The way some veteran Washingtonians remember the names and locations of U.S. House of Representative Offices Buildings—Cannon, Longworth, and Rayburn—is to remember the expression “cheaters, liars, and robbers,” or, if a juicy congressional sex scandal is underway, “cheaters, liars, and rapists.”
Unfortunately, that came to mind when I recently saw the top 15 stories listed on the electronic front page of USA Today. Three of the stories dealt with college scandals—SAT examination cheating at New York City suburban high schools, thuggery amongst the marching band at Florida A&M University, and more on the Penn State football scandal that indeed appears to involve rape.
The SAT cheating incident was a scandal waiting to happen. In most economic transactions, resources are allocated on the basis of price—you can’t buy the good or service unless you can pay the price. McDonald’s will sell hamburgers to all comers with money—rich or poor, saints or sinners, black or white. But elite schools often will only sell their services to perhaps one out of every five or ten “applicants” (it is interesting McDonald’s calls its clients “customers,” while Harvard calls them “applicants”). The SAT (or sometimes ACT) exam is important in the selection process. Suppose not overly bright applicant A would be willing to pay $100,000 to go to YU (Yuppie University) that charges $40,000 in tuition, but she can’t get in because of her mediocre test scores. Spending $3,000 to bribe a smart kid to take the exam for her makes perfect sense for some, moral considerations notwithstanding. (Another way is for the parent of the student to give a huge gift to the university, which seems often to open admission doors despite institutional protestations to the contrary).
By the way, I do feel that severely punishing the test takers is fine—but to let the bribers off lightly is a travesty, brought on, no doubt, because the high-school students are juveniles. But I think the parents who financed and often instigated these incidents should face jail time, or at least a week in a hotel room with Nancy Pelosi (if they are conservative) or Michele Bachmann (if they are liberal).
Moving on to lying—it is so endemic to college life it is hard to know where to start. Schools, of course, prefer to hide information rather than outright lie. Yet, because of ranking-based “bottom lines,” institutions are prone to cheat on their college rankings. My CCAP organization does the undergraduate rankings for Forbes, and we refuse to use self-reported data because, frankly, I think dishonesty is rampant in higher education.
As to rapists, obviously the Penn State story comes to mind. And now there are allegations of child abuse within the basketball program at Syracuse University. In general, acts of violence such as the kind that allegedly occurred at Florida A&M, Penn State, and Syracuse are often tolerated far too much. If Joe Paterno fought hard to keep students playing football after clear evidence of law or rule breaking, that is sad—but it is precisely the story that Tom Wolfe told years ago in his marvelous novel about college life, I Am Charlotte Simmons. Anyone familiar with big-time college sports or the money-hungry behavior of modern college presidents knows that athletes are often given privileged treatment.
This is a further sign of how moral relativism is pervading, corrupting, and cheapening the quality of life in America. The fact that it is happening so frequently in higher education is so sad, and so undercuts the notion prevalent in the academy that higher education is a special, ennobling niche of society that deserves special treatment, subsidization, and respect.
