Cheating and Dante's hell

Our Lit Hum books are full of moral quandaries. Was Hektor right to leave his family and return to battle? Was Medea justified in killing her children? What are we to think about Griselda’s patience, Cordelia’s silence, and Lily Briscoe’s self-doubt? Is there anything morally redeemable about Mr. Collins? Puzzling over such matters is one of the many joys of Lit Hum.

But Lit Hum instructors presently face a moral quandary of a very different sort: How can we at Columbia encourage the highest standards of academic honesty? We must do something, but what?

Academic dishonesty taints our relations, both among students and between instructor and students. It only takes a few cases a year to do the harm: A couple students copy off each other’s midterms and seem surprised this is a problem, a few ask to go to the bathroom during the final exam to look up IDs on their cell phones, a few buy papers online while others plagiarize major parts of their essays. How are instructors and students supposed to respond to these moral failures?

We need to have an honest conversation about the grave dangers of dishonesty. Our academic culture must be based on trust and integrity. Lit Hum not only sets the tone for the rest of the Core, it is—at its core—an open conversation among equals. We struggle together to glimpse the profundity and beauty of our texts. We bond in our delight, fascination, and perplexity.

Cheating breaks the bonds and taints the openness that is essential to Lit Hum and to an honest dialogue among equals. It’s a kind of violence against all of us. It disrupts, disconcerts, and discourages. Many faculty find cheating so unsettling, they’d rather look the other way. Some become so incensed, they become anxious about every new set of papers. We Lit Hum instructors want so badly to help our students become better writers, readers, and independent thinkers that we despair at the thought of such a breach of faith. When students break our trust, we have to recalibrate the relation to our class. We feel delight when a student suddenly does significantly better work but then catch ourselves with the worry: Is this the student’s work or not? We wonder: Is it disloyal to search for sources online or foolish not to? We worry about worrying too much or too little. The thought of students getting ahead (or trying to) by false means produces despair.

We find cheating in Lit Hum utterly irrational: Students come to Columbia to take the Core, develop writing and reading skills, and engage in honest conversation with one another about our shared literary past. Cheating ruins that. Besides severing the bonds of trust, cheaters are not developing the skills that they came to Columbia to master and that will help them in more advanced courses. They’re not preparing themselves to live a rich and thoughtful life. That’s not just dishonest; it’s dumb.

Of course, many students would never ever cheat. In the same way that many instructors have a hard time dealing with academic dishonesty, many students are themselves so committed to honest learning that they find discussions about cheating disconcerting. They’re insulted by professorial proclamations about the need for honesty.

What are we to do? As chair of Lit Hum, I take this moral quandary very seriously. We instructors will educate ourselves about how to catch plagiarists and how to create assignments that discourage plagiarism. We will have new rules (e.g., no cell phones at exams). I hope that we can start using Turnitin or another software that makes it easier to identify papers bought online. (For some of us, the thought that wealthier students can cheat more easily than less wealthy ones by buying an A paper, or trying to, is particularly galling.) There will be discussion, debate, and much gnashing of teeth. In short, we Lit Hum instructors and staff will do everything we can to discourage dishonesty and encourage an environment of trust.

What will you students do? You must not ignore the problem. It impacts your academic and social lives. Should there be an honor code? Should there be more thorough discussions during first-year orientation? Should upper-level students volunteer to help proctor Lit Hum exams? How can we work together to create an environment of trust? This is one giant and annoying moral quandary. And the sooner we confront it, the sooner we can return to more important matters.

I leave you with a more proper Lit Hum quandary: To what sort of torment would Dante submit the classroom traitor? Here are some suggestions in keeping with contrapasso perfection: He would submit the traitor to a thousand paper cuts around the head and hands; he would have the violent characters in the books unread by the plagiarist tear the cheater apart; he would make the traitor spend the rest of eternity with Mr. Collins. Now this is the sort of moral quandary we should spend our free time considering.

The author is the Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy and the chair of Literature Humanities.