If you wonder why more instructors don't report plagiarism, consider the case of Belinda Frost.
She taught English as a Second Language at Southern Utah University. Like most ESL instructors, she was an adjunct instructor. That meant, among other things, that she had no job security.
You might think you can already see where this is going. If you do, bear with me: There's a bizarre twist to this story.
Like most adjuncts, she shared office space with colleagues in her department. That meant, among other things, that various items are often mislaid in someone's mailbox or on someone's desk. So, it's not remarkable that she found a stack of papers another instructor, Nina Hansen, left inadvertently.
What's also, sadly, not remarkable, is that there was easily-detected plagiarism in some of those papers. However, Ms. Hansen gave passing grades to those papers.
Ms. Frost made copies of them and turned them over to her dean, Mark Atkinson.
Did he reward her? Thank her? Think again.
He didn't do anything for her. But the university police did: They charged her with theft. As a result, she received a "trespass" notice, which forbids her from entering the campus, where her daughter is enrolled in youth programs.
According to SUU spokesman Dean O'Driscoll, the "trespass" order is intended to keep Frost and Hansen away from each other. However, Frost is not banned only from the ESL Department: Simply setting foot anywhere on campus could result in her arrest for criminal trespass. Meanwhile, the university has put Hansen on probation and says her performance will be monitored.
As I've mentioned in other posts, if you're an adjunct and report plagiarism, you're more likely not to be re-hired the following semester than the student is to be disciplined in any way. At the same time, in some schools, your re-hire might be based upon students' grades or test scores. I don't know whether such was the case at SUU, but I would imagine that instructors were under pressure to get high grades and scores.
One reason may be that the students whose papers included purloined material were international students. In a public institution like SUU, they may be paying three or four times what in-state residents pay in tuition. And, the more students that are enrolled in, and pass, ESL classes, the more money the school receives in grants and government funding. So it's not hard to imagine that Hansen and other instructors felt pressure to pass as many students as possible.
The sorts of things I've described are regular occurrences in the colleges in which I've taught. That is one reason why, in composition classes I teach, I regularly find students who can barely utter or write a coherent sentence. And I, of course, am under pressure to ensure that they pass and stay in school.
The purposefully absent quality of "education" is, as you said, predictable, as well as shameful, socially destructive, et cetera. What makes this one stand out is the close coordination between an academic dean and a campus police department. For the charge to suddenly come down like that, it's fairly clear that the dean made a third-party report about Frost accessing the "wrong" mailbox, and that the university police took him at face value and filed the charge without taking statements from Frost or Hansen--or, more dangerously, conducting an independent review of the locus in quo and determining that of course Frost wasn't "trespassing."
ReplyDeleteOne can easily imagine a hundred mistakes that could cause anyone in any environment--from the USPS to the UPS store to a corporate mailroom--accidentally getting the wrong mail, and there are a thousand reasons why one's job description would specifically or by implication authorize going into a different mailbox...let alone the still more obvious "the student put it in the wrong box because they do that all the time."
Here, though, that's all irrelevant; the U cops have become a private security force at the behest of some brainless EdD in Utah. "The boss" has more than just hiring and firing authority to control workers--he has cops. Hello Rockefeller's ghost.