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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?
“Prescriptions are merely public confessions of prescriptionists … what is right for one individual may be wrong for the next; and what is sin and abomination to one may be a worthwhile part of the next individual’s life. The range of individual variation, in any particular case, is usually much greater than generally understood. Some of the structural characters in my insects vary as much as twelve hundred percent. This means that populations from a single locality may contain individuals with wings 15 units in length, and other individuals with wings 175 units in length. In some of the morphologic and physiologic characters which are basic to the human behavior which I am studying, the variation is a good twelve thousand percent. And yet social forms and moral codes are prescribed as though all individuals were identical; and we pass judgments, make awards, and heap penalties without regard to the diverse difficulties involved when such different people face uniform demands.”
—Entomologist and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey
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.
“Are we allowed to sing? I imagine that at times it might improve the tone of the debate.”
–Canadian opposition leader Jack Layton on the House of Commons floor two months ago.
Layton, the head of the progressive New Democratic Party, died of cancer this morning at the age of 61. As I noted on this site at the time, Layton’s NDP won astonishing gains in this spring’s Canadian elections, transforming the country’s political landscape while electing six – yes, six – activist undergraduate students to the country’s parliament.
studentactivism.net 
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