I Can't Believe You're Still Doing This . . .

Again, from College for Creative Studies.

At one point, we had a sociology instructor--he was a very nice guy, MA from Marygrove University (a very small, very parochial four-year institution in Detroit), and when he'd tell me (I was Chair of Liberal Arts) about class trips and projects he was doing, it sounded like the students were getting a good introduction to the social realities of a city in the throes of all kinds of urban blight and decay (regardless of how often newscasters extolled Detroit's beauty and vitality). This was what sociology should be about, I thought, the nitty-gritty that affluent suburbanites never knew existed. And he didn't seem to have any political or social ax to grind. He just wanted to broaden students' awareness and sympathies.

But there was a problem. I was alerted by the girl in the media center (who typed syllabi and exams for him) that he was nearly illiterate. She was correcting all his spelling and grammar errors, as well as errors in phrasing, etc. She showed me an original he had brought, and she showed me the finished product after her labors.

I had to have a meeting with him. I told him I loved the classes he was teaching, thought highly of his approach, and wanted him to continue, but that he was going to have to clean up his act when it came to writing. He was entirely agreeable--he would take some classes and solve the problem.

Several months later, the typist came to me again. Apparently, the instructor had not gotten the draft to her early enough to make sufficient corrections, and she was now angry that he was using her to cover over all the mistakes he was still making, despite the promise to correct them. He had even given the class an uncorrected assignment, syllabus, or exam--I can't remember which--but it must have made him look utterly ignorant, since we had students who were very sharp.

I told him I couldn't continue to hire him.

It was a shame. I liked him, and I liked his courses. In a way, it wasn't even his fault. He should have taken steps to improve his writing, of course. But what about the program which let him through with a master's degree? How could he have passed even a single freshman composition class, let alone graduate classes and a graduate thesis (if one had been required)? Either he had someone else write every paper he submitted (or he purchased them)--but he didn't strike me as a dishonest person at all. Or, and I suspect this to be the case: Marygrove University, in its desperation to get students and their private-college tuition, sometimes paid by goverment assistance, took them in, passed them along, and claimed success regardless of fundamental areas of incompetence. (We're not talking about the occasional misspelling or grammatical goof here--we're talking about wholesale incompetence with mechanics, punctuation, spelling, etc. He might have had an undiagnosed learning disability, but that didn't stop him from getting his degree and putting it on his resume.)

Or, the claim to have a degree was a fraud. If that was the case, he betrayed himself as soon as he put something on paper.

But he was affable, understood the problem--perhaps even realized that the cat being out of the bag (again) he was going to have to move on.

The potential for such frauds--not only at College for Creative Studies--has since led all institutions to require the provision of official documents that establish degree earned.