Shop Talk: Monday, August 29

Most interesting and yet frightening. What is the impact for educators to strive to have the learner presented with instruction from those who are like the learner? When will the learner ever be expected to accept information from those who are NOT like himself or herself? What happens to our aims for multiculturalism and diversity then?

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Where are the professors, deans, and presidents? 

Most haven’t directly experienced injustice. And words are insufficient to effectively communicate injustice. In other words, individuals have limited sympathies, limited understanding, and little or no motivation to put an end to injustice, until their lives are directly affected by injustice. 

As chuckkle has already pointed out, Vedder is conflating a number of different situations.
The Constitution protects citizens against actions by governmental bodies which can result in fines and incarceration; in other words, criminal penalties.  Civil actions are less directly covered.
The situation that Vedder described involves neither the criminal nor the civil court system.
Rather it’s an instance of a ‘what happens on campus stays on campus’ policy.
As someone who started his college career in 1959 and retired three years ago, I suspect that I can match Vedder instance for instance.
Typically, this sort of situation arises when some campus body (on our campus the Office of Student Affairs) tries to deal with situations without involving the court system.
A rape accusation would be viewed as a violation of the student code of honor, and the Office would try to resolve the complaint while protecting the rights and interests of all students involved.  The Office can not impose either criminal or civil penalties; the most that it can do is to suspend or dismiss the student.  Thus this is not a constitutional issue.
If the accuser had wanted civil or criminal penalties imposed, she (?) should have reported the incident to the local police.  If the case were prosecuted, the accused would then have a constitutional right to confront the accuser.
If this failed and the accuser brought a civil suit (see O.J.) then the standard would be ‘preponderance of evidence’.

Parenthetically, Vedder also conflates free speech and academic freedom (which he raises in the context of faculty tenure).
Free speech involves the use of the campus as a public forum by all members of the campus community.  Any topic may be involved short of a direct incitement to violence.
Academic freedom (as protected by faculty tenure), on the other hand, concerns the right of a faculty member to express opinions in her classes which fall within the subject of the class and her professional competence.
Thus, as a Professor of Economics, Vedder can espouse any economic system that he wants to in his classes.  On the other hand, most of his opinions on the legal system would NOT be protected by academic freedom and (in theory at least) he could be accused of violating the terms of his contract.

And as frankschmidt points out, in Vedder’s good old days (in my case, 1960), a Dean did, in fact, threaten to expel me because I did not properly wear a tie to dinner (I had a bow tie clipped to my jacket lapel).

“In the Golden Age of higher education, defined as when I attended school
(around 1960), colleges were viewed as oases of free speech with full
respect for First Amendment rights.”

Oh, this should be good…

“In 1964, for example, the school where I teach, Ohio University, allowed
a hateful leader of the American Nazi Party to spill his venom on the
campus, believing free and unfettered peaceful expression of ideas is
the hallmark of a good university.”

Sounds like it WAS a Golden Age of higher education, all right – for rich WASP cis men who could come to college unfettered by nonsense like lack of societal privilege, or fear of being assaulted and threatened on campus just for being the wrong race, sex, gender presentation, religion or class.

I wonder why campus policies on sexual assault were basically nonexistent back then?  I mean, it certainly couldn’t be because college administrators basically didn’t care, just like most of society didn’t care.  Hmmm…

My apologies for the multiple postings. Disqus kept telling me that the post wasn’t working.

I caught a student who handed in an obviously plagiarized paper on Machiavelli. Because my field is sixteenth-century Florence, it was clear to me right away that something was up. The student was smart enough to guess I would know he couldn’t read Italian, so – from the web-posted essay on Machiavelli by a prof elsewhere – he removed an Italian source and made up an Anglophone one, complete with fictitious author, book title, etc. Because I knew such a book and author did not exist, I got suspicious immediately; it took me perhaps a minute to do a string search on Google and find the web-based source he’d cut/pasted as his paper. It gave me some Schadenfreude to ask the student how long it had taken him to find the source, learn it was about two hours, and then tell him that it had taken me a fraction of that time to prove it was plagiarized from the web.

The third-most disappointing part was that the student was in the honors program. The second-most disappointing part is that a colleague in another dept had had the same student the semester before, and given him As because his papers seemed ‘so professionally written’ (guess why?). The most disappointing part was that this was not enough to get the student expelled.

Finally, none of this solves the problem of students who can afford to order custom-written papers. The only way to protect against that problem is to require pre-approval of an abstract and collect notes and drafts, etc., throughout the semester. But it’s hard to do this for multiple short papers.

To vpostrel below: I’m not a lawyer, so this isn’t legal advice, but I’d look into legal recourse if I were you. His dissociating your name from your own work does not protect him. I believe that, as soon as you write something original, it is your copyrighted work. You’d have a lot of lovely evidence from the email you quoted.

I think there are many students out there who honestly can’t figure out how to incorporate research into a paper.  Everything they know about the subject is tied up in one or two articles from the internet, and they simply don’t know how to separate out their own opinions, using their own words, from what they’ve read.

That doesn’t excuse them from copying and pasting without citations, since we’ve told them repeatedly they can’t do that.  I just think we’d find less plagiarism among students if they were better at critical thinking.  After all, think about who your worst group of offenders is.  First time freshmen, straight from high school?  How about grad students?  Older students from the second-career crowd? 

I can’t help but wonder what would happen if you have students write an opinion paper as an in-class assignment, and then grade and return them and have students find sources to back up their opinions in a second “draft.”  Then ask them later to write a paper in the traditional manner, finding sources first.  And finally, ask students to compare the two processes, with pros and cons for each.  If you’ve ever tried this approach, let me know.  I’m interested to hear the results.

I had a student plagiarize journals in a Freshman Comp class. There was a 50/50 split among topics I gave and ones the students chose. The student copied the journals, simple 1 page assignments where he could write about whatever he wanted, from the Internet for those topics he got to pick. I caught him because the journals switched to having a female character referring to herself. This guy (on the basketball team) clearly hadn’t read beyond the first sentence or two (looked liked they were from a blog) to know there was no way he could have written these. I am pretty convinced he didn’t think I read the journals either.

If you want to see students blatantly contracting for papers, check out O Desk.  I’ve seen postings along the line of “I need this paper in 24 hours and it must be perfect” followed by a copy and paste of some professor’s detailed instructions for completing the paper.  O Desk keeps a history of the jobs employers have posted and how much they paid for them.  I’ve seen some individuals that have paid a whole lot of money and all the job postings are pretty clearly for academic papers.  The one that really disheartened me was where an individual was looking to hire someone to write his/her dissertation. 

Today’s blackout of Wikipedia must have students everywhere panicking.

How about a PhD candidate who plagiarized?  After three attempts at getting the person to recognize the problem and having the Chair suspending me temporarily from the committee only to reinstate me because the Chair was too busy left me no option but to resign from the committee.  That has to be the most bizarre experience I’ve ever had with plagiarism at that high level.  

Google string search is fine but tedious at catching cheaters.  I’ve been using turnitin.com and once I’ve caught someone, I do a string search on google on the exact phrases to verify before turning over the report to our secretary, who then launches a formal process.  The saddest thing was about 5 years ago when a student argued with me that her marketing professor told her it was ok to use stuff off the internet and “people do that all the time”.  I’m not sure if that’s what the professor actually meant.  If she did, that was problematic.  Or it could be the student’s selective retention issue.  Bottom line?  We can keep wasting our time arguing back and forth and clogging my inbox or we can spend an hour at an academic integrity meeting aka a tribunal.  One of her more mature team members was extremely disappointed with her and even told her not to dig a deeper hole.  No more email pollution after that.  

Since I review a few papers a year for various journals, I’ve also been more vigilant on manuscripts that look choppy.  Last year I caught three plagiarized manuscripts.  In one case I even managed to trace the authors because they posted their working paper on their websites.  The worst penalty is usually that they’ll get reprimanded by the editor.  Nothing more.  The cycle probably continues for the recalcitrant offenders, in which case it’s up to the individual universities to deal with their “copy cat” professors.  

I am all for students that want to improve a different project, if it applies to my class. When I have had students that wanted to do this, I required that they show me the
original and we work out a plan well in advance. This is so that I can tell
where the starting point is, in order to help them to expect a reasonable
amount of work with me. 

Without this, a student who did a lot of work in one class could just skate by in mine, and the point is not to get three A’s for the same paper, but to learn and improve with each successive class. Moreover, this unfairly penalizes the classmates who did
honest work on their original papers. 

I believe the second professor in this case is applying a similar standard – the paper that would have gained an A if written that semester is not the same thing as the 50/50 improvement of a paper from a previous semester. Your daughter need
not have cited herself in an undergraduate paper, but she should have consulted
with the professor well in advance, so that the expectations for the new paper
would have been clear. 

[on edit: my apologies for the strange cut and paste formatting]

If they had….they would have had.   Sheesh!

I’m dying to know what you replied to the second student, the one who thought he should have an A because “I made B’s on almost all my papers.”

I’ve found that using a scoring rubric really cuts down on student complaints about grades on written work, as well as making it easier to give specific feedback for improvement. It’s only fair to make expectations clear, even if your standards are high.

But Prof. Jenkins, you can’t expect me to be as smart as those 7 students!!!

Thank you for pointing out that “excelling” doesn’t have to mean a competition with the other students – why are Americans so hung up on individual level competition as the model for everything?  

However, I would suggest another target of comparison against which the student “excels” – the content of the course itself, aka the material described in the syllabus.  If a student displays complete mastery of the course content, by getting very close to 100% of it correctly, that suggests that they’ve hit the ceiling on the course (like a student who gets 800 out of 800 on the SAT) and their knowledge surpasses the course requirements in that area.  

So in that sense, if you had a remedial English class syllabus and for some reason got enrollment that was all English-AP-score-5 students, it would be entirely reasonable to expect the entire class to get an “A” – to excel in their mastery of the course requirements.

The only time that looking at the students in comparison to each other is relevant is in judging the course itself, not the students – if there is a wide trend towards the top or bottom of mastery across most students, that suggests that there is something wrong with the course or how it is being taught.

It is funny how often I’d have to be a “Math teacher” in my Composition classes!

“why are Americans so hung up on individual level competition as the model for everything?”

That’s a bit of a selective view, isn’t it? I believe that both the person you agreed with AND the person you disagreed with are Americans. So saying that one confirms a national/cultural stereotype while not noticing that the other undermines it is not a very well-reasoned position to take.

Message to all cheaters who take others work and claim they wrote it. If you spend time to twist around others work to make it look like u wrote it, this means u could write your own. EVERY HUMAN WAS BORN AS ORIGINAL. DON’T PUT MUCH EFFORT TO BE A COPY OF SOMEONE.

To lindar324:  My university has a clearly stated policy that work completed for one course cannot be submitted in another course.  I know a few professors who will make exceptions if asked and given good reason (e.g., the initial paper was 10 pages and now the student wants to expand on the topic for a 20 page paper).  I believe the idea behind our policy is that, if a student just submits something from another course, the student isn’t really DOING the work required for the second course.

From the brief except, it didn’t really sound like my work. It sounded like some adaptation written by someone who doesn’t really have a handle on the English language, perhaps cut and pasted from an interview. I’ve also been plagiarized by a tenured English professor (now no longer employed), and I didn’t sue him. http://www.dynamist.com/weblog/archives/002771.html and http://www.dynamist.com/weblog/archives/002769.html

Isn’t the reason for people to go to college to “go pro” in something?  If you wanted to go to college to be a lawyer, you would go to Harvard because it is a top law school.  If you wanted to be a doctor, you would go somewhere with a top medical school. So, these athletes that are forced to go to college for a year by the NBA are going to a college that can help them to succeed in “going pro”, just like every other student. 

The best suggestion I have heard to help this issue is to create some type of major that is geared toward student athletes that have great potential to go pro. Make it an associate degree that focuses on the business side of professional athletics so that when they do leave school to become pro, they are more prepared for that world.

Last I heard, to become a lawyer by way of Harvard, you actually have to graduate with a degree.  Same situation for medical school.  Are you suggesting that students headed for the NBA will also have to graduate with a degree?

In a way, yes I am saying that. Why not be able to graduate with some sort of Associate degree in professional athletics? If this is the direction that university sports are headed in, train the student athletes to succeed at that level on both the athletic side and the business side.  Many professional athletes go broke because they are unable to handle the business side. If you want these athletes to also be students, give them an option to get a degree that will help in their chosen career path.

 Exactly! And furthermore, Calipari has been one of the most vocal coaches against the current rules, calling out the NBA and the current NCAA president repeatedly. In addition, he celebrates his four-year graduates just as much as his NBA players. Take a look at his facebook page where he raves about Eloy Vargas and Darius Miller for graduating. Finally, the best evidence is that all of his past players love him and are committed to him, regardless of whether they’ve gone pro or not. Sounds players-first to me and sounds like a pretty decent fellow.

You need to look up your facts on those one-and-done players. Only one has not completed their spring semester at Kentucky and he has since said that he wishes that he would have. That player was Daniel Orton. If you would look at this year’s team, you will see that they all finished out the spring semester and the projected #1 player in the draft ended up with a GPA of over a 3.0 (I can’t remember exactly, but 3.6 keeps coming to mind.)

11179102  wrote: … “Give Calipari this – he has created his model by following the rules provided by the NCAA and NBA and built in broad daylight.  We don’t have to like it, but reality is what it is.   In this light, Calipari is not the problem, just a symptom of the problem.” …

I beg to differ with you on this: 

The University of Kentucky, a major state university and educational institution, actually has the basketball team, not the coach. Kentucky is part of the NCAA and as such is obligated and expected to support and follow its rules, NOT  HAVE  A COACH FOLLOWING HIS MODEL. 
Calipari following NCAA rules…since WHEN? Look at his record in the NCAA which has solid evidence of NOT FOLLOWING RULES, bringing PENALTIES upon numerous colleges and universities who hired him to perform as a professional (not as an unethical practitioner following HIS MODEL ), and having his record as a coach changed (since he’s been at Kentucky) by deletion of SUCCESSES he enjoyed when NOT FOLLOWING RULES. 
It is a shame that a would-be-great University employs such a person.

Numerous other coaches can win games and championships with elite players, so why is Calipari still a college coach when he does not respect or follow collegiate athletic rules? 

“Pre pro, one and done” basketball players do not belong in student athletic programs at such institutions. This has become accepted because of the regrettable decline in American values. There seems to be just one value now: money.
This is the change needed: Universities with athletic programs which recruit and play “pre pros” who are not and do not want to be students should have to pay taxes as entertainment enterprises. 

Associate degrees may be awarded by the University of Kentucky (not sure if community colleges in their state are part of the UK system), but most major universities grant bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees. The “one and done” guys won’t be there long enough to earn even an associate degree, which involves taking courses and attending classes for two years, usually. In many states, associate degrees are awarded at community college level, not the major universities with big athletic programs. 
The great universities (as Kentucky is intended to be) were founded to educate the citizenry (greatly needed in this country), to advance knowledge through research and to provide public service which fosters the progress and well being of their states and communities. 

How do “pre pro, one and done” athletes relate to fulfillment of those purposes?

It’s pretty interesting reading all the posts from those trying to find a rationale for Calipari’s behavior. Oh he’s playting within the rules, but let’s see what cost Kentucky will eventually pay from associating itself with him. Calipari will leave Kentucky in shambles as he did with UMass and Memphis. This is not a good guy. He’s a snake oil salesman who comes to town, makes a few million, and leaves you far worse off than you were before he arrived. Sure, you’ll get some temporary thrill, but it all catches up to you for hiring him — and with any luck it will catch up with him.

“‘No other program is losing five or six players a year’ to the NBA, he wrote on his blog. ‘This is a players-first program, and you cannot put a young team into situations that are not fair to the players.’”

Hello? The reason that Calipari loses a half-dozen players to the NBA each year is because he recruits players who are ready for the NBA after one or two years of college. And when those go pro, he recruits more. John Wall and DeMarcus Cousins went pro and were replaced by Anthony Davis (2011-2012 college player of the year), who will be replaced by another one-and-done star. If anybody has cause to end the series, it’d be Indiana, which every year plays against a Kentucky team that’s more NBA D-League (probably better) than NCAA.

And as for Calipari’s record of good deeds, his supporters ought to review his record, especially that at UMass.

Kentucky, which had a pretty good pro basketball team, the Colonels, in the ABA, lost it in the merger. Since then Kentucky and Louisville have filled that bill.

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The problem with your argument, Kessinger, is that almost none of the players who play sports at the college level go pro, let alone have lucrative, long-term careers. Last season, there were 46 players drafted into the NBA from colleges.

http://www.basketball-reference.com/draft/NBA_2011.html

Even factoring in other professional leagues around the world, there simply aren’t as many jobs out there as there would likely be players who wanted to take advantage of it. This isn’t unique to basketball, but would skills they learned be transferable, especially if the player only stayed in school for a few years?

While I think your idea to include a degree component on the business side of the game is a good idea, I’m not sure that an AA degree alone is going to prepare those players for the “business side of professional sports.”