I am proud to let you know about a new report released today by United Way Worldwide at an important Town Hall event in DC where United Way announced its pledge to generate 1,000,000 new volunteers in mentoring and tutoring for education. (United Way’s pledge is a great example of the level of educational leadership I wish we could see more of now a days.) I was fortunate enough to be asked to write and do the chief research and focus group work for the report.
I’ve posted an announcement of the report at my company’s site, the Mannakee Circle Group. Here is the piece I posted there:
 Soledad O'Brien talks to Oakland Raiders cornerback Nnamdi Asomugha at the Town Hall Today at a National Town Hall event at Trinity Washington University moderated by CNN’s Soledad O’Brien and featuring Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Corporation for National and Community Service head Patrick Corvington, and White House Domestic Policy Adviser Melody Barnes, United Way Worldwide releasedVoices For The Common Good: America Speaks Out On Education.
Mannakee Circle Group president Brad Rourke conducted focus group research, reviewed notes from the field, and did the principal writing for this report. (Available here.)
The national report is the result of extensive work by United Way listening to community members talk about their aspirations and concerns when it comes to their communities and education. It is based on more than 150 community conversations with thousands of participants, held by local United Ways in 17 cities — along with six focus groups in Billings, MT; Chicago, IL; Detroit, MI; Los Angeles, CA; New York City, NY; and Washington, DC.
Key findings in the report include:
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- When you improve schools, you improve communities — and vice versa
- People feel disconnected from schools
- Instilling values is just as important to people as teaching academics
- We’ve reached a turning point in education
- People want to work together but aren’t sure what to do
The community conversations were conducted using a framework developed by my friend and colleague Rich Harwood. Special thanks to another good friend and colleague, Mike Wood, vice president of field engagement at United Way, for bringing me in to this project.
For more about the report, visit United Way.
 Click for Full Report (pdf)
My friend Ed Sirianno recently drew my attention to a post at Inigral (maker of the Schools Facebook app) with ten tips for getting faculty involved in using Facebook on campus.
While it is focused on higher education, the ideas apply to getting any reluctant group of people involved in Facebook. For online community managers, this can be a daunting proposition. While it is relatively easy to evangelize to people who already have dipped their toes in the water, it is sometimes excruciating to try to make the case for engagement through social media to intelligent skeptics who listen politely and then go about their business, chuckling to themselves about how silly you are.
Indeed, in one community content initiative I am involved with, we recently suggested to our constituents that it was critical for them to use Facebook to generate interest in the work. Some of the responses I got back made me wonder what year I was in. Typical (paraphrased) response: “I set up a profile last year when my nephew visited me from college, but it seemed silly then and still does. I don’t want to see photos of what he ate for lunch.”
A community manager who is in charge of a public institutions social media and Facebook page might justifiably throw up their hands. But the failure is with the evangelists, not with the skeptics. We may make a good case for using Facebook (for instance, higher education people take note that 90% of college students are on Facebook), we need to make it engaging in an ongoing, day-to-day way for all the groups we hope will connect with it.
 "Analog Computer" by Flickr user Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, Texas A&M Here are some of the key ideas from Inigral, along with some of my comments:
- Polls: With well-crafted questions that eschew hype, you can give people a reason to visit and interact with your page.
- Photos: Post and tag — sharing and tagging of photos remains one of the easiest ways to engage people in creating content together.
- Sports Info: One-stop shareable hub of school sports results and other info.
- Office Hours: Virtual office hours (like Stanford does — Stanford is the “rock star” of colleges on Facebook with more than 45,000 fans).
- Announcements: Key departmental and other announcements — since they allow interaction through comments, this can become an important interaction area for faculty, many of whom are deeply invested in the organizational politics of their institutions.
- Students: In my view the most important reason for faculty to want to interact with Facebook on a daily basis is that this is where students are. If a community manager were to be intentional about creating a space for interactions between faculty and students, the early adopter faculty would begin to use it and demonstrate value to their colleagues.
Replace the word “student” with “citizen,” “customer,” “constituent,” or “fan” and you can see how this can translate into many other public-facing institutions.
Thanks, Ed, for sharing! I urge you to read the full Inigral post.
 "... Iuvenetus Summus!" by Flickr user Poldavo (Alex) Andrea Jarrell drew my attention to a piece in yesterday’s Washington Post by former Howard Dean Internet wunderkind Zephyr Teachout.
Both newspapers and universities have traditionally relied on selling hard-to-come-by information. Newspapers touted advertising space next to breaking news, but now that advertisers find their customers on Craigslist and Cars.com, the main source of reporters’ pay is vanishing. Colleges also sell information, with a slightly different promise — a degree, a better job and access to brilliant minds. As with newspapers, some of these features are now available elsewhere. A student can already access videotaped lectures, full courses and openly available syllabuses online. And in five or 10 years, the curious 18- (or 54-) year-old will be able to find dozens of quality online classes, complete with take-it-yourself tests, a bulletin board populated by other “students,” and links to free academic literature. . . .
Because the current college system, like the newspaper industry, has built-in redundancies, new Internet efficiencies will lead to fewer researchers and professors. . . . [A]t noon on any given day, hundreds of university professors are teaching introductory Sociology 101. The Internet makes it harder to justify these redundancies. In the future, a handful of Soc. 101 lectures will be videotaped and taught across the United States. When this happens — be it in 10 years or 20 — we will see a structural disintegration in the academy akin to that in newspapers now. The typical 2030 faculty will likely be a collection of adjuncts alone in their apartments, using recycled syllabuses and administering multiple-choice tests from afar.
So how should we think about this? Students who would never have had access to great courses or minds are already able to find learning online that was unimaginable in the last century.
I reproduced a fair amount of the piece because I believe it is an important point to grasp fully. The institutional structures of academe are poised to undergo profound upheavals. This is due to a confluence of social forces, not the least of which is the general shift to a citizen-centric world in which people demand that institutions and organizations conform to their priorities and needs, not vice-versa.
Just as with the journalism world, we do not yet know exactly how this will play out, though we can sense the general contours. It’s possible that the education of the future will be deeply self-directed, as Teachout describes.
However, most of our prognostications are still rooted in what we believe people need or want from institutions. For instance, the above vision of college presupposes that people come to campus to seek “a degree, a better job and access to brilliant minds” from higher education. Certainly, people do seek those things.
However, like many institutions, there’s something more that people get that they sometimes do not realize they are getting. These elements often go overlooked in our talks about the future.
In the case of newspapers, it is (among other things) serendipity and an editorial eye: There are editors concerned with making sure I have the opportunity to see things I might not have seen otherwise, and overall ensuring there is consistent quality.
In the case of universities, the “more” may be a pedagogy rooted in a day-in, day-out experience. This is left out of many discussions of what higher education might “look like” as the future unfolds. Our conversations typically assume that a “student” is really a “consumer” of education.
But the pedagogy of campus does not just impart knowledge. It imparts practice, too. It forges habits of thought and attitude. It creates students. Many of the methods that higher education uses are ones that people might not seek out if they can pick and choose their program at will — just as an example, many core course requirements.
Where, then, will people seeking education find this pedagogy? Like many things that used to be taught earlier, maybe they’ll be taken to the workplace. For many people, their first encounter with someone telling them “no” is in their first job. Similarly, in a world where people create their own education, it may be that the first time people really learn how to organize their thoughts across subjects (which is the kind of thing many professional settings require) is in the workplace.
This suggests to me that the role of mentorship — or apprenticeship — will only grow in importance. Managers already know they often need to jump-start new employees. They may need to devote even more thought to first-year experiences.
But in what other ways can we convey habits that require practice over time, sometimes over the in-the-moment objections of our subjects? This has been one of the roles of some institutions in public life. With what will we replace them?
Just to be clear: I regard it as a glorious thing that the president plans to address students in schools directly. The controversy that has brewed over whether this is indoctrination seems ill-founded. President Obama is not trying to control the thoughts of our young ones. He’s using the bully pulpit to urge them to take their education seriously, and to stay in school. More presidents should take such steps.
However, a closer look at the hue and cry over the speech is in order. While it may be that the underlying driver for the folks who have called for a national keep-you-child-home-from-school day could be dislike of President Obama specifically, the initial flap was over lesson plans that the Department of Education distributed along with its announcement of the talk.
The pushback was so intense that new lesson plans were developed that were designed to settle any fears that teachers would use the classroom time to promote President Obama specifically (as opposed to the office of the President of the United States generally).
 "New Classroom" by Flickr user Editor B Curious, I took a look at the lesson plans (pdf). To be honest, I can see the critics’ point, even with the new version, which includes questions such as “Are we able to do what President Obama is asking of us?” The document overall reads as if it were written from a standpoint of adulation of this specific president — one is hard pressed to imagine a similar document being written if it were George W. Bush making the same address, or, for that matter, Bill Clinton.
I can overlook that, however, even while I understand the misgivings some people may have.
A Missed Civic Opportunity
What has the civic side of me hopping mad, however, is what a missed opportunity this is. The Department of Education, in creating a lesson plan that encourages students to think of “What is the president trying to tell me?” and “What is the president asking me to do?” is squandering the chance to create a collective moment in which students are asked to think civically and not personally.
Here are some questions I would rather our nation’s students consider, on the occasion of a presidential address to the classrooms of America:
- In what ways is education important? Is it important for everybody or just for some people?
- How are we doing throughout our community when it comes to young people and education?
- How can we work together so everyone has the best chance to learn as much as they can? What would it take to do that?
- What are some of the things a president could do to help everyone learn? What are some of the things we can do together? How about in families?
For most students across the nation, this will be a shared experience — something they all do at the same time. Why not take this time to focus on our obligations and bonds with one another, rather than inwardly on what I am supposed to do to maximize my success?
My friend Sutton Stokes drew my attention to this from Ars Technica:
Internet connection + English = college degree. The University of the People wants to bring online education to anyone who can speak English and access the Internet, and to do it for as little as $15 a course. The goal? A real college degree from an accredited school. Shai Reshef has a vision: soon, anyone with an Internet connection and some proficiency in English can take classes online at his new “University of the People.” And not just classes—the school will be accredited, offering actual degrees in subjects like computer science. Charges will be minimal, starting at just $15, and will be based on the student’s country. It sounds too good to be true, but Reshef is enough of a believer in the idea to pump a million dollars of his own into it, and he argues that it can be a self-sustaining nonprofit once it tops 10,000 worldwide students.
I’ve written before about for-profit and online higher education, in which I am generally in favor, but I am not sure what to make of this.
Done right, with people in charge who are dedicated and consistent on the mission (bringing higher education to impoverished people), it can be a real force for positive change.
But, what to do about people who use it as a diploma mill? And how do you guarantee that the core management will keep that proper attitude?
And . . . the question that may make all this moot . . . can it really become self-sustaining?
What do you think?
Andrea Jarrell pointed out to me that, according to Inside Higher Ed, Brandeis University is selling all of the art it owns.
Says the article:
“These are extraordinary times,” said a statement from Jehuda Reinharz, the university’s president. “We cannot control or fix the nation’s economic problems. We can only do what we have been entrusted to do — act responsibly with the best interests of our students and their futures foremost in mind.” The university’s statement pledged continued support for teaching the arts, and for the liberal arts, and said that the decision was part of “an emerging new vision for the university aimed at streamlining it for the future while bolstering its focus on undergraduates, the liberal arts and research.”
Last week, the Brandeis faculty agreed to create a special committee to review the curriculum. Among plans being discussed are adding business or engineering programs and finding a way to simultaneously expand undergraduate enrollment while shrinking the faculty. University administrators have also floated the idea of replacing all existing majors and minors with new “meta-majors,” a term whose definition is hard to pin down even among those who have discussed it. Many faculty members have said that they will never go for the abandonment of traditional disciplines, and many have derided that idea as simply cover for eliminating positions and departments.
Two points, related.
First, it is interesting to note that no institution really is safe — even ones that exist within other institutions. In today’s climate, all organizations are subject to breakup and no organization is guaranteed permanence. Higher education is an area (like primary education) that has been stretched by the transformational forces in society but so far has sidestepped the revolution going on all around us. For the most part, colleges and universities still look like colleges and universities. But for how long? How much of that stability is just momentum? (So, for example, looking just at the art museum issue: Why should a college be home to the best art museum in New England? Why shouldn’t such a museum be standalone?)
Second, the challenge Brandeis is facing is quite literally to do more with less. That is going to take equally revolutionary thinking. You can’t just wring more out of people, you’ve got to restructure the way the work gets done. I happen to think this “meta major” business sounds like a bunch of bogus claptrap. However, it’s worth asking: What is a “major?” Why do we have them? How are they best taught?
It’s may also be worth asking: Why is there tenure? Should there be required minimum teaching skills in order to actually get up in front of students? Why does all this have to take place in a location?
My friend John Creighton and I have been thinking together about what it might mean for education to become far more “student centered – a trend that has already begun. Education is one of those areas that so far has been sheltered from some of the more turbulent changes taking place in society. But we think that may soon change.
It will be important, in that context, for people who care about civic life to have an understanding of what these changes will mean for public life in general. What civic norms will be created? What expectations? How might public life benefit? How might it be made more difficult? What unforeseen side effects might there be?
Here is a brief piece we wrote (John did most of the writing) recently setting up this question:
The 25-year debate about the quality of public education in the United States has brought about marginal changes in how we deliver education in this country:
- Families have a few more choices about where to send their children to school
- We pay more attention to education standards than we have in the past
- Most schools and school districts are working to maximize instruction quality and time
However, the way the nation’s schools are organized has remained largely the same for the last half century. This is true both for public and private schools. American schools continue to be mostly institution-centric, place-based hierarchies. Indeed, public education has been one of the few areas that has remained immune to the new realities emerging across the globe.
The lack of change is about to change and it is important to try to understand the civic consequences of it.
There are three forces at work that make a deep change in public education a distinct possibility:
First, demographic shifts have brought new expectations for all institutions. Post-GenXer’s (incoming parents of school age children) have very different expectations for how they relate to organizations, both public and private — they expect deeply personalized products, action-oriented or participatory experiences, and an explicit role in the relationship. They expect their experiences with organizations to focus on them, not on the needs of the institution. This is most clear in the private sphere but it is driving even more powerful change in the public sphere. Personal choice is becoming non-negotiable. Research suggests that there is a growing political consensus to support personalized education, too.
Second, the physical world is enabling and driving change. The infrastructure is taking shape and increasingly in use to support these new expectations – cheap mobile communications devices, individual citizens with easy and deep access to technology (across the economic spectrum) and growing networks of people and organizations that span time and geography. It is now possible for students and educators to be connected in ways previously unimagined.
Third, educational policy is already responding to the new reality. Curricula are housed online and delivered electronically. Educators are increasingly digitally fluent and have coalesced into robust social networks. Liberalization of charter school laws makes personalized instruction and “designer” schools feasible. State laws are already facilitating online public education (in Florida, in fact, the laws require it).
It is not hard to imagine that the future of public education will be dominated by personalized learning and student-centric (rather than institution-centric) schools that are neither entirely place-based nor time-fixed.
This is not a story about “the new economy” or “advanced technology.” It is a story about an already-changed world that is dragging all institutions along with it.
Of critical importance, in this landscape, is to develop an understanding of what effects this transformation of a central civic institution will have for civic, community and democratic life. Those interested in self-rule in communities will need to try to understand the types of questions and challenges communities (and the nation) will confront as public education adapts to a new generation of Americans.
Andrea Jarrell passed on to me an item she saw in the always-useful Inside Higher Ed. It’s an interview with Harold T. Shapiro, the new chairman of DeVry, Inc.
Yes, that DeVry. The for-profit school. Before you turn up your nose, know this: Shapiro is former president of University of Michigan.
Many of my friends and colleague probably share my initial gut reaction to things like DeVry, University of Phoenix, and Strayer University: They can’t be rigorous. They’re just diploma mills. They exist only to get Federal financial aid dollars.
But the interview with Shapiro has me thinking differently.
Two highlights:
Higher education is such a subsidized activity that it wasn’t clear to me that a market-funded organization really could overcome the competition represented by these very large subsidies. Now what’s happened over time, of course, is these subsidies have declined as states have had different kinds of priorities or have had budget constraints of one kind or another; the subsidies to higher education have gone down very substantially. . . .
Yes, I thought that a private organization could [possibly] be more effective, it could be more nimble, it could be more efficient in certain ways, but I just thought that wasn’t enough to overcome the subsidy [disadvantage]. But I was wrong. They found a way to operate extremely efficiently and now increasingly through the online service and the broadening of the curriculum they have found niches out there that just weren’t being served.
What about quality? How can for-profit schools really provide what “real” schools do?
I think there’s a general skepticism that people that are in this for profit aren’t going to serve their students well. I feel the other way around, because if DeVry doesn’t serve their students, we’ll be out of business.
I was president of the University of Michigan. It’s not going out of business anytime in our lifetime. DeVry could go out of business in years — not in decades — if it wasn’t serving its students. So it has to pass a much tougher test than traditional higher education does. I hardly think we do it perfectly; I’m sure we have many improvements that we could make, but we’re always on the trail, always trying to do something. . . .
If you look, for example, at how quickly we adapted to online education, we’re much more fully adapted to that than any traditional school that I know of. Now I don’t know them all, so maybe this is an exaggerated statement, but we have an extraordinary number of students who get their degrees partly in classrooms, partly online. The coursework that we’ve developed online in the areas that I’m familiar with, like statistics which I taught for a number of years [at other institutions], is really high quality.
These are excellent points, and Shapiro is a serious person who merits serious attention.
This is an area to watch in the future.
Perhaps you noticed the articles recently announcing the Josephson Institute’s latest installment of their annual survey of youth perceptions on ethics. It’s something I take note of, since I used to work at a think tank on ethics.
The Josephson survey is always good for some alarmist fare, and rightly so. Perhaps the most striking — and persistent — finding is that most young people see themselves as ethical yet also, by large majorities, report engaging in unethical behavior like cheating.
Most articles that cover the Josephson report dutifully trot out educators who say that students are “stressed out” and “busy” and so they cut corners. Then there is a paragraph outlining all the new seminars on plagiarism at this or that school.
What’s always bugged me about this approach is that it gets two things wrong.
- First, it excuses wrong behavior by implying that tough times somehow justify (or mitigate) cheating.
- Second, it falls into the “not enough knowledge” trap: that is, it assumes that wrong behavior is arising out of a lack of knowledge, that kids just don’t know what plagiarism is and so if only they knew more about it they would stop.
And so, I would like to draw your attention to this article by “Smintheus” at Unbossed. Written by a professor, it is an excellent discussion of the landscape adults who actually oppose cheating (and who oppose enabling cheaters) face. It touches on a number of other points, too, so I recommend reading the whole thing.
It’s not so easy, it turns out, to fight the good fight. So many places in public life, we get messages to let things slide, don’t get involved, don’t upset the apple cart.
So what can we do about this, besides mouth platitudes?
That’s a good question.
Competition between colleges is as tough as it ever was and will definitely get tougher. But this seems ridiculous. My friends at Ethics Newsline brought to my attention that turns out that Baylor University has been paying students who are already admitted and attending the school — to retake the SAT. Just sitting for the exam can win $300 textbook credit and raising your score by 50 points wins you $1,000 in scholarship money. Considering that SAT scores can easily vary by 50 points from sitting to sitting, this is a good bet for any incoming student.
Why would Baylor want its already-admitted kids to retake the SAT? Easy: The SAT is a major part of the US News & World Report’s college ranking system. Baylor’s got a strategic plan called Baylor 2012 that evidently includes a cornerstone goal that it will do better on the US News rankings. They’re on their way, according to The Lariat, the student newspaper. Baylor’s average score SAT went from 1,200 to 1,210.
Baylor’s vice president for marketing, John Barry, first told The New York Times that there’s no problem because any other college could have done it too: “Every university wants to have great SAT scores. Every university wants to be perceived as having a high-quality class. We all wanted that. Were we happy our SAT scores went up? Yes. Did our students earn their scores? Yes they did.”
Some critics of standardized testing in general are pouncing on this because they say it reveals how evil they are. I don’t see it that way. The SAT is just a tool. So are the US News rankings. Baylor was misusing one tool to game the other – that doesn’t make the tools wrong, it makes Baylor wrong. Indeed, according to the influential Inside Higher Ed, Robert Morse (the US News “ranking czar”) made clear that the magazine “disapproves of any educational policy designed solely to manipulate the ranking.”
This episode shows how careful leaders have to be when they set goals — because staff throughout the organization might think that reaching the goal is the most important thing, not how you get there. In some areas, that can work. Schools? Not so much.
This is also a great example of gaming a system without breaking the rules. In other words, it’s a great example of the difference between what’s legal and what’s right.
While Baylor’s Barry at first said the university was “very happy with the way [the program] turned out,” they must not have been too happy about being caught. They’ve promised to cut the program, saying it was a “goof.”
The story first broke in Baylor’s student paper, The Lariat. It didn’t die with that one piece, either. In a recent editorial, The Lariat points out that:
Ultimately, the decision about SAT scores is really just a symptom of a larger problem. As Baylor progresses towards its 2012 goal, it’s seems more and more intent on fulfilling as many of the imperatives [in the strategic plan] as possible. There is a serious problem with this mentality, though. We seem so anxious to reach these goals that we aren’t considering whether we’re actually improving as a university. In this case, we’re trying to improve the appearance of our student’s scores without actually attracting higher-scoring students.
Many business schools now make ethics courses a central requirement to get that MBA, in an effort to improve things. According to Fox News religion correspondent, Lauren Green:
In the wake of the Enron collapse there’s been a bumper crop of ethics courses added to the business curriculum. The nation’s number one business school, Harvard began its much heralded and mandatory Leadership and Corporate Accountability course five years ago. . . . And Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School was established last year . . . for the express purpose of turning out business school graduates who’ll work to the corporate culture of greed to a culture favoring more socially responsible leadership.
But this assumes the problem is that people somehow need more knowledge in order to make ethical decisions. No: they need a moral compass coupled with some backbone. The Lariat’s insightful analysis shows it doesn’t take smarts and a degree to make the right decisions — it takes guts.
Someone, somewhere along the line, should have been able to stand up and say, “Um, boss? This SAT plan is wrong.” Maybe a memo to that effect will come to light, which would restore my faith in humanity.
Meanwhile, seemingly the last line of defense for Baylor’s reputation, the student editors of the paper hold out hope that should also be coming from the halls of the administrative offices: “With any luck, the damage done is not irreversible, and we can reaffirm our university as fair and ethical.”
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In 2007, I founded Rockville Central (about Rockville, MD) and comanaged it until we ceased publishing in October 2011.
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Baylor: A Mulligan For New Students
Competition between colleges is as tough as it ever was and will definitely get tougher. But this seems ridiculous. My friends at Ethics Newsline brought to my attention that turns out that Baylor University has been paying students who are already admitted and attending the school — to retake the SAT. Just sitting for the exam can win $300 textbook credit and raising your score by 50 points wins you $1,000 in scholarship money. Considering that SAT scores can easily vary by 50 points from sitting to sitting, this is a good bet for any incoming student.
Why would Baylor want its already-admitted kids to retake the SAT? Easy: The SAT is a major part of the US News & World Report’s college ranking system. Baylor’s got a strategic plan called Baylor 2012 that evidently includes a cornerstone goal that it will do better on the US News rankings. They’re on their way, according to The Lariat, the student newspaper. Baylor’s average score SAT went from 1,200 to 1,210.
Baylor’s vice president for marketing, John Barry, first told The New York Times that there’s no problem because any other college could have done it too: “Every university wants to have great SAT scores. Every university wants to be perceived as having a high-quality class. We all wanted that. Were we happy our SAT scores went up? Yes. Did our students earn their scores? Yes they did.”
Some critics of standardized testing in general are pouncing on this because they say it reveals how evil they are. I don’t see it that way. The SAT is just a tool. So are the US News rankings. Baylor was misusing one tool to game the other – that doesn’t make the tools wrong, it makes Baylor wrong. Indeed, according to the influential Inside Higher Ed, Robert Morse (the US News “ranking czar”) made clear that the magazine “disapproves of any educational policy designed solely to manipulate the ranking.”
This episode shows how careful leaders have to be when they set goals — because staff throughout the organization might think that reaching the goal is the most important thing, not how you get there. In some areas, that can work. Schools? Not so much.
This is also a great example of gaming a system without breaking the rules. In other words, it’s a great example of the difference between what’s legal and what’s right.
While Baylor’s Barry at first said the university was “very happy with the way [the program] turned out,” they must not have been too happy about being caught. They’ve promised to cut the program, saying it was a “goof.”
The story first broke in Baylor’s student paper, The Lariat. It didn’t die with that one piece, either. In a recent editorial, The Lariat points out that:
Many business schools now make ethics courses a central requirement to get that MBA, in an effort to improve things. According to Fox News religion correspondent, Lauren Green:
But this assumes the problem is that people somehow need more knowledge in order to make ethical decisions. No: they need a moral compass coupled with some backbone. The Lariat’s insightful analysis shows it doesn’t take smarts and a degree to make the right decisions — it takes guts.
Someone, somewhere along the line, should have been able to stand up and say, “Um, boss? This SAT plan is wrong.” Maybe a memo to that effect will come to light, which would restore my faith in humanity.
Meanwhile, seemingly the last line of defense for Baylor’s reputation, the student editors of the paper hold out hope that should also be coming from the halls of the administrative offices: “With any luck, the damage done is not irreversible, and we can reaffirm our university as fair and ethical.”