Beer and Circus

by Murray Sperber

  In addition, the student sports fans, unlike those undergraduates who regarded cheating as “an insult for an insult,” tended to see it as an element in “the game of going to college,” a contest that they were determined to win “by any means necessary” (the two phrases kept recurring). These students are only one cohort—albeit a rapidly growing one—of the undergraduate population, but their attitudes definitely contribute to the general cynicism of the student body. As do the unethical coaches and the never-ending scandals in intercollegiate athletics.

  An undergraduate at Indiana University suggested a survey question to probe the connections between student cheating and college sports:

  A star athlete at your school asks you to help him/her cheat on an important exam. A passing grade in this course will determine whether the athlete remains eligible to play or not. Would you help the athlete cheat? If not, what would you do (turn the athlete in, etc.)?

  The question was included in the survey and produced interesting results. At schools with Division I college sports programs, 59 percent of the respondents said that they would help the athlete cheat, men outnumbering women in positive assent almost two to one. Of the 41 percent no vote, a large majority came from women. However, on the second part of the question—“what would you do (turn the athlete in, etc.)?”—84 percent of respondents at Division I schools said they would not turn the athlete in, and only 16 percent said they would. (This statistic parallels a U.S. News poll finding that only 18 percent of their responding students said that they would “turn in a classmate” who is cheating.)

  Of equal interest were the written responses prompted by the question. A typical yes explanation from a male student was: “Cheating is o.k. If I have the answers to the exam, sure I’ll give them to a star jock.” Other males explained with versions of the following: “I’d help. It’s not hurting me,” and: “No big deal here. I’d tell him, ‘Let’s go for it.’” However, more nurturing and judicious yesses came from some females. One wrote:

  I would help the athlete prepare for the exam but probably wouldn’t help him cheat in it. Unless he was the absolute star of the team—then I’d first make him sign lots of stuff for my kid brother. But I’d never turn him in.

  The no answers held some surprises, but rather than showing student idealism, they usually revealed cynicism. A large number of males replied with a version of this response: “No, I won’t help. Why bother? If he flunks the class, you better believe he’ll still remain eligible.” Some males, particularly at Sunbelt football schools, replied with versions of this formulation, “No. I’d tell the athlete no-can-do, but I sure wouldn’t turn him in for fear of being assaulted by the student population.” However, in a more ethical and emphatic refusal, an intercollegiate athlete wrote:

  I’d tell him to eat shit. As a jock myself I realize that it takes a lot of effort to study after a hard practice but you don’t learn anything by cheating. I’ve had teammates ask me to help them cheat lots of times and I always tell them to “mange merde” (I took French).

  A number of the female no answers had rather complicated responses; one of the more tortured was: “I wouldn’t help him. Maybe I’d even tell the professor or, at this school, the TA. Then again, the TA has no power. It would be a total mess. Maybe I’d try to forget the whole thing, pretend that he never asked for help.” But a few vocational women had strong and clear answers, like the following: “No help for this pathetic moron from me. I’m also turning in the son-of-a-bitch. I work too damn hard outside and inside this university to ignore this!”

  Many critics of college sports claim that athletic department academic fraud stems from the fact that most intercollegiate athletes are dumb jocks, and that they do not belong in higher education. Some dumb jocks exist on college campuses (a number of Minnesota basketball players were in this group), but, in reality, the physically and mentally exhausted and academically underachieving athlete is much more common than the dumb jock (some UM b-ball players and the vast majority of other athletes at the school were in this category).

  As discussed elsewhere in this book, most Division I athletic scholarship holders are vocational students, working full-time at very demanding jobs and also trying to carry regular course loads. Many of these young men and women, because their coaches and sports require extraordinary amounts of their time and energy, experience academic problems. And athletic department tutors—under orders from coaches to “keep the jocks eligible any way you can”—sometimes cheat to keep players academically afloat. However, for some critics of college sports to regard the athletes as the source of athletic department academic fraud is to blame the victims (often willing but always shortsighted) of a complex and exploitative system.

  To their credit, a minority of athletes fight the athletic department system as soon as they enter college, and they manage, through amazing effort, to obtain a good education while playing sports—often they have to defy athletic department attempts to steer them to “gut” courses and “mickey” majors. Other athletes, when they realize that they will never play at the pro level, begin to work hard on their education; nevertheless, because of time and physical constraints, they often academically underachieve. And some athletes, after they end their college athletic careers—either because of injury or the completion of their playing eligibility—become excellent students. At last able to concentrate full-time on their studies, they bring the discipline that they learned in sports to their academic endeavors.

  Finally, the reasons why athletes commit academic fraud are as complicated as the causes of regular undergraduate cheating. Nonetheless, in every case the individual student can refuse to commit the crime. Numerous athletes and regular students do not cheat. That some honest undergraduates exist—despite their schools generally ignoring student cheating—is a testament to the morality of these young people.

  13

  UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION TRIAGE: HONORS PROGRAM LIFEBOATS

  Honors programs and colleges, with their striking contrast to ordinary undergraduate classes, offer the best proof of Big-time U’s neglect of general undergraduate education. The comments from honors program directors and in their guidebooks provide a clear view of the triage scene.

  In every case, catering to the [honors] student as an individual plays a central role in honors course design. Most honors classes are small (under 20 students) and discussion oriented—giving students a chance to present their own interpretation of ideas … .

  All honors classes help students develop and articulate their own perspectives by cultivating verbal and written style. The classes help students mature intellectually and prepare them to engage in their own explorations and research.

  —Dr. Joan Digby, editor of Peterson’s Honors Programs

  Every description of honors programs stresses the small size of honors courses versus the usually enormous regular undergraduate classes. For example, at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities), honors students “cite class size as their primary reason for choosing the special program. Classes in the rest of the university … [are] notoriously large. Some are so big that they use television monitors” so that students in the back half of the lecture hall can see what the professor looks like and can hear him or her better.

  At many universities, honors students “place out of” or skip the massive introductory courses; at others, the university sets up special honors sections of these courses for them, almost always taught by full faculty members, not graduate teaching assistants. Miami University of Ohio, in describing its honors program, takes a sarcastic swipe at the lecture course tradition, both at its school and others: its honors “program empowers students to see themselves as generators of knowledge rather than as passive transmitters,” taking notes and regurgitating information on exams. The University of Maryland (College Park) honors program makes the same point when it tells potential freshmen applicants, “You’ll be creating knowledge with the faculty, not memorizing a zillion facts to throw b
ack on some test.” This prompts the question: If administrators at Miami, Maryland, and other schools condemn the lecture course method, why do Big-time U’s continue teaching the vast majority of their undergraduates in these courses? This tradition is pedagogically bankrupt, as these administrators and almost all of the studies on the topic indicate, but research universities keep it alive and flourishing for noneducational reasons—it is the most economic means for Big-time U’s to pursue research prestige.

  In its honors program material, the University of Connecticut also offers a damning statement about regular undergraduates at the school; it states that its honors program—enrolling only a small percentage of all undergraduates—“is for enthusiastic and energetic students who enjoy small classes, extensive discussions with professors, and the challenge of articulating and refining their ideas.” Do the vast majority of UConn students dislike small classes, personal contact with professors, etc.? U.S. News profiled an honors freshman at the school who took science seminars with as few as fifteen students as “compared with more than 300 [students] in the non-honors” equivalent classes. Surely, regular UConn students would have preferred the seminars?

  In its admissions material for regular students, UConn does not mention the discrepancy between its honors program and general undergraduate education one. However, it stresses the UConn Huskies men’s and women’s basketball teams and their national championships as well as the accompanying campus festivities. The Insider’s Guide says of UConn: “Well known as a party school, students find that it is hard to find good places [on campus] to study”; however, the honors students have special, quiet places reserved for their use.

  Many honors programs also advertise: “The Honors college emphasizes the development of fundamental rhetorical skills: writing, reading, speaking, and listening [emphasis added]. Enrollment in any course rarely exceeds 25 students, and many courses are seminars where each student is encouraged to play an active role in discussion” (University of Oregon). Again, the implication is that regular courses at Big-time U’s do not teach these essential “rhetorical skills,” and that an undergraduate’s best chance of acquiring them is in an honors program. This theme is repeated so often in the guidebooks that the conclusion is ominous: Big-time U is admitting that it is not teaching regular undergraduates to read and write at a college level. Many experts in the field of “outcomes and assessments” also confirm this fact. Therefore, when honors programs emphasize their ability to teach literacy, they are pointing the way to their lifeboats.

  Instead of acknowledging this triage of undergraduate students, research universities try to sell honors as a wonderful enhancement of their entire educational mission, and a great boon to all students.

  An Elite Education at Public School:

  Honors Program at College Park

  [University of Maryland]

  The program is a key element in the campus’ much larger ambition to move into the upper echelons of public universities nationally … . “These programs set the pace for the entire undergraduate experience here,” says University [of Maryland] Provost Gregory Geoffrey. “They attract to the campus the very best students and their presence enriches all students.”

  —Michael Hill, Baltimore Sun reporter

  The University of Massachusetts [at Amherst] is proposing a $15 million complex to house a new academically exclusive [honors] college within UMass-Amherst … . The complex would give an identity, as well as distinct residences, classrooms, and a student center to Commonwealth College … conceived as part of a broad plan to enhance the prestige of a public university … [and] establish tangible evidence of the state’s commitment to academic excellence at UMass … .

  It will be a breeding ground for Rhodes and Marshall scholars—honors never bestowed on a UMass student, and ones that UMass president William M. Bulger is eager to have distinguish his school.

  —Kate Zernike, Boston Globe reporter

  That the pursuit of “prestige” motivates research universities—particularly Upward Drift ones like Maryland and UMass—is not news. Indeed, many rating services and annual guidebooks consider the number of Rhodes, Marshalls, and other famous scholarships won by a university’s undergraduates as an important “school prestige” item. However, for Big-time U officials to pretend that an honors college or program will benefit all undergraduates is worse than hypocrisy, it is bold-faced lying. How can an honors program help “the entire undergraduate experience” at Maryland or any other school when it siphons off the best students as well as many of the best faculty teachers? Numerous experts have commented on the well-known phenomenon of removing the brightest and most articulate students from a course, and leaving the rest, as well as the instructor, to sink. Similarly, at many schools with honors programs, faculty members willing and able to teach regular undergraduates often decamp to honors courses, diminishing the already low level of pedagogy in general undergraduate classes. One observer noted, “The bright students better fit the faculty ideal” of what undergraduates should be, and they help “keep faculty morale high,” allowing professors to ignore the insurmountable problems of teaching often hostile students in mass courses.

  In UMass’s new honors college, enrollment in courses—all taught by full faculty members—is limited to no more than twenty students, with many classes much smaller. However, regular UMass undergraduate courses are often very large, with hundreds of students in some introductory classes. One freshman commented, “It is really scary … . I attend two classes that are bigger than my whole [high] school put together,” that’s more than 400 in each UMass class. Another student complained about the school using undergraduate teaching assistants in some lecture courses: “I’m paying the university … to get the best education possible, and an undergraduate from down the hall is grading me”—although the complainant admitted that the undergrad TA graded really easy. The chair of the psychology department defended the use of undergraduate TAs as a way of allowing huge classes to have more human-sized discussion sections. “It’s not possible to have professors provide this [discussion] experience for a class of 300 to 500 students. There isn’t enough time in the day or money in the budget.”

  This school, along with an increasing number of other Big-time U’s, does not even put enough money into regular undergraduate education to staff all discussion sections with graduate student TAs; instead, it uses unpaid undergrad teaching assistants. The UMass student griped that in his discussion sections, “People would ask simple questions and the [undergrad] TAs had absolutely no idea how to answer.”

  Nevertheless, there is enough money in the UMass pot—$15 million worth—to fund Commonwealth College, a Lexus on a campus surrounded by ordinary general undergraduate education programs. But not everyone on campus loved the new Lexus, one student writing the Boston Globe: “The elitist ideology of Commonwealth College is a danger to public higher education. Isolating the ‘smart kids’ is a bad idea, reeking of selfish administrative illusions of greater prestige.” A Globe columnist also articulated this argument, adding: “This [honors college] is about image,” and UMass pursues it at the expense of ordinary undergraduates. “What is the message to every” UMass regular student? “It’s not subtle at all. It screams out to those who don’t make the honors cut: You’re just not worth that much.”

  The recent Boyer Commission report funded by the Carnegie Foundation put the UMass situation in national perspective, particularly the fond hope by the president of UMass for Commonwealth College to produce Rhodes, Marshall, and other scholarship winners:

  Universities take great pleasure in proclaiming how many of their undergraduates win Rhodes or other prestigious scholarships and how many are accepted at the most selective graduate schools, but while those achievements are lauded, too many baccalaureate students who are not in the running for any kind of distinction may get little or no attention.

  The University of Texas at Austin must have been pleased when U.S. News, in its 1999 co
llege issue, included the UT honors program, Plan II, and one of the program’s graduates, a Rhodes Scholar, in a laudatory article. The magazine also claimed that the students admitted into this UT program “rival those accepted at Houston’s Rice University, one of the nation’s best private institutions.” However, what happens to the more than thirty-four thousand UT undergraduates not in the honors program? Unlike Rice, where all undergrads take small classes and have personal contact with faculty members, UT features many lecture courses, some with five hundred students in them and, over the years, a constant stream of student criticism about the size of classes at the school and the remoteness of professors from the average undergraduate (see Chapter 13).

  Nevertheless, because honors programs gain prestige for research universities, and also camouflage the failure of their general undergraduate programs, Big-time U’s pump money into them—dollars that could better go to improving educational conditions for all students. In addition, schools have diverted funds into generous scholarships to attract honors students to their campuses, whether these students need the financial aid or not. Again, this money could help regular undergraduates in the traditional form of need-based aid; the New York Times disclosed that “as a result” of these new scholarships, universities “have less to spend on many needy applicants.” The Boston Globe, in writing about UMass’s new honors scholarships, noted: “Nationwide, more and more second-tier schools [like UMass] have begun offering similar scholarships … to lure top students”; these universities claim that “the better the students they can get, the higher their rankings rise and the more applicants they can attract—which in turn raises their rankings even more.”