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Ten years ago yesterday I was at the same place I was twenty years ago — on the Binghamton University campus in upstate New York. (In 1991 I was a student, in 2001 I was advising a statewide student organization.)
I woke up in Albany on the morning of September 11, and drove on empty highways to Binghamton for a scheduled meeting, listening to reports of the attacks on the radio. A few days later I wrote this summary of what I found when I arrived:
Binghamton was surprisingly subdued — much calmer than I’d seen it when the Gulf War started in January 1991. Lots more people have cable in their dorms now than did then, though, so I expect most of the students who were really worried were in their rooms by the phone.
In 1991, if you wanted to keep up with a breaking news story on a college campus, you usually had to go to the student union and gather around a communal television. In 2001 if you wanted to keep in touch with family you needed to stay in your dorm room.
Ten years ago, twenty years ago. No Facebook, no Twitter. Today you can sit on a couch in the union surrounded by dozens of your fellow students while you hear your parents’ voices from a hundred miles away and read what your friends are doing on their couches in their unions all over the country. All at the same time. You don’t have to choose between connecting with a global experience and your local community and your far-flung networks of loved ones. You used to have to choose, but you don’t anymore.
I wrote a few weeks ago about how impoverished the Beloit College “mindset list” is, how trivial and how silly. But it’s not just in matters of educational policy and campus politics that the list missed the mark. The American campus, and the American student experience, is changing in all sorts of ways, in ways it’s easy for both students and faculty to miss.
Technology doesn’t shatter community, it transforms it.
There’s a lot of chatter this morning about Groupon’s latest deal in the Chicago area: A 60% discount on university tuition at National-Louis University.
Sounds amazing, but the full story isn’t quite as impressive.
The offer is for one graduate-level course. Not one course as in “any one course,” but one course as in “one particular course.” A course that was concocted specifically for the Groupon promotion. It does apply toward a master’s in teaching, but only if, after completing it, you apply for, are accepted to, and enroll in NLU. (Given the nature of the class, it’s hard to imagine it being accepted as transfer credit at any other school.) All in all, this “deal” is clearly more a marketing initiative than an educational innovation.
And that shouldn’t come as a surprise, given National-Louis University’s past…
Until 1990, NLU was known as the National College of Education. It changed its name to National-Louis University to honor to its largest donor, Michael W. Louis, who had made a $30 million pledge to the college the previous year. In 1982 Louis had given NCE three million dollars to create a college of arts and sciences, which the school had also named for him. In 1983 they granted him an honorary doctorate as well.
So. Yeah.
The always-thoughtful danah boyd (those lower case letters are her idea) speaks up for youthful recklessness:
I’m worried about our societal assumption that risk-taking without thinking of the consequences is an inherently bad thing. We need some radical thinking to solve many of the world’s biggest problems. And I don’t believe that it’s so easy to separate out what adults perceive as ‘good’ risk-taking from what they think is ‘bad’ risk-taking. But how many brilliant minds will we destroy by punishing their radical acts of defying authority? How many brilliant minds will we destroy by punishing them for ‘being stupid’? It’s easy to get caught up in a binary of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ when all that you can think about is the consequences. But change has never happened when people simply play by the rules. You have to break the rules to create a better society. And I don’t think that it’s easy to do this when you’re always thinking about the consequences of your actions.
I’m not arguing for anarchy. I’m too old for that. But I am arguing that we should question our assumption that people are better off when they have the cognitive capacity to think through consequences. Or that society is better off when all individuals have that mental capability. From my perspective, there are definitely pros and cons to overthinking and while there are certainly cases where future-aware thought is helpful, there are also cases where it’s not. And I also think that there are some serious consequences of imprisoning youth until they grow up.
The California State Senate has passed a bill expanding financial aid to undocumented students in the state’s public colleges and universities. The California Dream Act now goes to the Democratic-controlled State Assembly, which is expected to pass it next week. Governor Jerry Brown has not said whether he will sign the bill, but he approved similar legislation this summer and is considered likely to do so again.
Undocumented students make up about one percent of enrollment at California’s public colleges and universities, a rate of attendance far below undocumented immigrants’ representation in the state’s population (in the range of two or three million out of a total of thirty-seven million).
Huffington Post and Time magazine released stories this week with near-identical headlines: College Plagiarism Reaches All Time High: Pew Study (HuffPo) and Survey: College Plagiarism Is at an All-Time High (Time). But neither the study the two articles cite nor the press release that accompanies it makes that claim.
What the study does say is that fifty-five percent of American college and university presidents, when asked, estimated that plagiarism has risen in the last decade. (Forty percent say it’s stayed the same, two percent said it’d fallen, and thirteen percent had no opinion.) They weren’t asked, and they didn’t offer, their opinions on how this generation of students compares to earlier ones.
A 55-42 split is nothing huge, by the way. And there’s also reason to be skeptical about how informed college presidents are about rates of plagiarism. Even if reports of cheating have risen — and again, we don’t know that they have — that could reflect changes in professors’ tolerance, advances in policing of the practice, or simply the ease with which clumsily cut-and-pasted passages from online sources can be detected.
If you ask a group of senior faculty and administrators whether students are better (smarter, more committed, more ethical, whatever) than they were in years gone buy, you’re rarely going to get a positive answer. So this survey is, in the absence of actual supporting data, pretty close to meaningless. But even setting that aside, the story and its coverage bear almost no relationship to each other.
Which leads one to an uncomfortable question. If the survey made no reference to plagiarism reaching an “all-time high,” and two different headline-writers at two different news organizations both used at that same phrase to characterize it …
Is someone at Time or HuffPo plagiarizing stories about plagiarism?
Update | Time’s story went up yesterday, the Huffington Post’s this afternoon, so if there’s any plagiarism going on here, it would appear that Time isn’t the culprit.
What say you, HuffPo?
