The Classroom Conservative

Watching The Money And Counting The Drinks

If I am careful with my money, I am downright stingy with other people’s.  I am particularly stingy with yours.  It is for this reason that hosting a Faculty event knots my stomach.  Let me be clear: I have had involvement with a number of operations across the public sector, and I can vouch for the frugality of your universities, specifically.  As an undergraduate assistant, I saw my professor reprimanded for making too many photocopies for our class.  This left an impression on me of which I am still conscious.  The Canadian public does not fund waste.

As a result, our institution has a hospitality policy.  We may not spend more than sixty dollars per person at any celebratory event, and this includes the cost of as many as two drinks.  I make use of these guidelines once a year to take to a chain restaurant our sessional instructors in Calgary, folks who work very, very hard for a modest wage.  And so, on Friday night last, I sat in Milestones and counted glasses of beer upsized to pints, overhearing our friendly waitress try to convince colleagues with a coffee to substitute a latte.  And I was sick to my stomach.  I hope that, for everyone else, it was a great meal – and a great time.  It did me good to see people whom I have called for a favor after business hours relax after business hours for one night.

The point of this post is not to complain about hospitality policies with which I agree, and if one person has to forego a good time so that, in some measure, twenty-eight guests can maintain some measure of obliviousness to financial realities for a single night, that seems like a pretty small sacrifice.

Still, I wonder what would happen if, this year, the bar tab was not “evened out” by the teetotalers or if everyone exceeded their bill limit by five or ten dollars?  At worst, I would have to pay for it out of my own pocket, a small sacrifice to recognize people whose commitment to their job makes me look good.  But would our financial bureaucracy ever give me a one-time pass with some kind of reprimand?  After all, it is not like anyone would expect me to say to a guest, in the middle of the meal, that we really cannot afford a second dessert.  Would they?  My best friends at work are financial professionals, and I have a lot of sympathy for them.  They work with people who have virtually no training in the management of money, and my friends are answerable to internal and external authorities.  They are good people, and I know that they know that I do not venture out once a year in hopes of swindling the system by stocking up on freezable appetizers.

For a previous expense claim, I recall submitting the bill and omitting the visa receipt.  Now, of course, had I simply submitted the visa receipt, a total without an itemized account of how the money was spent, I could understand that claim being rejected.  But the objection to my claim was that only the visa receipt could prove that I had actually paid the bill.  A server charging me one amount might, after all, agree to accept a lesser amount while splitting with me the difference.  Honestly, that kind of malfeasance would never enter my imagination!  It is like Andy Dufresne says to Red in The Shawshank Redemption (1994): “On the outside I was an honest man, straight as an arrow.  I had to come to prison to be a crook.”

And that, ultimately, is the problem, is it not?  While there are sometimes stories in the media of professors trying to use their research funding to buy stereo equipment for their homes, my sense is that this kind of embezzlement is far less common than it is in the private sector.  “It’s not your money,” says the CEO who hosts the Christmas party with the rock star entertainment and the magnums of champagne.  Maybe not, though I do not know if their shareholders would approve.  And because the private sector has given us such atrocious examples of wanton behavior, we here in the Ivory Tower double- and triple-count the paperclips.

Their Plagiarizing Dean And Our Bloodlust

I have been having an interesting discussion with some dear friends and colleagues about plagiarism.  While it has been measured and professional, a model for the kind of academic discourse I value highly, I am still surprised that anyone would take my comments below as an apology for plagiarists, generally, or Dr. Phillip Baker, specifically, accused as he is of an act that, as I said, “eats away at the essence of the academic enterprise.”

My point, again, is that the line most people want to draw between an administrator’s banquet speech and an undergraduate’s term paper ignores the complexities of plagiarism, itself.  Those people who were braying for the Dean’s resignation were confusing the standard to which we hold administrators who represent our institutions with the process by which we impose progressive discipline on students when our emphasis should be teaching people who do not know better.

Any full professor should know better, of course, and as the University of Alberta continues to investigate Dr. Baker’s conduct, he may discover all manner of things about sanction, the skepticism of potential collaborators, and how difficult it is to re-enter the classroom.  The process will take some time.

As Dr. Baker was a senior administrator, I recommended handling the matter as a breach of trust case, allowing for the seriousness of alleged misconduct by an officer of the university, an approach that should have appealed to the “rough justice” crowd.  Now that he has resigned and the UofA has accepted his resignation, he has submitted to just about the most serious discipline anyone in his situation could be expected to suffer.  He has been humiliated, publicly, far outside the sleepy walls of academia; he will have a difficult time ever leading another academic unit.  While the salary scales in professional programs are dramatic, I would wager that Dr. Baker forfeited perhaps as much as one-third of his wage.

Thus, I have some difficulty understanding new calls for his outright dismissal.  A full professor of obstetrics and gynecology is unfit for the classroom?  On the basis of what evidence?  He should forfeit his earned administrative leave?  Why?

If you look at the bookshelves at Chapters, you will see the modest shelf devoted to the subject teeming with books on the problems in postsecondary education.  Margaret Wente appears still to have a backlog of critical pieces to run in the Globe on slow news days.  There is a great anxiety about our colleges and universities, and one has to wonder – when Alex Rodriguez apologizes for taking performance enhancing drugs and keeps drawing the largest sports contract in the world, when Joe Biden is caught plagiarizing and becomes Vice-President of the United States – whether Dr. Baker, as Dean, endures greater scrutiny simply because his head rises above the turret of our Ivory Tower.

Embattled Dean No Undergraduate Cheat

I handle all plagiarism accusations against students in our Faculty, and I find highly troubling the comparisons made between student cheating and the alleged misconduct of Phillip Baker at the University of Alberta.

When students found in a New Yorker article material used by Dean Baker in a banquet address to graduates, some people called immediately for his dismissal.  After all, it was argued, students who cheat at the UofA may be expelled.  I do not know the intricacies of disciplinary regulations in Edmonton, but we have never here imposed such a sanction on a first-time offender.  I just find it strange that anyone would immediately call for the professor’s head by simply equating his situation with a student submitting a paper.  Student discipline is meant to be progressive.  A warning might be right if we encounter a genuine learning opportunity: what happens in the case of a situation where a student simply did not know better, when a knowledge gap can be closed?  It is much more common to reject a plagiarized assignment or to fail students in courses in which they submitted plagiarized work.

Of course, the Dean of a Faculty has a position of trust, and much more should be expected of an administrator than of a student.  It is precisely for this reason that we cannot simply draw a line between an undergraduate submitting a term paper and a Dean giving a speech.  We must let the University of Alberta conduct its investigation in its normal fashion.  I would not speculate as to what punishment will be imposed, if the UofA concludes that one is warranted.  But I would wager that no comparison with the undergraduate classroom will play a part in calibrating justice.

We are all sinners, each in our own little ways.  But while plagiarism – acknowledging the necessity of the act of borrowing without admitting our thefts – is a cancer that eats away at the essence of the academic enterprise, there are so many more interesting elements of this case.

Dean Baker asserts that his speech “was intended for a private audience,” as if only more public utterances must be properly attributed.  Is there not the suggestion there that while we would never borrow without citing in a journal article we might crib a little in our lectures?  Even if this is the implication, the students’ actions suggest that there are no more private utterances.  Apparently, recognizing the words of Atul Gawande, they were able to google the Dean's source and follow along.  What astute – and wired – citizens the UofA graduated in that class!  I have heard colleagues wonder if the wired classroom means that our every assertion will be immediately fact checked?  Could that degree of scrutiny be worth the potential distraction?  T. S. Eliot, author of The Waste Land was born in 1889.  Actually, Wikipedia says, correctly, that he was born in 1888.  But Yahoo Answers mistakenly calls the poem The Wasteland.

Most interesting of all is what Dean Baker’s letter suggests about taking notes.  “I came across a text which inspired me,” he wrote in his explanation and apology, “and resonated with my experiences.”  Did he cut and paste out of The New Yorker, eschewing the opportunity to note where his words ended and where Dr. Gawande’s began, intending – perhaps – to go back and acknowledge later or perhaps obscure further any debt?

If so, we might finally have on Dean Baker something that approximates the undergraduate experience.

Why Not Forgiveness?

I was a first-year pre-Business student in a province with twenty-two per cent unemployment.  My English professor looked out the window one day at a truck delivering milk and said, “No one is getting a job, so you should study what you love to study.”  I switched to English.

What one loves to do does not necessarily lead to a career, of course, and there is much to be said for determination.  But, over the last decade, I have encountered many people who have admitted, or who have demonstrated through performance, that they are in the wrong majors.  Many times, students who have long imagined a professional career are doing science courses for which they have no aptitude; it is also the case, however, the potential teachers in humanities subjects show no basic writing skills.  (This is not an anti-science rant, you see.)  First-year pre-Business at Memorial looked similar to first-year English, all those years ago, and I escaped Calculus with my “A.”  No harm done.  For many students, however, failure in courses for a major they wish to cast off follows them throughout their undergraduate careers. 

Does it need to be this way?

Some of my colleagues believe that we are in the business of weeding, of sorting, of selecting.  Over time, however, I have come to believe that we have a duty to help students find things at which they may succeed.  Imagine this hypothetical first semester for a Physics major at my university: Biology 1010 (F), Math 1410 (F), Math 1560 (D), Physics 1000 (D), Philosophy 1000 (B).  Perhaps this student hoped for a future in engineering or in medicine, but things did not go so well, obviously.  In my hypothetical scenario, the student takes Introduction to Philosophy as a humanities elective, exhibits an aptitude for the subject, and enjoys the class, scoring a “good” grade.

Our student has passed three of five courses with a grade point average of 1.00.  Although, mercifully, she starts to wonder about whether engineering or medicine is right for her, she has never considered any other program; in spite of the fact that she is on academic probation, she pleads for the opportunity to do five courses under closer supervision and continues on her original path.

Her second semester is worse than her first, as her lab demands grow.  Her next set of grades are as follows: Math 2560 (F), Physics 2000 (F), Physics 2130 (F), English 1900 (C), Political Science (D).  She picked up one more humanities elective and her first social science elective, but she made no more progress in science.  She did not like English as much as Philosophy, and she keeps thinking about that earlier class.  Building on her “B” in that discipline, she wonders if – with more work on the subject she enjoyed – she might go on to be a teacher or a lawyer.  Unfortunately, she will have a hard time changing course: her cumulative GPA of 0.80 will mean her expulsion.

In my administrative capacity, she can write me a letter, and I can let her stay.  But, by the end of one more year, she really needs to improve her grade point average by as much as 1.2 to get to the 2.00 that means good standing.  To “erase” her science “F” grades, she will need to repeat those courses, even though there is no reason for humanities (or even social sciences majors) to take second-year Physics as an elective.

For a student who wants to change program, why could we not just forgive courses no longer needed?  Imagine, for example, that we were able to forgive up to five courses from an old program that are not essential for a new program.  In the scenario I have imagined above, the student might be absolved of “F” grades in Biology 1010, Math 1410, Math 2560, Physics 2000, and Physics 2130.  For all the effort (and tuition) put in that first year, she would be left with two humanities, two science, and one social science credit, all of which could be used in a Philosophy major.  The student has a GPA of 1.6, still on probation, but with a real chance to raise herself to good standing by the end of the next academic year.  Currently, the best advice for this student would be to register as an occasional student, complete eight courses (if she could get them), and seek to be absolved of her “F” grades upon readmission.

But why should we cut loose a student who, for the sake of argument, has figured out what she wants to do and gives us some reason to believe that she can actually do it?  Could we not just forgive her?

Asking Questions About Questions

For just the second time in fifteen years, I skipped the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities (held in Fredericton, this year) in order to attend the annual meeting of the American Literature Association in Boston.  I came away with the same invigorating feeling that always comes from listening to humanities researchers: other people care about the things I care about; our work is relevant and makes a difference!  My colleagues can fret about the carbon footprint of conference travel and imagine a future when we discuss ideas across computer monitors, but I would miss the genuine fellowship of conference travel.

A more troubling development is rooted in the old David Lodge gag about the fellow who tries to write his conference paper on the airplane and is only “saved” from the embarrassment of having nothing to say by the interruption of a natural disaster.  Now, it is not the case that everyone leaves writing a conference paper until the last minute, but to accommodate those people who do we have dispensed with presubmission of complete conference papers.  Though it seems reasonable to think that, in the internet age, it would be simple to have a full text of a paper available before its delivery, when we hear a paper at a conference we hear it “cold.”  By the time we figure out what it is saying, and what it might mean to us, we are left to stumble and bumble through asking a question that is just becoming a question.  One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons is of a guy on a dais announcing the commencement of shorter speeches disguised as questions!

If we could read the papers ahead of time, if we had them on our iPads while they are being delivered, would we not ask better questions?  What about the ability to submit questions in advance, electronically?  Really, no one wants to ask a question; we all want to ask two or three: one to get the speaker thinking about our interpretation and a couple that engage the speaker’s engagement with our ideas.  This seems to me to be an excellent example of where technology can help us update the values of the past for current circumstances.  By exchanging papers and questions in advance, we might realize genuine discussion instead of people reading papers at an audience.