Monday Board of Trustees Meeting Cancelled

Don't bother getting up too early tomorrow morning. No explanation has been given but we just received word that the emergency BOT meeting that was scheduled for Monday morning has been cancelled.

As Alice said, "things just get curiouser and curiouser."

Monday, Monday, can't trust that day...

Well that explains why there is a special Board of Trustees meeting on Monday (fyi 7.30 am in the Library Auditorium). See below from Michael Sneed's column in the Sun Times today.
And does it all come down to a cliché.... "cherchez la femme" or is it déjà vu all over again-- "blame the faculty?"

Chicago Sun Times, February 23, 2013

Sneed exclusive...

Is Armageddon at hand at Chicago State University?

Sneed hears trouble is brewing at the South Side university, which was pockmarked for years by fiscal mismanagement and inept leadership.

 ◆ At issue: A battle between University President Wayne Watson, the highly respected former chancellor of City Colleges of Chicago, and several university board members who reportedly want a new person at the helm.

◆ The buckshot: Watson, who was hired in 2009 to install top-to-bottom management at the fiscally unsound school, was reportedly accused by several board members of violating school policy by being less than candid about a relationship he has with a school employee — even though both of them are single.

◆ The flipshot: Sneed is told pressure was put on Gov. Pat Quinn to get rid of Watson, who, according to two top sources, was getting pushback for trying to instill a culture change at the struggling school by instituting heavier faculty workloads.

◆ The backshot: “There are board members who either want to control Watson or want their own person at the helm and have heavy backers who are major donors to Gov. Quinn,” said a Watson supporter. “It’s as simple as that.”

 

http://www.suntimes.com/news/sneed/18412638-452/csu-controversy-brewing.html

IBHE & the Future of Education? "Academic Dystopia" (Please put me out of my misery now)

"Sun is bad for you. Everything our parents said was good is bad. Sun, milk, red meat...college.”
--Woody Allen

This line from Woody Allen's film Annie Hall popped into my head during the long presentation from the IBHE on campus last Tuesday --powerpoint presentation with relentless statistics-- which was still going on when I left after an hour and a half. Was it ironic to anyone else that the speaker who was advocating for a turn to the online-model of education à la U of Phoenix "because students will just not sit through a professor lecturing at them" was doing essentially that? As if we needed more confirmation about the ill state of higher education in the state of ILL, Alan Philips, IBHE’s Deputy Director of Planning and Budgeting, delivered the bleakest message possible in his apocalyptic presentation on "The Future of Higher Education in Illinois and the U.S."

I was unable to stay to the end where I had hoped something positive might have been said and some debate on the questions take place. Perhaps others can comment and augment the discussion here. What struck me, however, was the academic dystopia that we, especially those of us in the liberal arts, are facing and how much it is already underway in some places around the country.

This talk started with a grim litany of statistics outlining the continued lack of funding in public higher education all over the U.S. (NOTE: faculty salaries and retirement highlighted as problems, but administrative bloat barely mentioned), and references to graduates of universities having to take jobs for which they are woefully overeducated and underpaid and in great debt from their college years. In the meantime, the Univ. of Phoenix and other for-profits of that ilk have swooped in to capitalize on the growing body of disenchanted “customers” (formerly known as students) who want education their way—think of the Burger King anthem as background music --on their terms: flexible, online or better yet ipad/iphone digestible, quick, and practical, and “good value for their money” which I guess means provides them with a high-paying job at the end. Unrelenting lists of statistics underscore the popularity of this type of learning and the institutions that provide it. The Univ. of Phoenix et al. will very likely replace many brick & mortar universities because UP respond to what the “customer” wants and because "the state" cannot afford to keep all the brick and mortar schools going. If you are lucky your university will become a "brick and click" university—offering both online and face-to-face education, but the right "branding" also needs to be in place.

Adding to the demise of university world as we have known it are employers who will begin demanding “certificates of competency” and portfolios of "skill sets" that will displace the caché that a mere diploma from University X used to give; Philips referred to this as “the disaggregation of the degree.” The success of online lectures sites like TED and COURSERA signal the popularity of the medium and the free online offerings by major universities in the U.S.A. and from around the world are transforming “customer choices.” It is not too far off before “customers” can cobble together a series of online classes here and there from specialists at this or that major university and call it a degree. The notion of an academic "department" then will likewise change. All you need is one or two faculty "rock stars" who set up an online course or two or three that are then managed or overseen by an assistant—maybe a  grad student (if such a thing can even exist in this scenario) more likely a glorified website manager. A “university” may then and ultimately will ask the question, “why, when an online course can attract hundreds or thousands of students at a time, would a department need to have more than 1 or 2 faculty?”

This was not the whole talk, nor did I get a chance to hear discussion afterward, so again, I welcome anyone else who was there to follow up or continue the description. It was, however, interesting to see some heads bobbing up and down in apparent agreement and a few others shaking back and forth in dismay. Before we drink all the koolade offered and march ourselves into the for-profit model and marketplace CSU needs desperately to continue this discussion. It is exactly this discussion that we never got to have during the time of that hijacked presidential search in 2008. That was a moment when Trustees, faculty, students, and administrators should have come together for honest conversation, but of course we were not allowed to do so.

So Philips' talk left me wanting to ask some questions as I’m sure it did for others.

One thing that strikes me in these types of presentations is that we have to stop conflating “education” with job-training. Do you want to be educated or do you want a job? They are not the same thing and this I think is the crux. What it means to be educated has changed over the centuries but in the western tradition of which we are a part the emphasis has been on skills of literacy and numeracy. In the modern era this has focused on thinking critically about ideas and the communication and debate of those ideas. CSU and other places can try to “brand” themselves all they want, but until they figure out what they mean by education we are going to limp along as we have been these past 3 years. Do we want to educate people or do we want to place them in jobs at graduation? And with cuts to higher education and the government on state and national levels opting out of support for what were once great institutions –California’s UC system, SUNY—my guess is that education will return to the 1920s model where only elite institutions will be places to attain an education and only the elites of society who can afford it will be able to be educated. The notion of mass education and opportunity for the rest of the population to be educated will be limited if it exists at all. For all but the elites the option will be job training.

 And we should not assume that all our students are the same. Some students want to be educated, by which I mean they want to learn a subject that they like, they want to learn how to think and express themselves and find a way to make life for themselves meaningful. These are the ones who have the potential to be lifelong learners. Of course other students want to get their “piece of paper,” take the path of least resistance where course work is concerned, settle for C’s, get out and start making money. I have been impressed, however, by the number of freshmen in the past two semesters of teaching 1099 freshmen seminar how many students are the former and not the latter.

I know I’ve mentioned this before but CSU does not realize what its real brand could be—an opportunity for a liberal arts style education within a state university system. This is our strength—small classrooms, individual attention, personal attention—rather than some version of the DeVry Institute, let alone an outpost of the University of Phoenix or as I’ve remarked here in the past, Chicago State City College. This isn’t even my articulation of this idea, it came from a colleague of mine in the sciences, not from a humanities professor.

 It struck me at one point in Philips' talk how in the 1960s and 70s no one thought it was a skewed world when people who had very little formal education (a little high school in some cases, even less possibly) could make “good money” at industrial jobs--$50-70,000 after years in a Steel Plant that included weeks and weeks of paid vacation, plus company scholarship opportunities for sons and daughters capping it all off with a secure retirement. Why? Unions and a very different economy. So now we have a situation where “overeducated” people are in low-paying jobs. Is this situation the fault of universities? Are we blaming the way universities educate people for something that is circumstantial and beyond the university’s control? There are fewer union jobs and very little security in any jobs these days—in other words a very different economy.

Another question for Philips. Regarding employers and their desire for “skill sets” not diplomas. Why listen so uncritically to what employers want? Ultimately they want to pay as little as possible for labor. They want the best on the market and to pay the least amount of money as possible in true corporate/capitalist model. Employers who want skill sets also want to control knowledge. This is a slippery slope—letting companies tell us what to teach or what goes into a curriculum, or offering us their version of an online course for us to implement is to create Hamburger University. Doesn’t McDonald’s already do that? The reason: they can inculcate their corporate culture into their workers and create people who are not critical thinkers but who know how to follow along unquestioningly.

Philips noted that he has received some pushback from certain academics and administrators about his enthusiasm for online education. Someone he had spoken to thought the online education stuff was another example of a passing fancy, a flash in the pan. Phillips sincerely believes it is not. So, one question I wanted to ask him was how the U of Phoenix phenomenon is different from the 1970s-era failed “telecommunication” courses? I remember my mother taking “classes” on public television in our living room and sending her homework to the professor by mail to be graded –this in the late 1960s. She never got a degree that way and I don’t know when or how the program ended. One of the campuses of the University of Toronto, Scarborough College, was built in the 1970s or just a bit earlier to be its telecourse outpost. It stood as an example of that failed experiment of filmed lectures and limited faculty-student interaction. When I was teaching there in the 1990s and it had been converted to a “traditional” brick and mortar university.

 The question “what is a university?” is a good one to raise. It’s not the first time it’s been asked, but CSU and other universities in the state of ILL need to have a much wider discussion of it before we sip too deeply of this proffered cup.

IBHE on campus--TUESDAY, Feb 12

All interested members of the CSU community are invited to hear representatives from IBHE--this should interest faculty in particular.

Tuesday, Feb. 12, CSU/UPI is co-sponsoring a talk by two speakers from the Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE), at 12:30 in the Library Auditorium. They are :

Alan Philips, Deputy Director of Planning and Budgeting, on "The Future of Higher Education in Illinois and the U.S."

 Jonathan Lackland, Deputy Director of External Relations, on "Legislative Issues."

Lunch will be available starting at 12:00 in the Cafe area (outside the Auditorium), on a first-come, first-served basis.

From our colleagues at Eastern Illinois University regarding CSU CJ Search

In the fall of 2012 CSU's Faculty Senate asked a few of its sister Senates in Illinois to review the Senate Shared Governance Committee's report and comment on the irregularities of the hiring last August in Criminal Justice. This memo came in last week from Eastern Illinois' Faculty Senate. At least it's nice to know that outsiders can share the outrage over the CSU Administration's actions even as some of our own colleagues are quick to apologize for it.

THE FACULTY SENATE OF EASTERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY DOCUMENT IS LINKED HERE AND POSTED BELOW. AT THIS WEBSITE YOU CAN FIND THE SENATE'S SHARED GOVERNANCE COMMITTEE'S CRIMINAL JUSTICE REPORT AS WELL AS THE UNIVERSITY'S INVESTIGATION--"THE MITCHELL REPORT."
https://sites.google.com/a/csu.edu/csu-faculty-senate/home

You wrote us to solicit our reactions regarding the recent hirings in the Criminal Justice department at your university.  We are somewhat reluctant to give a forceful response as we have only heard one account of the events that transpired.  We also feel that it might not be our role to provide guidance on the internal workings of another institution. That said, this appears to be an unusual situation.  Assuming everything we have been told is accurate, our responses to the five questions you asked us can be found below.  

Question 1. Beyond our Senate investigation at the request of a Senator in the affected department, are there other actions the Senate should take? FYI, the Higher Learning Commission accreditation visit is scheduled for November 12th -14th, 2012.

Regretfully, we were not able to respond to this message before that date.  It is our view that any and all measures to secure the removal of the President of your University, and the Provost as well, are warranted by these events.  The Board of your university approved a mission statement that states “The university fosters the intellectual development and success of its student population through a rigorous, positive, and transformative educational experience. CSU is committed to teaching, research, and service and community development including social justice, leadership and entrepreneurship”; a vision statement that says “Chicago State University will be recognized for innovations in teaching and research, and in promoting ethical leadership, entrepreneurship, and social and environmental justice”; and core values that include “’Responsible choices and actions’, ‘Personal and academic excellence’, and ‘Personal, professional and academic integrity.’”  If the Board’s commitment to these values is genuine, they cannot continue to support the current administration. 
Question 2. What sort of remedies might we pursue to ensure this doesn't not happen again? Or is this just how the modern academy is?

This is most emphatically not “just how the modern academy is”.  The hiring procedures described in your investigation are not merely violations of expected protocol, they are the most egregious abuses of Presidential power we have ever seen.  If your President has given himself the authority to make hires without faculty input and without even making reference to the qualifications of the candidates, it is clear that he intends to preserve the power to repeat this behavior.  As such, no remedy short of the removal of this President can protect the academic integrity of the University. 
Question 3. How far outside of the institution should Faculty Senate go beyond this letter to air this in the hopes of preventing other appointments which could damage our institution's integrity? 

If there are other groups outside your institution that you can contact with some hope of preventing the continuation of these sort of appointments, by all means do so.  We see no reasonable limits to who may be contacted.   For example, an appeal to the Office of the Inspector General might be appropriate if you feel that the President used favoritism in hiring a personal acquaintance.
      
  Question 4. Does this behavior/action in and of itself constitute grounds for a motion of no confidence in the president? Or is it an item in a larger bill of particulars for such a motion?

Yes, this action is without a doubt sufficient grounds for a “no confidence” motion.  Indeed, such a motion would have been justified if only a fraction of the abuses of the hiring process that took place at your university had taken place.  Further, these actions are so repugnant that we believe they are grounds for a “no confidence” motion in the Provost as well even though she merely accepted this outcome without actively taking part in it. 
Question 5. Would any of you be willing to sign a statement supporting our Senate as we continue to pursue this issue?

This message is our official response to this request for advice.  You may treat this as an open letter--we are willing to be publicly committed to the views stated herein. 

The Faculty Senate of Eastern Illinois University

Ok, I know I'm being picky...

Although there are a number of big issues that need attention here at CSU and we're all waiting on tenterhooks for the HLC report (now many weeks overdue), shenanigans in the job hiring at CJ remain and are now morphing into other issues, and yet another interim appointment --dean of the College of Ed--joins the cadre of other interim deans on campus, but no, I am not going to bang on about any of these. Instead, I'm voicing something here that other people have mentioned as an unnecessary irritation. This is a comment, a critique, and a plea: get rid of the triangle.

Whoever had the brilliant idea of changing the CSU letterhead which for years was just that--letters on the top of our stationery--to the big green off-kilter triangle at the bottom (or sometimes top) of a page of stationery needs to go back to the drawing table and rethink the implication of this change. I assumed the new logo was some kind of "branding"/marketing thing --certainly it was never voted on by the CSU "community" --and is clearly meant to impress the impressionable, but did anyone think about the day-to-day impact of a letterhead that demands, nay, sucks up, so much printer ink when you try to print out a copy of the exalted administrative document? This is not corporate America with its seemingly unlimited resources and moneys, this is CSU with very limited resources.

Today was the last straw. I just received a multi-page document from an administrative office that I should print out for use with students but I refuse to do so because I am not going to waste printer ink on printing out a picture of a triangle that will deplete my very expensive ink cartridge at home. The last one I bought cost $90. Nor will I print it out in my office because I do not have an ink cartridge for the old printer there. We don't have a big budget for office supplies and cannot get them at the drop of a hat even if we did. We all know that some offices on campus are more equal than others so I'm bringing it to the attention of those offices more equal than mine.

Newsflash to the CSU marketers and administrators responsible for the triangle brand: My department cannot buy enough printer cartridges to keep all its faculty supplied, not all departments are connected to a main department printer, I AM NOT REIMBURSED FOR PRINTER CARTRIDGES THAT I USE AT HOME TO PRINT CSU stuff (nor for paper for that matter).

Last week I received an administrative letter whose last sentence was obscured by the big green triangle. Today I am supposed to print out multiple pages of green triangles? Get real. It is not possible to read everything as an online document some things must be printed. The outside world may be impressed by the big green triangle at the bottom of the page, my how hip it looks, but inside CSU this brand is a wasteful irritation.

Once more to the bargaining table...

For those who may not have seen the latest about our "online time reporting" duty see the message below.  Thanks Laurie and the UPI team for keeping on top of this.

Heavy sigh...

 

Dear CSU/UPI Members,

 

You have probably already received notices from Human Resources about online time reporting for faculty starting on Thursday; ASPs have been reporting their time online since July. We had previously agreed to having our members report leave taken, known as negative time reporting (which is what the ASPs have been doing) but the current push is for reporting of hours worked (positive time reporting) to which we have not agreed. The university administration has ignored our demand to bargain their proposed change, as well as our demand that they delay implementation of any such change until bargaining has taken place. We have contacted our legal representatives and should hear from them before Thursday; meanwhile, if you do your online time reporting before we have an answer, follow the instructions in the form but then e-mail Human Resources (rmitch26@csu.edu), copied to me (lwalter@csu.edu) saying that you filed under protest. That way, they can't use your compliance this time as a precedent for future time reporting.

 

If you don't know how to fill out the form, don't hesitate to let HR know that the training opportunities were insufficient.

 

I will let you know as soon as we have heard from the lawyers.

 

In solidarity,

Laurie

Response to the Human Resources Investigation

As one of the authors of the investigative report on the August Criminal Justice hiring, I find the investigative report by Renee Mitchell a truly disappointing misrepresentation of the events surrounding that search. Since the Senate investigation dealt with only one of the three allegations she was charged to look into, my response will deal only with that allegation.

The October 5, 2012, charge from Dr. Napoleon Moses asked Renee Mitchell to “Determine if institutional faculty hiring procedures were followed with particular emphasis placed on whether faculty representation was present on the Search Committees for each faculty member hired.”

The response to that charge should have been short and straightforward: no on both counts. Here is what the investigative finding should have been: 1) The August Criminal Justice hiring contravened institutional faculty hiring procedures. The Search committee included only administrators (the Criminal Justice Department Chair, the Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and an Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences), a clear violation of university procedures. 2) Of the three new faculty hired subsequent to the search, only one non-tenured faculty member examined the file of one successful candidate: Lewis Myers. At the time the search commenced on August 9, this faculty member had the responsibility for the pre-semester advising of hundreds of students. This faculty member did not recommend that Lewis Myers be hired. In fact, of the 119 applicants for the position(s), Criminal Justice faculty vetted only 14 prior to interviews commencing. Neither of the department’s tenured faculty saw any of the files, and no faculty, tenured or otherwise, participated in the interviews for any of the three candidates who were subsequently hired.

Ignoring these already established facts, Renee Mitchell's report reads like this: “Allegation #1 is unfounded. While faculty members did not participate in all of the interviews, an opportunity did exist.” However, by the time one of the tenured members of the department discovered that interviews were being conducted, several had already occurred. The Department Chair did not officially notify the faculty of the interview schedule until the evening of August 14, at which point five interviews had already taken place. Eventually, one tenured faculty member interviewed three candidates and the non-tenured faculty member interviewed one. Instead of a faculty-driven process, the search unfolded with three administrators on the search committee vetting the applicant files, determining the list of candidates for on-campus interviews, doing the majority of the interviews and determining the final candidates to present to the administration for a hiring decision. As I have pointed out before, University policy clearly vests in the department faculty the responsibility for reviewing applicant files, determining the best candidates for interview, conducting the interviews and formulating a list of potential hires. I have to ask how anyone could conclude that a faculty hiring process that almost totally excludes faculty conforms to University policy.

The troubling conclusions of this report are underpinned by some questionable assertions. The report indicates that “CJ Faculty Member #1 (Dr. Thomson) provided three (3) names: two (2) names from the search under question; and one (1) name previously recommended from prior search. Of the two names recommended from the search under question, one (1) candidate was hired” This is untrue. Dr. Thomson’s top three recommendations included no one who was hired. He had not interviewed April Bernard because her interview occurred before he arrived on campus on August 14. Neither he nor anyone else from the Criminal Justice faculty interviewed Lewis Myers or Andre Grant. In addition, Dr. Thomson made his recommendations more than one hour after the Department Chair requested contact information for three persons subsequently hired, an indication that the decision had already been made.

The report also indicates that “the Dean was also aware that two (2) faculty members were assigned to the search committee for the criminal justice hires. This official records from Human Resources render this assertion false. In fact, the three members of the search committee included only administrators.

I will not again go into the Board of Trustees policies that define who is and who is not an administrator, that information is available on the internet for anyone who wishes to peruse it. Suffice to say, administrators are not faculty and a search committee composed exclusively of administrators simply does not include faculty participation. Of course, an investigation conducted by an individual who serves at the pleasure of the president might be expected to contort itself to creatively interpret those policies and reach conclusions about the administration’s activities than differ from those articulated by the earlier investigators.

While this Human Resources report will undoubtedly provide ammunition for those individuals who think the opposition to this president is misguided, it also provides a useful insight into how this administration responds to faculty concerns. Simply put, the administration hijacked this search, violated university policy and created unnecessary uproar. This cynical and self-serving administrative whitewash does not change those facts.

More on the Criminal Justice Search 2012--now compare the narratives

At the complaint of faculty in the Criminal Justice Department over the hiring of three new members in August the Senate conducted an investigation which condemned Administrators, notably the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and the Chair of Criminal Justice, for failure to follow established proper academic procedures and especially the failure to involve the Criminal Justice faculty in any meaningful way.

Last week a memo was circulated to faculty which offers the Administration's perspective on the hiring process in Criminal Justice. Dr Renee Mitchell of the Human Resources Department of Chicago State University conducted the investigation and that report as well as the report of the Senate are available at the link below. If I read it correctly H.R. absolves the administration from any wrongdoing paradoxically she recommends that the CSU hiring policy be revised.

See what you think about these competing narratives--the Senate report and the H.R. report. Both are linked below.

I wonder what the Illinois Inspector General's Office would say about the situation presented here?

Criminal Justice Search --Senate Rept vs H.R. Investigation Rept.

Is the plagiarism warning on syllabi racist?

The office of the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences has asked all faculty to include the following statement on their syllabi:

Plagiarism and Academic Misconduct : ‘Academic misconduct includes but is not limited to cheating, encouraging academic dishonesty, fabrication, plagiarism, bribes, favors, threats, grade tampering, non-original work, and examination by proxy. Procedures regarding academic misconduct are delineated in “Student Policies and Procedures” article X, section 2. If an incident of academic misconduct occurs, the instructor has the option to notify the student and adjust grades downward, award a failing grade for the semester, or seek further sanctions against the student.’

I objected to this statement. I wrote the following: "I do not wish to put this statement on my syllabi for principled reasons. First, the statement is in quotation marks (oddly using the British convention rather than the American), and no source is given, violating my stipulation to my students that any quoted matter must be properly cited. Second, the statement conveys a hostile and threatening tone, one I do not wish to convey to my students; I go to great lengths to convey to my students that I am there to help them become more capable, a message at great variance from the tone and message of the above statement. The statement replicates several from the administration threatening sanctions if we do not do what the administration says. I do not wish to speak to my students in that fashion.

 

"What do others think?"

Only one person from the dean's office responded, and that person is to be commended for engaging the issue. The response was this: "The plagiarism statement has quotation marks around it because it was copied word for word from the statement used in the syllabus of a colleague in the college of Arts and Sciences. I asked permission to use it, and the faculty member said sure, but that it had been copied work for word from somewhere else. The quotation marks are therefore an artifact of the unclear provenance of statement but a recognition of the fact that it was copied word for word. There is no conspiracy."

I replied: :"Of course, the remark about the quotation marks without citation was not my main point but a 'dig' at the failure to cite in a remark about plagiarism. To repeat my main point:

“'I would prefer to assume that, of course, no one would cheat and then deal with misconduct as it may arise. If one person says to another, "I expect you to be honest," it expresses the possibility that someone might not be honest and is an insult to that person. We assume honesty; it goes without saying. We deal with dishonesty if we must.' [I was quoting from a response to my coordinator's efforts to justify the statement; I had forwarded the correspondence between myself and the coordinator to the deans and chairs.]

“What do the rest of you think about this point as an objection to the plagiarism statement on a syllabus?”

Again, among the deans and chairs only a single dean responded, writing, “I suppose the same could be said about almost anything – traffic rules, house rules, what is considered a criminal offence, tax laws, property transfers,… there are rules and regulations, and they are [usually] written down.  And they do not suggest that everyone is dishonest unless proved otherwise. Academic integrity is at the foundation of our enterprise – and maybe it appears to some individuals  that all students and faculty understand and adopt it, but a university education is also increasingly a credentialing process, a means to an end, where  the exigencies of the deadline or grade affect performance and practice.  ….

“… it makes more sense to arrange a forum/teach in – faculty, students, judicial affairs, journalists, researchers, etc.

“If you yourself choose to have some other statement about academic integrity, have it as a topic of learning and discussion in your classes so that students know the issues, consequences and concerns, you could do so.  Keep in mind that when a student does cheat, the university takes it seriously, and we do not want to hear ‘everybody does it’,  ‘I didn’t’ know it was wrong’, ‘you didn’t say we couldn’t copy’.”

I replied: “I would love to do a forum on the topic. I believe it would be immensely helpful. But it should be phrased as a question: how should faculty deal with cheating? Or something like that?

“NO ONE should infer that I tolerate cheating. I don’t. However, I deal with it as the behavior of an individual, not the class. The only thing I say (I don’t write it down) is that I am there to help them to read with better comprehension of complex texts and to help them to write more clearly and precisely about complex ideas which may not be their own ideas; then I say, “When you write I want your own bad writing. If you wrote like a professional you would not need to be in college. So give me your own writing so that I can help you to write better.” And I spend a lot of time with students in one-on-one or small group sessions going over their papers (because they have to rewrite them; they weren’t good enough).

“I do not believe that a schedule of assignments for a class is the same as saying ‘you need to be honest’ to students. The former represents a schedule of what we will do so that students understand the class requirements. The latter is an insult to the student.

“The point about the change in the nature of universities is obviously relevant; so also is the observation that, in a predominately black university, racist assumptions about student behavior may creep in. In my classes I have read aloud the university’s ‘Code of Excellence’ to illustrate how negative racial stereotyping of black people plays out at Chicago State. The bookstore will not let students into the textbook aisles ‘because they might steal.’ Students sign up for financial aid at the last minute ‘because they are ghetto.’ Do you think that the University of Chicago requires that all syllabi contain a statement about academic misconduct?

“[to the dean who engaged my objection to the plagiarism statement] thank you for engaging in a conversation on these issues. What do others think?”

Since writing that I checked what NCATE asks for, and that don’t ask for a plagiarism warning.

And what do readers of this post think? Is the plagiarism statement racist? Am I off base?