Research-Universities Group Called Texas A&M’s Professor-Tracking Program ‘Ill-Conceived’

What I like about Texas is its delicious up-front-ness. After all, this is merely making explicit what is implicit in far too many supposedly elegant institutions of the higher learning. (And how much money the Classics Dept. rake in last fiscal year? What? Off with their heads!)

Perhaps it is the Chancellor who needs to know how his university is supposed to run. He was a political appointee by Perry, was he not? The track record for Perry-appointed personnel on Texas education boards has proven itself to be less than stellar over the last few years.

And some of the biggest moneymakers are adjunct professors teaching very large classes at the introductory level. By this metric, all the senior professors should be fired and the university should just go with TAs and adjuncts. No worries about tenure then either! Of course, then Texas A&M would be summarily dismissed from the top tier and booted out of the AAU. Not a concern for Rick Perry or his flunkies, I’m sure, who only care about the win-loss record of the Aggies football team.—Sandy Thatcher, Frisco, TX

I can just see the application pool at private institutions overflowing.

Yea how much money do the administrators bring in?

Just so you guys all know. I first wrote this back when I was in Elementary School in 1973. I’m not sure how this joker Marc Parry got a hold of my paper. LOL!

Plagiarism is a bane of every professor’s existence, but I found the mother lode when teaching in Yunnan Province, China. Openly the students tried to copy from each other. they justified it as an act of mercy: “We just wanted to help each other pass.” Finally, albeit temporarily, we cracked the problem by separate desks in separate rooms.

Wayne – interesting. I found the same cultural acceptance of plagiarism among students from the Middle East. The justification was “If I need something, my brother/friend/countryman is expected to help me”. That explained more than one paper submitted by someone from Riyadh about what it was like to grow up as a blue-eyed redhead in Minneapolis.

…a lot?

I found the same cultural acceptance of plagiarism among faculty at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM). Several colleagues stumbled upon two instances of apparent plagiarism on the part of several faculty and administrators at the College of Business, USM. We informally asked for a discussion to see if we could have a meeting of minds about the apparent plagiarism. (Plagiarism is rarely cut and dry, as implied in the article.) Dean Harold Doty, President Martha Saunders et al refused. We then undertook efforts to open a discussion following the rules in our Faculty Handbook. They still refused to discuss their actions or follow the Faculty Handbook. Since the documents in question were part of submissions for reaccreditation, we asked the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business to encourage discussions and participate in a dialogue about the documents they received that were copied. They, too, refused. We learned through freedom of information requests that the involved administrators and faculty had, after we asked for a discussion, gotten permission to copy the documents “without proper citation”–their term. They did this to comply with reaccreditation requests from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. So, their approach to plagiarism was to get permission after getting caught. Getting permission, in their view and the AACSB’s, converted plagiarism to acceptable behavior. It is still relevant because one of the plagiarized documents was The Academic Integrity Policy taken without attribution from Syracuse University. The only part not copied by USM was the list of citations Syracuse University used to create its Academic Integrity Policy. And the School of Accountancy, USM, still represents Syracuse University’s Academic Integrity Policy “without proper citation” on its website. In my view, at a minimum, our university missed a wonderful learning opportunity. For details, see http://www.usmnews.net.

Chauncey M. DePree, Jr., DBA
Professor
School of Accountancy
College of Business
University of Southern Mississippi

You have a good point about phrasing questions, except that your samples are not, in the end, the same questions. The first is a research question, which asks students to locate and analyze information. The second is an opinion question, which requires no research.

If one’s learning goals include guiding students to enter into a conversation with the ideas of others — i.e., to act like scholars — then one cannot simply assign essays that ask for opinions informed only by personal opinion and reflection.

True, or at least partly true. Until students have proven themselves capable of personal opinion and reflection, asking them to critically reflect on the words of others often results in works that fail to address the “critically” and “on” bits. Which is to say, I get a room full of perniciously plagiarizing parrots who don’t even have alliteration on their side.

When I ask for opinions, I find I don’t have to tell students to engage with the ideas of others. Most of them simply do just that. If for no other reason than to bolster their arguments against the evil professor who might think less of them for thinking out of turn. It is also an amazingly effective way to find out what students are taking away from my classes by observing what students say in the “tell the professor what they want to hear” component of the work.

However, what might enlighten the point as to where the two versions converge is my failure to include the last sentence I would have included in either case. “Provide three sources that either support or refute your arguments.” (“Sources? But this isn’t a comp class!” they all cry in unison.)

And really, I don’t want them to act like anything except themselves. Acting like scholars is a pretty useless skill for most of them after they graduate. What I do want them to do is to learn how to be open, observant, flexible, and inquisitive so that they can be better prepared for a world that requires constant learning and adaptation to succeed.

So in other words, a company that produces a plagiarism detection tool (which actually isn’t plagiarism detection since it also flags appropriately cited content) created a study that shows that plagiarism is social; since social is expanding, ergo plagiarism is probably expanding? I’m glad we have such an unbiased source!

For what it’s worth I think turnitin’s model is great for them, people pay them to run a text checker, and then they not only get money from people who run text files through the engine, but also get to keep people’s work (without paying money to them) so they can check against it in the future.

Plagiarism, and the underlying principle of efficiency, has been around for a long time. We just have better tools to detect it. Instead of using these tools punitively (and paying for them in the process), it’s better to apprentice students into the academic discourse that we obviously want them to be conversant in. They won’t pick it up by osmosis, let’s train them to do it right and convince them to buy into the reasons why we cite.

I appreciate your thoughtful response to Lacey Johnson’s article. But I agree with 11179102 and also “gently disagree” with your position. As a first generation student from a poor and rural family, I believe I would have greatly benefited from a first-generation dorm for the first year of my undergraduate studies. Your point that economically disadvantaged students will lose opportunities for networking is, I think, misguided: for the first year of university, most students are simply getting their bearings, learning how to study, and navigating the potentially intimidating territory of university life. It is far above the abilities of many students, regardless of social class, to make meaningful connections for future employment at this stage of collegiate work. Further, those students who are sophisticated enough to establish potentially useful social networks that will lead to employment or social advantages down the line very often do so as part of sororities and fraternities–almost by default (because of both cost and the social elitism of most residential Greek systems) middle- and upper-class students whose parents also successfully navigated these channels and can provide guidance.Many first generation students arrive on campus with no idea of how the university works, and finding one’s way around campus–and especially finding resources appropriate to their needs–is already daunting. A dorm where these types of information were made not simply available but *normal* could provide a much-needed sense of safety in the always humbling and sometimes (for those accustomed to the embarrassment of food stamps, AFDC, and simply being poor) completely demoralizing act of reaching out for help. One year in a dormitory socializing students to university life in a supportive environment, where they aren’t the silent and unacknowledged economic minority, could do a world of good. Anecdotally, as a first-year student at a land-grant state university, I was housed with an upper-class sorority member whose life experiences were night and day compared to mine. I spent that first semester feeling ashamed of my (extremely limited) wardrobe, my regional speech patterns, and my obvious poverty. The only thing I gained was a palpable sense of relief when she moved out to live in her sorority for the second semester. And without a centralized support structure, I *never* learned that there was an office specifically geared towards students from lower-class backgrounds at my university. Had I known, I absolutely would have taken advantage of the services.

Dr. Kahlenberg: Like many others, I have read and followed your work in recent years with great appreciation and with great respect. I was first generation.  I did not attend a large, land-grant institution; instead I attended a small, “eastern selective” as the top tier undergraduate colleges were referred to during the 1970′s and 80′s.

I have mixed feelings about this proposal – on the one hand, I believe it is imperative that first generation students receive appropriate levels of support and orientation to college.  On that matter, I believe we are in agreement.  Whether or not a residence hall specifically designated for First Generation students is helpful or detrimental to their ability to gain the greatest benefit from being on campus is an open question, one whose answer depends strongly on the individual.  For some of us, having a place to which we can “retreat” is important as we transition from one demographic category to another.  For others of us, “jumping in full-fledged” is more appropriate.  For that reason, I think we should reserve judgment about the value of this residential experience at the U of KY or any other institution that tries out this type of living arrangement.  I think we need to continue to learn more about what can help students achieve the greatest benefit based on their developmental readiness (yes, I am a psychologist by training) for different types of living and learning environments.

I think your commentary raises several valid concerns and highlights the paradox or irony of the situation.  We recognize the need for special services to support first generation students but we also want to be sure they are integrated into the campus community as if they were no different than anyone else so that they can maximize the acquistion of “cultural and social capital” offered by colleges.  That was the paradox we struggled with in terms of race when I was in college during the 1970′s.  Both then and now, the often unspoken assumption about students like us was that we were “in need” as opposed to being “capable.”

Perhaps part of the difficulty is that we imagine all first generation students are relatively the same, that is, that we share the same talents and deficiencies in roughly the same degree.  The academy once thought that all African-American and Hispanic students were relatively similar in that same way.  Yet, my experience shows me that there is diversity within any demographic cohort and it is for that reason that I believe we should view the residence hall as one option among several to support first generation students.

When all is said and done, as I indicated in a post to the original article, it is important to think in terms of what we can do to improve the student educational experience as we learn from what works and what does not work.  For my part, I am willing to support the idea of a residence hall for first generation students as long as it is voluntary and has clear, structured programming (rather than relying on “black box” impact.)  While it may change the way it occurs, I don’t think that will undercut the arguments you have advanced in support of greater socio-economic diversity on college campuses.

barstl – in theory I would tend to agree with you about the need to not segregate students on campus via special programs.  In practice, however,I find that segregation occurs whether we like it or not from a philosophical perspective.  What I believe is helpful is to work with what occurs and try to shape it in productive ways.  Identifying student cohorts based on certain shared characteristics is not inherently wrong or problematic – it is what is done when the demographic cohort is identified that can be problematic.

So, if coaches were expected to use their ability to influence the group that will naturally form (athletic team members are among the most group-member oriented cohorts I have experienced on each campus at which I have worked) so that the group becomes more open to interacting with others, then we could see more integration of  student populations than might naturally occur.  And, yes, I recognize this is an idealistic notion but none-the-less, one we ought to consider promoting.

The same can be argued for efforts to work with first generation students (and, I agree, being a first generation student is not an inherent handicap but it does come with a lack of some social/cultural capital that can reduce for some students their ability to maximize the benefit of their college experience.)  Again, if the directors of such programs work with the students to build up their capacity to reach out beyond their comfort zones, that can enhance interaction that might not otherwise occur.  I think it is more about how we envision and carry out these programs and efforts than the fact that we conduct them.