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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.
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?
This year, like every year since 1998, a couple of profs at Beloit College have released a “Mindset List” describing the world that the new crop of incoming first-years grew up in. Here’s a few things they left out:
The average first-year college student in the United States this fall was born in 1993. For them…
College presidents have never been expected to stay in their positions for long, and have always had onerous fundraising responsibilities.
Pell Grant funding has always been under attack.
Colleges have always been required to keep public statistics on campus crime, and have always evaded those requirements with impunity.
Grad students have always been boosting enrollment with jokey-sounding course names.
Conservative commentators have always been appalled.
The presence of significant numbers of students of color on campus has always been treated as a new development.
NCAA rules violations have always been a headline-grabbing crisis.
College athletes at high-ranking Division 1 schools have always been pampered and cynically exploited.
The connection between the above two realities has always been the subject of hand-wringing op-eds.
Which have never translated into serious reform.
Tenured professors who came of age in the late sixties have always been exaggerating their own activist exploits, and deriding contemporary student organizing.
The drinking age has always been 21.
Binge drinking by under-21s has always been epidemic.
Returning students have always been a growing campus demographic.
And have always been ignored in lists like this.
Remediation has always been a handy cudgel for enemies of open enrollment.
Middle-aged people who spent their youth desperate for sexual gratification have always been decrying the rise of hook-up culture.
The proportion of state budgets devoted to higher education has always been plummeting.
The extent of rape in the dorms and at frat parties has always been the subject of whispered rumor.
Adjunct hiring has always been growing.
Adjunct pay has always been unsustainable.
Free public higher education has always been a distant memory.
Faculty and administrators have always been inexplicably surprised to discover that the new incoming class is roughly a year younger than the previous one.
The Department of Education recently issued new guidelines on campus policies on sexual assault, including a directive that judicial bodies investigating sexual assault allegations employ the “preponderance of the evidence” standard in their deliberations.
“Preponderance of the evidence” is the standard commonly used in resolving civil cases — lawsuits — in the United States. It basically means that the question at hand will be resolved by a determination of which party’s version of events is more likely to be true. (“Beyond a reasonable doubt” is the standard of guilt used in criminal cases in the US, and there are other standards used in other circumstances, too.)
I don’t yet have an opinion on the DOE’s directive, and I think it’s an important question, so I’ve been reading up on it. And I just noticed something really weird.
As I noted above, “preponderance of the evidence” basically means that the judicial body will determine which side of the case, based on the evidence, is more likely to be in the right. If they come down on the side of the complainant, even hesitantly, the defendant is found guilty. It makes no difference, in other words, whether they’re completely convinced or have major doubts — whichever side they think is more likely to be in the right is the side that wins.
A common way of explaining this is to say that preponderance of the evidence means that if even 51% of the evidence presented supports one party, that party gets the decision. It’s an arbitrary number, of course — there’s nothing magical about 51% as opposed to 55% or 50.623% — but it gets the concept across. Whoever has the stronger evidence wins. Period.
So you see the 51% thing a lot. It’s all over the place — the number 51 appears in about a quarter of all web hits for the phrase “preponderance of the evidence.” But occasionally you see other numbers, like 50.1%, or even 50.000001%. And here’s where it gets interesting.
The number 50.1 appears only rarely in Google hits on “preponderance of the evidence” — a few times per thousand. But in pages in which the word “rape” or one of its variants appear as well, 50.1 shows up almost three times as often. You see a similar bump for 50.01, 50.001, etc.
Those numbers aren’t that big. It doesn’t seem to be a complete glitch — the numbers go in the opposite direction when you add “civil law” to the search instead of “rape,” for instance — but the magnitude isn’t huge.
Check out what happens when you substitute “campus sexual assault” for rape, though. The number 50.01 shows up three times as often as you’d expect, and 50.0001 shows up nearly seven times as often. Plug in “Title IX,” the campus sex-discrimination law on which the ruling was based, and 50.0001 shows up more than fifteen times as often as it should.
What does all this mean?
Well, one thing it doesn’t mean is that a campus assault case in which 50.0001% of the evidence supports the complainant is going to result in a conviction. The very concept of “50.0001% of the evidence” is meaningless — the idea that you could quantify the evidence in a sexual assault case to a precision of two parts in a million is absurd.
And that, of course, is why “50.0001%” is a figure of speech that you hardly ever see in discussions of this legal standard. It’s not coherent. It’s not meaningful. It’s not illuminating of the issues at stake.
And that is precisely why it keeps coming up in discussions of Title IX and campus sexual assault. Because “preponderance of the evidence means the side with 50.0001% of the evidence wins” is a lot scarier than “preponderance of the evidence means that the relevant body looks at all the evidence and rules for the party it thinks has the stronger case.”
Dharun Ravi, the Rutgers student who bragged on Twitter about broadcasting his dorm roommate’s gay hookup on the internet, was indicted on fifteen charges (PDF) earlier today.
Ravi’s roommate, Tyler Clementi — a first-year student just weeks into his first semester at Rutgers when the spying occurred — committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge just days after it began.
The first eight counts of the indictment allege that Ravi recorded Clementi and his partner on one occasion, shared that recording with at least one other person, and attempted to do so again later. They further allege that the spying was either “an attempt to intimidate … because of sexual orientation” or was “reasonably believed” to be so.
Additional counts in the indictment allege that Ravi tampered with evidence in the case by deleting a tweet from Twitter, posting a false tweet, and deleting text messages that he sent to witnesses. It also claims that he interfered with a witness and lied to law enforcement.
According to the New York Daily News, Ravi faces a possible five years in prison if convicted of all charges.
I’ve got to say I’m a bit surprised by this indictment. I’ll have more thoughts later.
studentactivism.net 
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