expect college to be like secondary education, and secondary education is itself thin gruel compared to what it was when I graduated from high school in 1972. The Amazing Colossal Syllabus attempts to bridge the gap between what students expect in reference to their college career and what they need to do to justify that career in something other than a degraded, purely pragmatic way.

Higher Education.

Thomas Bertonneau meditates on college plagiarism:

Although I cannot give scientific evidence for it, I believe that the percentage of calculating plagiarists has also increased, but the calculation remains as unwise as it always was. It still rests on the plagiarist’s ignorance of his own ignorance, his inability to recognize the specificity of his own incompetence. At the same time that plagiarism itself has become easier, the ability to detect plagiarism has also become easier, another reality of which the plagiarist himself has not the faintest inkling.


Even a fairly esoteric topic such as Henrik Ibsen’s play Emperor and Galilean—which I taught in a course on modern drama recently—when entered into the Google browser, yields close to eighty thousand results. On the first page there are at least a half a dozen essayistic commentaries on the Norwegian playwright’s Symbolist tragedy. At the end of the semester, I collected a strongly suspect term paper in response to an assignment that asked students to compare a number of modern plays, including Emperor and Galilean.

If there were such a thing as an intelligent or well-educated plagiarist, the idea of a careful patchwork of paragraphs, culled from various websites and rewritten to make the style homogeneous and framed within original prose that endowed on the whole something like a convincing structure—that, I say, might occur to him. But if the plagiarist were intelligent and well educated, if he were that capable, he would probably not be a plagiarist; he would be an honest student who acquits himself in courses.

In the case of the Ibsen plagiarist, two facts worked together to arouse my suspicion. One was that I could neither picture the student nor connect her to a single comment made in any classroom discussion during the semester. She had effectively not participated in the course.

The other was the prose itself, which contained no references to my remarks made during the term (student writers invariably rehearse instructor observations), and which had a bland competence little resembling student expression. In one instance, a paragraph began with a long appositive, a rhetorical device I have never known any student to employ. In addition, the prose indicated knowledge of Ibsen well beyond what I had sketched in lecture in the two weeks set aside for Emperor and Galilean.

It took thirty seconds to type the provocative appositive into the Google browser, whereupon I double-clicked the first item and immediately beheld that selfsame front-loaded construction. The entire paper, save for a single introductory sentence, had been blatantly downloaded from the website, without alteration.

As in the Hemingway case, the Ibsen plagiarist, although caught red-handed, stubbornly denied her guilt. There was something perversely comical about it. Like the other student, this one expected, first me, and then the dean, to whom I reported the violation, to put down as a fantastic coincidence the word-for-word identity of the prose over which she had put her name with that from Uncle Harlan’s Down Home Ibsen Website (or whatever it called itself).

This was calculating plagiarism of the most barefaced species, with complete absence of acknowledgment in the transgression and absolutely no sign of remorse. The student’s written communications with me were indignant and sub-literate. At one point she held it against me, as she wrote, that, “you are my only one professor that says I plagiarized.”

In a separate case, a different plagiarist compulsively confessed to the offense and submitted written apologies to me and to my department chair. The chair and I were sufficiently moved that I merely failed the assignment. That student passed the course with the lowest possible grade, on the strength of other work. This was a panic-stricken plagiarist who showed keen, believable remorse.

The Ibsen plagiarist, in contrast, was a self-serving con artist, a superlative cynic. My instinct was to fail her in the course, which the dean in fact insisted I should do. I hardly required persuasion. What happened to the Ibsen plagiarist beyond flunking Modern Drama? I cannot say.

And:

Plagiarism is one more index of the long-heralded Decline of the West. More and more students go to college; fewer and fewer of them are actually capable of rising to the higher learning. Colleges and universities, operating by the enrollment economy, actively seek students and bend or ignore admissions criteria to recruit them in numbers. Aggressively cynical and uncivilized, the popular culture promotes crass self-interest and narcissism.


The sitting vice president of the U.S.A. once, when a senator, plagiarized a campaign speech from his British member-of-Parliament counterpart, but he is the sitting vice president of the U.S.A. The epistemology of plagiarism is worth describing, and I have tried to do so, but ultimately, it is necessary to repeat, rampant plagiarism is an alarming moral problem. The destruction of shame makes theft and fraud thinkable options for an increasing number of students.