You’ve really got to look at this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I can’t quote the whole thing, and no summary can do it justice.
Briefly, a newly minted assistant professor (he describes himself as both green and white) has a pretty good system for catching cheaters on his quizzes. On the quiz in question he caught eight, of whom seven readily confessed when confronted with his irrefutable evidence. The eighth, however, did not. Instead, he was angry, threatening, contemptuous, and he demanded that the professor apologize to him.
The student was black.
I know that he cheated. He knew that he cheated. But, after his performance — a brilliant but subtle flash of the race card conveyed through body language and facial expressions more than words — the once-crystal-clear context that had me in charge evaporated into the stale air of my office. We both knew he’d won this game. I ripped up the quizzes and tossed them into the trash. He left my office without a word. I felt horrible.
After telling my department chairman about the incident, I asked myself a series of difficult questions: Did I think J7 was going to hit me because he’s a big, black guy? Should a black kid have any reason to tell the truth to a white figure of authority? Am I gutless? Should I have been truly race-blind and treated J7 as I would have treated a wealthy white frat boy? On some level, do all white people owe all black people an apology? Did this kid just play me like a fiddle?
With a Ph.D. in history, I know a thing or two about race in America. And if my student evaluations are worth anything, I teach the subject well. Perusing hundreds of books and articles has ensured my expertise on the matter, while hours of classroom lecturing have honed my delivery of this precious and powerful information….
But J7 stumped me. When he swaggered out of my office, disgusted that I had yet to apologize, he left me with a pile of questions, each one of which seemed to evoke the same answer: “Yes … no … maybe.” I sat at my desk and truly wished I could have just looked over and swiped the answers from someone else, someone who was better prepared, someone with more experience. But, alas, such an opportunity will never be mine to exploit.
In trying to think of what to say about this, I’ve been able to come up with only one word: pathetic. But that won’t do. It might do as a description of someone else who behaved like this, but something far beyond pathetic is need to describe someone who volunteers this account, in print, of his own behavior.
UPDATE
Whew! I looked up the guy who wrote this article and learned to my consternation that he received his Ph.D. a few years ago from a fine history department (no real surprise there) where one of my best friends from graduate school, and an outstanding, impressive historian, teaches pretty much in this fellow’s field. But my friend just confirmed that he never taught him, although he “might recognize him in a line-up.”
I just sent him the following response:
What a relief! I of course know profs aren’t responsible for the ideas of their students (if they were, even [name omitted to protect my advisor] wouldn’t touch me with a ten foot pole), but I just couldn’t see you easily tolerating this superficially self-critical but actually self-congratulatory white guilt. It reminds me of what someone (not me, really) said about contemporary liberals: it’s a good thing they’ve got double standards; otherwise they wouldn’t have any standards at all….
“Should a black kid have any reason to tell the truth to a white figure of authority?”
Well, that depends. Is the concept of personal integrity a white thing?
obvously, Dr McWilliams needs “more diverse” expereinces in his life so that he would have been able to immediately spot and stop the “street hussle” that his student gave him.
Now every black student at SWTSU (I refuse to use the new name) will know that he is an easy mark and they fill enroll in his class just for the opprotunity to cheat.
“As far as I see it,” he concluded, “you owe me a huge apology.”
WTF! That’s when you look him in the damn eye and say “For what? You cheated.” Good grief. He should have had a colleague come in to monitor the conversation because of the way the guy was acting.
Apologizing to the cheater
Faced with a race-baiting cheater, a history professor backed down — and wrote about it in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The professor scrambles the order of questions on quizzes so it’s obvious when students copy from a neighbor. Here’s…
Look, if you’ve never faced raised voices, intimidation, and unspoken threats of violence, your reaction upon first exposure is *not* going to be a measured composed response. The professor was thrown totally off balance by the attack.
Most people’s first exposure to uncivilized behaviour is to escape as quickly as possible. That was not an option available to the professor. It is likely, should he be prepared for a similar incident that he could deal with it far more logically.
“Look, if you’ve never faced raised voices, intimidation, and unspoken threats of violence, your reaction upon first exposure is *not* going to be a measured composed response.”
That’s true. I’ve discovered that my reaction upon first and repeated exposures is that I lose my temper. This could get me killed someday, I admit. My response to the apology demand probably would have been to shout, “Get out of my office, you stupid jerk!” It goes without saying that the quiz grade would have been zero.
I agree with Tom West, it’s probably unfair to judge McWilliams on this one episode. It sounds like the main problem is that he was used to students confessing to cheating, and had a whole spiel that fit into that scenario.
When a student doesn’t confess, the scenario goes off the rails. Add in the stress of the confrontation, and sense goes out the window. Anyone in his right mind would wonder about guessing “Andrew Jackson” as the name of an Indian tribe, for example, unless his low expectations have moved way past soft bigotry. Logically, the punishment for not confessing should be more severe, but instead McWilliams backed down (at least, I take it that’s what throwing the quizzes in the trash means).
I think McWilliams had a minor power trip going over these cheaters, and that adds to his guilt now. But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say he wrote this up to help prepare other newby professors.
When he swaggered out of my office, disgusted that I had yet to apologize… Um, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say “swaggered out of my office, pretending to be disgusted…”? There’s no doubt the student cheated, right?
I think Tom West makes a good point. I could have made it more clear that what I think is pathetic is not so much McWilliams’ behavior when he was confronted with an intimidating threat of violence. It is, rather, his considered, published reflections of the matter, in which he displays classic white guilt symptoms of thinking that such quaint notions as integrity, honesty, etc., are “white” and that whites may not have any business insisting on them from black students. He may have felt guilty in retrospect for not insisting on them, but that’s not how I read his article.
Actually, I think his whole way of handling cheaters was a bit touchy-feely.
I had a class in differential equations, in which we had take-home tests that we had a week to work on. We were allowed to use any resource except another person. One day shortly after we’d turned in our tests, the instructor stood before the room and announced that two of us had collaberated on that test; he knew because you can approach solving these problems in many different ways, and these two girls had worked the problems the same way and had made the same mistakes. He was pretty hot about it. He told us that those students were getting zeroes, and that if it ever happened again there would be no more take-homes. End of story.
I appreciate the professor in this story wanting to do some character training, cheating rots your soul blah blah, but by the time people get to college it’s probably too late for that. (And I really appreciate his wanting to do without the scantron – speaking of rotting souls.)
“I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Why is this so hard for a professor of history (!) to grasp?
I have read the entire Chronicle article and am quite confused. Was this allegation of cheating based on just one screwball answer? What did the student get on the exam? If every answer from J7 was identical to J8— you have him nailed—and you don’t bother to confront the student – you turn him in–with the evidence–and be prepared to go through some sort of judicial board review of his appeal. I often put bogus choices in my multiple choice or matching exams, e.g. Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Peanuts, Snoopy.
And when they are chosen- I feel secure in knowing that the student picked the letter assigned to the answer at random and wasn’t cheating. Sounds to me as though the Professor was so overcome with white guilt that he failed to explain competely what happened with this student as well as the others.