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Susan Blum is an anthropologist at
the University of Notre Dame who has ventured into the field of
higher education studies through the lens of ethnographic research.
This research is largely the result of interviews by “four gifted”
(p. 7) undergraduate student research assistants of 254 other
undergraduates concerning what they thought about academic
requirements and how they acted to satisfy those requirements. The
study was apparently stimulated by journalistic and academic reports
of high levels of plagiarism and cheating in American universities.
(Similar forms and rates of cheating, including plagiarism, have been
found in Canada.)
Blum
explains this high level of student deviance in terms of three very
academic factors: “intertextuality,” the changing nature of
identity formation and self-development, and the prolongation of
adolescence produced by mass post-compulsory education. None of these
three factors is easily conveyed, especially with one chapter per
factor (so I will not attempt to summarize them here). Nevertheless,
Blum attempts to do so but in the process mauls a least two of the
three fields of study (the two fields in which I have expertise) in
her attempt to bring them to bear upon her subject matter, which is
really an impassioned defense of students who cheat their way through
university.
At
the same time, Blum believes that academics themselves engage in so
much academic misconduct and/or are confused about what constitutes
plagiarism and proper citation that it is hypocritical of them to
impose standards of honesty on students. One problem with this claim
is that her evidence for it is largely based on differences between
disciplines (e.g., medicine and English). Certainly, there are some
problems with academic misconduct, just as in any profession, but the
situation is hardly a bad as she claims. Some disciplines have
publication manuals (e.g., the APA manual) to guide students and
researchers, and the peer-review process acts as a gatekeeper for
publications. But even if the situation were as bad as she claims,
two wrongs do not make a right. A reason for teaching students in a
given discipline how to research thoroughly and reference properly is
to help them internalize standards and thus to prevent future
misconduct and ethical breaches.
An
informed editor or well-versed reviewer of the original prospectus of
this book could have spared readers a number of excesses by applying
Occam’s razor to Blum’s analysis. Instead of the bloated and
pedantic postmodern obfuscation delivered in this tome, Blum could
have focused on the simpler explanation that those students who are
not motivated to learn and follow academic standards of scholarship
are also more likely to cut corners in reaching their educational
goals. Blum skirts around this explanation in her chapter “Growing
up in the College Bubble: The Tasks and Temptations of Adolescents,”
but she never nails the problem of academic disengagement on the
head. Instead, in effect, she excuses disengaged students from
assuming responsibility for their actions because they are
“relational” with “multiple selves” (and thus too busy with
their social lives).
While
this type of explanation might satisfy some postmodernists, it is
possible to make such an argument only by misrepresenting the fields
of study upon which it is ostensibly based. This is a matter of what
constitutes good scholarship, which Blum does not seem to understand.
Her lack of attention to the issue of scholarship constitutes the
central weakness in her analysis: in her assertions that standards
are relative, she did not recognize that some standards are better
than others. Good scholarship requires that those fields of study
upon which one bases one’s assertions are accurately and fully
represented. Her representation of the field of identity studies, for
example, is filled with errors (e.g., she factually misrepresents
Erikson’s work) and omissions (e.g., she fails even to acknowledge
the vast literature on self-monitoring, yet sets up a model virtually
identical to it). In fact, most of field of identity studies is not
even represented in her one-sided reliance on postmodern theories of
self and identity, which themselves are highly controversial within
the field, in part because they lack empirical verification.
In
relying exclusively on postmodern assumptions and approaches, Blum
overestimates the extent of identity problems among young people and
thus over-generalizes about the possible roots of cheating and
plagiarism. Throughout her text, she writes about students and young
people as a very homogeneous group uniformly influenced by current
societal trends, including the use and misuse of the new
technologies. But not all students or young people correspond to
these descriptions, and yet we hear nothing about those who do not.
This bias leads Blum to recommend that the entire educational system
bend to accommodate students who are of a particular character-type
associated with an other-directed identity confusion, who are either
unwilling or unmotivated to learn how not to plagiarize.
Blum
comes closest to providing readers with a parsimonious and useful
account of how academic disengagement is associated with cheating or
plagiarism in her characterization of contemporary student culture.
But here again she over-generalizes, for different forms of student
attitudes and behaviours can be identified as constituting the basis
of different cultures. Yet, Blum would have us believe that all
students are helpless in resisting the pressures of a youth culture
that prefers hedonism to hard work (and there is nothing new about
this preference).
In
addition to directly confronting the problem of widespread academic
disengagement, this book would have benefited from “modernist”
theories of socialization and deviance.
For
example, a working knowledge of theories deviance would have helped
Blum realize that all forms of norm violation have grey areas that
are negotiated on a case-by-case basis by social actors. Although
some adults violate norms, this does not mean that children do not
need to learn how to observe those norms. Once one learns a norm,
violations of that norm become a matter of choice, not of necessity,
unless one is coerced, constrained, or incapable of comprehending
the difference between right and wrong. At the same time,
understanding why someone might violate important norms does not mean
that one has to endorse that norm violation. For example, all inmates
in our prisons have stories that help us understand how they got
there, but that means neither that we should endorse what they did to
land them in prison nor that we should let them out because we feel
that they couldn’t help themselves. Moreover, setting standards in
schools to the lowest denominator to accommodate the most alienated
and unmotivated students is unfair to motivated and able (honest)
students and simply enables disengaged students not to correct their
behaviour.
In
her closing (eight-page) chapter, the flaws in Blum’s analysis loom
large in her recommendations concerning “What Is To Be Done?” She
begins by reiterating her contention that the current generation of
students has undergone a transformation “in what it means to be a
person and a student” and that, in this light, current approaches
to plagiarism are inadequate. Reflecting her over-identification with
the subjects in her analysis, Blum contends that it is “the duty of
youth” to reveal the hypocrisy of adults who “demand an
impossible standard” in matters such as not drinking under a
certain age, a norm she equates with plagiarism.
Before
presenting her recommendations, she tells us of a recent incident
with a student that led to the epiphany compelling her to write the
book. In this story, she caught a student—who was on the cusp of
applying to graduate school—who had cut and pasted material into an
assignment. The student claimed she did it because she was
overworked, so Blum gave her a chance to redo the assignment. The
revised assignment also contained cut-and-pasted material. Thinking
that she had not properly taught this student how not
to plagiarize, Blum gave this student a third chance, which included
“reading a website devoted to teaching students how to avoid
plagiarism.” The final result was apparently original, but
“unimpressive.”
Evidently,
the student learned—at least in this instance—how not to
plagiarize, but two things are remarkable in Blum’s example. First,
this student was a senior applying to graduate school (in fact,
between the second and third incidents the student pressured Blum to
submit her course grade so her applications could be processed), yet
she had obviously had little regard for scholarship, let alone
completing an assignment without cheating. But, second, Blum took the
blame for the plagiarism, stating that she “failed to convey the
needed information” to the student. Apparently, the other students
in the class could complete the assignment the first time without
plagiarizing. How did they learn to do so without Blum’s coddling
hand? Blum appears not to have considered this question.
Blum
expects readers to take this as a “real-life” example of how we
can all learn how to better understand today’s students, but the
implications for her conception of academic standards, scholarship,
and the role of higher education are mind-boggling. Apparently, in
reacting like this a reader would be considered by her to be an
old-fogey, with Blum reserving a place for herself as an enlightened
contemporary of the current generation. But Blum is obviously
confused about a number of important issues that good scholars and
teachers are supposed to sort out in graduate school, especially
regarding the nature of
higher education and the role of the liberal arts in transforming
students into informed, ethically conscious citizens of the world. In
fact, she even admits to being confused about her subject matter,
stating that she regularly changed her mind about her position on
plagiarism “sometimes going back and forth on a certain item
several times in a single week” (p. 179).
So,
what are her recommendations for overcoming “the artificiality and
cultural specificity of standards”? She characterizes these as
ranging from “the most concrete and practical” to “the ether
with my wish list for grand social change,” and as necessary for
comprehending “the revolutions that are occurring in technology,
the self, [and] education.” Her list includes holding conferences
with faculty and students and discussing the value of higher
education, and abolishing “college as the major adolescent
challenge,” replacing it with “a two-year service obligation
prior at the beginning higher education” to let “students begin
to grow up a little before they enter our classes” (see pages
177-179 for the full listing). The list itself is actually quite
bizarre to read on its own, (and I do not have the space here to
parse it all out), but it reflects Blum’s apparent inability to
comprehend the nature of scholarship and the fiduciary duty of
professors to teach it and abide by it themselves.
And
herein lies the wider relevance of this book. Apparently, professors
such as Blum are themselves ignorant or confused about the standards
of scholarship and the necessity of accurately and fully representing
the fields of study about which they write. If researchers like Blum
do not learn what others have previously published on a subject, how
can they claim any authority on the matter (e.g., Blum’s neglect in
researching prior work in the field of identity studies)? If
professors like Blum believe that standards are so relative that they
themselves cannot meet their fiduciary duty of teaching students
these standards of scholarship, then academia is in deep trouble. And
if Blum’s work signals a “postmodernist” creep of relativism,
whereby fewer academics know or abide by standards of scholarship, we
will witness a decline in the public support for those disciplines
that perch themselves on that slippery slope. Fortunately, there are
some safeguards in the peer-review process that can help to direct
authors to meet standards of scholarship, but these safeguards failed
in the case of this book.
James
Coté is a professor in the sociology department at the University of
Western Ontario and regularly contributes to three fields of
research: the sociology of youth (his current main focus of
teaching), identity studies, and higher education studies. He is
founding editor of Identity:
An International Journal of Theory and Research,
past president (2003-2005) of the Society for Research on Identity
Formation . He currently serves as vice-president for North America
on the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee
on the Sociology of Youth. He was recently appointed to a five-year
term as associate editor of the Journal
of Adolescence. His
recent (co-authored) books include Ivory
Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis (2007),
Critical Youth Studies: A
Canadian Focus (2006),
and Identity Formation,
Agency, and Culture: A Social Psychological Synthesis (2002).
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