So it is the third day of my “vacation” before summer classes begin and as bad as finals week was, vacation is beginning to make me miss it! So far I have lost my three year old dryer and my cable/internet/phone for 4 hours yesterday. This makes me miss finals week with the full on plagiarizer and the two cheaters.

Now I know that technically plagiarism is of course cheating, and both count as academic dishonesty, but one was in a paper and the other two were with an exam. I was surprised at how angry I was at the three people who I had to fail and report, but of course I am always pissed when people think that they can get away with anything. Like in a class of 26 I will somehow miss that two students have the exact same, in many places word for word, wrong answer on the essay part of an exam. That really just trips my trigger is that I have no idea how they did this. They either had this down before they came to class, which is hard to believe, how did they get the question, or one of them passed their answer to the other one to copy. Either way, they fail. And then there is my plagiarizer. Not only were whole portions of the paper lifted from websites, but she was missing half of her portfolio. And the worst part of this is that no one in the department is surprised or as angry as I am. It’s all taken with some blasé attitude. Even academic affairs could care less. Which leads me to a question that has been burning in the back of my head for awhile, have we as academics just given up? Have we been beaten by the constant and ever present cheating? Was the internet the straw that broke the camels back? Have we thrown in the towel? It feels like we have, we have accepted what the world is now and moved on. The Phantom Prof, a few weeks ago, pointed out an article from the Chronicle about the high tech ways that students have begun to cheat, and the steps that colleges are taking to stop them. This depresses me, but it also makes me wonder how far we should go to stop people who obviously don’t really want to learn. Even if someone cheats their way through college and somehow graduates, won’t their lack of knowledge catch up to them somewhere in the real world? I would like to think so, but I have seen far too many people succeed when they should have failed.

One week left of classes and I am counting the days like someone trapped on a desert island. I remarked a couple of week ago that this semester has flown by, but I think I spoke too soon. Because while the first 13 weeks left me on winged feet, the last three weeks are on a turtle crawl. I am not sure why, maybe it is academic angst and spring fever that have settled over some wormhole vortex that exists just under my feet. But don’t ask me I’m an English teacher, not a physicist. I think that the new influx of students who come begging to pass have slowed time, for the whole semester I have been able to just work without interruption a bit on classes and then a lot of my diss, but now work on the diss has come to a halt because I am dealing with students who are desperate in the light of spring to pay for the sins of winter. What I want to tell them is that I don’t care what will happen to them now, but I don’t and I don’t know why.

Just yesterday I found a plagiarizer, failed someone’s paper because they couldn’t even follow the minimum of requirements and made extra copies of assignments from weeks ago for student who I haven’t seen in that long or who have lost their originals. I don’t know why the hell I go out of my way for these students, some would say I am simply too nice, and I should be tougher; but honestly for all my posturing I am a push over. My goal every semester is just to keep that information from my students as long as possible. And I am always amazed and how students think that they can just slide by, which I could never have done. Now I am not someone who is old enough to say that I walked through five feet of snow to school, I am actually rather young, but I am feeling the generation gap keenly. When I was in college (I graduated 9 years ago) my department had a pedagogically sound sink or swim attitude (hear my sarcasm here?) toward academic study. It was rigorous and cutting edge, you either read Derrida and understood him, or found a classmate who could explain it, the professors would not. I survived simply because I am at my best in adversity. I wonder now if the same generation is at my alma mater slinking into offices right now begging those same professors for extensions and mercy. I can’t see them giving it, but I wonder if they have had to change in the nine years that they kicked my butt.

I always wanted to emulate those professors, but I have not really been able to because I don’t want to fail the majority of my students. Maybe if I taught at a more prestigious university I could be a hard ass, but I wonder if that is true as well. Have all institutions of higher learning had to revise their standards for generation y and their helicopter parents. I am frightened for the future of the profession and the University. I see everyday that it becomes more corporatized, more customer centered. I actually had a student tell me that they pay my salary (which would be difficult because they do not have a job and thus are not a taxpayer, who actually pays my meager salary) and I was shocked that this student thought of their education like they were buying a sweater. So what is the future of higher education? I don’t know and I am very frightened.