Getting Away with It

So much for building a (nearly) perfect mousetrap.  Whilst grading a stack of written assignments, I discovered two which were clearly plagiarized.

I’d thought I was being clever with the assignment.  I had become weary of reading atrociously written research papers, so I came up with an alternative: Students were to choose two vocabulary terms from a list of six, define each term, and give a brief example of how the concepts work in real life.  Maximum length: One-and-a-half pages.  Double-spaced.  In 12-point font.

Three of these assignments make up the course writing requirement.  I thought it would preserve a degree of academic rigor for the serious students and prove a doable project for the rest.  The change has worked reasonably well in my classes at Snowflake College, where the students may be snotty, entitled brats but who are nonetheless capable of writing a coherent paper.

It’s been a different story at the school where I moonlight a couple of nights a week.  Verdant Fields Community College is an urban campus in Hickstown, a mid-sized city an hour’s drive from home.  Roughly three-quarters of the students are enrolled, if only nominally, in vocational training programs.  Since the liberal arts course I teach is required for graduation, I have a captive audience.

Verdant Fields' student body is largely made up of folks for whom the American Dream is an ever-elusive mirage.  Too many of them have been unsuccessful in their schooling up to this point, and yet somehow expect community college to be an entirely different experience.  A fair proportion of them suffer from diagnosed learning disabilities.  Many more seem to have undiagnosed learning disabilities.  I suspect a few suffer from some sort of emotional imbalance.

Each semester, I stand in front of a motley assortment of erstwhile high school fuck-ups, heavyset, prematurely aged single moms, inbred trailer park mutts, recovering alcoholics and assorted other species of addict, the occasional paroled felon, and, if the gods are smiling upon me, a handful of aspiring four-year transfer students leavened with the chance “mature” student possessing common sense, intelligence, and life experience.

Effective teaching in such a setting is a challenge for even the most skilled instructor, which I do not claim to be.  I quickly learned that a straight-up lecture class would not work.  The natives got restless pretty quickly.   

And so, I began to employ what the hacks at the teaching and learning center refer to as “active learning” techniques.  What this actually means is that I came up with ways to distract the children so I could teach the real students.   Group work, case studies, and role-playing classroom games have become my survival strategy…and it works!  Not to mention the fact that my student evaluations have improved substantially.  I even got the department’s teaching award last year.  Heck, I’ve had students tell me they chose my class because of my stellar ratings on That Website Which Shall Not Be Named.  (As a matter of principle, I steadfastly refuse to verify this.)

The downside of my new program is that my self-respect has been diminished.  I am fighting to stay afloat in the new educational marketplace where the student customer is king.  Whenever I find myself confronted with dishonest students, I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.  It shouldn’t be this way.  It should be the other way around; the students should be anxious.  But I know from bitter past experience that I’m going to be the one in the hot seat.

Inevitably, the cheating students, instead of being ashamed of having plagiarized, will react with indignation.  (Never mind that in each case, nearly the entire content of the paper had been cut and pasted from the internet.  As if I wouldn’t be suspicious after reading grammatical, well-reasoned responses from two morons who can barely write their own names.) 

Next, I will be threatened with being reported to the department chair for having dared single them out.  (Once upon a time, it would have been the professor making the threat along with a promise of certain expulsion for academic dishonesty.) 

In the end, in spite of their bristling and blustering to escape the consequences of their actions, the students will take a failing grade on the assignment.  (And I will have a strained discussion with the chair in which his assurances of support for my actions will be shaded by a strong implication that I am somehow at fault.)

I can’t help but tie this phenomenon, as with so much of what I see around me, to the moral hazard of the neoliberal age.  Higher ed is now part of the larger shell game the powerful play with the powerless.  College has become but a credentialing vehicle.  No matter how humble the vocation, a growing number require some kind of degree or certificate.  In other words, postsecondary training has become a barrier to entry into a workforce where good jobs are harder and harder to find. 

Both instructors and students are thus locked into a scheme which practically encourages shortcuts.  We are pressured to pass students who either can’t benefit from higher education or are unmotivated to work hard in the interest of maintaining enrollment and guaranteeing “student success” (i.e., persistence and graduation) numbers.  They, with some exceptions, mostly try to get the highest grade while doing as little work as possible. 

I reassure myself that the kind of students who plagiarize probably won’t get very far in school or in life.  And it’s true.  Most simply lack the intelligence and work ethic.  For all the extravagant promises made by its public relations flacks that attending Verdant Fields will transform their lives, for all their hopes of being underwater brain surgeons, their lot in life will be to drift aimlessly from low wage job to low wage job, overwhelmed by debt, seeking solace in alcohol, drugs, and transitory relationships, existing in a mental twilight without the least glimmer of insight into themselves or the world that produced them.               

I know I should feel some compassion for my two miscreants, and in an abstract, impersonal way I do.  But next week, those cheating little shits are going to pay.

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

Four Little Girls

Even the casual visitor to this blog will notice that I have a penchant for observing significant anniversaries.  This one is especially poignant.

Fifty years ago today, members of the Ku Klux Klan detonated a bomb at the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.  The bombing marked the climax of the Klan’s terror campaign against the city’s African-American residents generally and civil rights activism in particular.  16^th Street Baptist was at the center of Birmingham’s civil rights struggle in the early 1960s and was a natural target for white supremacist violence.

Although Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss, the Klan ringleader in the bombing, claimed the bomb was meant to go off before that morning’s service when the church was unoccupied, the blast killed four girls attending Sunday school in the church basement.  Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair perished. Nearly two dozen more people were injured.

The bombing focused the world’s attention on Birmingham, a city with a white establishment determined to postpone desegregation as long as possible.  The prosecution of the bombers, whose identities were known early on, did not take place until fourteen years after the fact.  Bill Baxley, Alabama’s young Attorney General, had been horrified by the act and once in office made a concerted effort to bring the bombers to account.

Chambliss went to prison in 1978, where he died seven years later.  It took much longer to bring in his accomplices.  Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton were finally convicted in 2001.  Cherry died in prison in 2004.  Herman Frank Cash escaped justice altogether, dying in 1994.  It took a good deal of courage for witnesses to come forward, even years later.  The late Rev. Petric J. Smith was a key witness at the trial of his uncle, Robert Chambliss.  Following the trial Smith was forced to leave Birmingham for good.  Had the trial taken place today, it’s quite possible he still would have been run out of town.  The New South may appear to have shed the darker burdens of its past, but the old attitudes lurk beneath the surface.

The memory of the 16^th Street Baptist Church bombing persists in our collective consciousness, albeit tenuously.  As our leaders are so fond of reminding us, we live under the constant threat of terror.  We should remember that on so many occasions in our history, we victimized our own. 

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

Remembering the March on Washington

As we look back today on the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s landmark “I Have a Dream” speech, PBS is airing the documentary The March.  It’s viewable online at http://video.pbs.org/video/2365069476/.

Chilling Effects

The Soldier Formerly Known as Bradley Manning has been sentenced to 35 years in prison for his role in the WikiLeaks scandal.  Meanwhile, Julian Assange remains at bay in the Ecuadoran embassy in London and Edward Snowden has found temporary refuge in Russia.

The years since 9/11 have not been good for government transparency.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, together with public acquiescence in any official measures purported to fight terrorism, have emboldened American officialdom to act with a secretive heavy-handedness unseen since the dark hours of the Cold War.  Manning should thank her lucky stars she wasn’t convicted of the charge of aiding the enemy.  Judging from the comments seen on various news sites, Manning would have been put up against a wall and shot if the court of public opinion had had jurisdiction. 

Manning’s real crime, as with those of Assange and Snowden, was that she embarrassed the powers that be.  It’s that simple; the emperor does not like to be told he’s naked when he’s convinced himself he’s clad in the finest robes.  Footage of U.S. helicopters lobbing Hellfire missiles into residential neighborhoods undermines the claim we’re fighting for freedom from terror.  The government’s aggressive pursuit of whistleblowers, past and present, notorious and obscure, has created a chilling effect on dissent.

A crucial point no one excoriating Manning, Snowden, and Assange can substantiate is whether any U.S. or coalition military personnel were directly harmed as a result of the WikiLeaks revelations.  The combat videos have undermined the military's image, to be sure.  The many thousands of diplomatic cables address mainly mundane affairs, with the occasional embarrassing observation or admission.  But the true threat is to the classification regime itself.  Official secrecy creates its own incentive to hide even innocuous information from the citizenry, not to mention the ability to cover up possible war crimes.  Secrecy permits us to go about our lives blithely unaware of the brutal deeds routinely carried out in our name.  It lets us believe our hands are clean.

Manning seems to elicit a rage in people which Assange, Snowden, and the myriad other players in the WikiLeaks drama do not seem to inspire.  The reader comments I’ve seen on Yahoo!, Reuters, AP, et al., leavened as they are with the sadly inevitable homophobic slurs and prison rape jokes, leads me to conclude that the real animus springs more from the transgressiveness of Manning’s persona than his misdeeds.  The underlying logic runs like this: No wonder she’s a traitor to her country, she’s a traitor to the masculine military ethos, to the very ideal of masculinity.  It calls to mind the “Commies and queers” witch hunts of the McCarthy era, when homosexuality was considered both figuratively and literally subversive.

This single aspect of the Manning case reveals an ugly truth of American culture.  We are a society of playground bullies.  The strong pick on and exploit the weak.  Manning is the kid whose lunch money was stolen, whose ass was lashed by snapping towels in the high school locker room, who has gone throughout her life forced to submerge her very identity under the crushing weight of heteronormativity.  A lifetime of having to choke down one’s rage every day takes its toll.  It is exceedingly difficult to feel loyalty to an order which denies you your basic humanity.

No matter—It won’t be long before Chelsea Manning fades from public memory.  Our collective amnesia will permit us to preserve our belief in our national virtue.  It will be easy to forget because America is populated with consumers rather than citizens.  We readily, perhaps too eagerly conflate abstractions such as “freedom” and “democracy” with material placebos.  Forced feedings at Guantanamo?  Unarmed villagers massacred?  No worries; the people in charge know what is right and it’s not up to us to question them.  Besides, we’ve got the latest SUV in the garage, the house’s value has gone up over the past year, and the kids each have a brand new iPhone 5.  All is well and right with the world.

God bless America!

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

In Memory of the Wheatland Hop Field Riot - August 3, 1913

Today marks the one hundredth anniversary of the Wheatland Hop Field Riot. 

The uprising stemmed from the brutal working conditions imposed upon itinerant farm workers harvesting hops at the Durst Ranch in Wheatland, California.  An influx of job seekers, whose numbers far exceeded the number of positions available, drove down the already slender going wage.  The workers who were taken on, many of them women and young children, performed heavy physical labor for 12 hour days in triple digit heat.  Despite the temperature, Durst did not provide water to the workers but instead sold them an acidic beverage to slake their thirst.  Shade and adequate toilet facilities were also lacking.

Facing a strike over low pay and poor treatment, Ralph Durst called in the Yuba County district attorney and sheriff’s deputies to quell the unrest.  The inevitable confrontation led to the sheriff’s contingent firing into the crowd after it resisted their attempt to arrest Industrial Workers of the World organizer Richard “Blackie” Ford, who was addressing the strikers.  At least one worker in the crowd fired back.  When the smoke cleared, four people lay dead: the DA, a sheriff’s deputy, and two workers.  Scores of other people were injured.

As so often happened during the labor struggles of the era, California Governor Hiram Johnson called in the National Guard to restore order for the bosses.  Ultimately, Ford, fellow organizer Herman Suhr, and a number of the other laborers present were apprehended and questioned.  Many of them were beaten or otherwise abused during the interrogations.  One suspect killed himself in his jail cell.

In the end, Ford, Suhr, and two others were bound over for trial on second-degree murder charges in the death of the district attorney.  Ford and Suhr were ultimately convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.   When Ford was paroled in 1924, he was promptly indicted for the death of the sheriff’s deputy only to be acquitted at trial.  Soon thereafter, Suhr was pardoned and set free.  

Let us not forget the workers killed and wounded that day, nor should we forget the IWW organizers Herman Suhr and Blackie Ford who were unjustly imprisoned for their efforts on behalf of labor rights.  An injury to one is an injury to all, then and now.

Solidarity forever.

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

Not Guilty...But Hardly Innocent

Well, it’s official: Murder is now legal in the State of Florida, at least if your victim’s complexion is darker than yours.

The George Zimmerman verdict last night did not come as much of a surprise.  Florida’s controversial “stand your ground” law offered Zimmerman a fairly solid defense for last year’s killing of Trayvon Martin.  A cursory look at this morning’s TV and online news offered the expected.  Conservatives are lauding the jury’s verdict as justice done, while liberals and progressives lament the result as another step backwards for race relations in America.

George Zimmerman is an unlikely hero by any standard.  The pudgy, sad sack cop wannabe has had a checkered past which includes charges of domestic violence and assaulting a police officer.  The fact that Zimmerman killed a minor who was simply taking a shortcut home should have rendered him wholly unsympathetic in the eye of the public.  But the hard truth is that we haven’t achieved the postracial society some pundits had hailed after the 2008 presidential election.

In fact, little seems to have changed for the better. Trayvon Martin’s murder calls to mind the lynchings of the pre-civil rights era.  His crime was being in the wrong place—an affluent, predominantly white neighborhood—at the wrong time.  Zimmerman had followed Martin, despite instructions to the contrary from the 911 operator, because he knew that there would be few real consequences from confronting the “suspect.”

The not guilty verdict proves that we indeed live in George Zimmerman’s America.  As the well-off retreat into gated communities, as we rely increasingly upon private security and high-tech gadgetry to safeguard our homes and property, and as paranoia envelops our culture, it’s perhaps too easy to justify the killing of a suspicious person.  It doesn’t help that our ingrained taste for gratuitous violence enables us to excuse murder, particularly when the law (and trial juries) sanction it. 

Mr. Zimmerman may be not guilty in the eyes of the law…but he is hardly innocent.  And neither are we.

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar    

Stultus Valley Days - III: Family Style

Daily life in Stultus Valley was defined primarily by its dense, overlapping web of familial ties.  One of the first questions invariably uttered by the natives when meeting someone new was, “Who are you related to?”

Extended family provided Valley dwellers with the sort of security ordinarily afforded by employers and public agencies in the broader world.  When minor disasters hit, such as summer wildfires and winter blizzards, folks sought the help of relatives rather than that of the county or the Red Cross.  A few extended families ensconced in the rugged draws of the surrounding hillsides were so self-sufficient you rarely saw their ilk in town.  It was probably just as well that the rest of us didn’t venture into those parts very often.  A lot of the people living along the rutted dirt trails supplemented their slender incomes by growing weed or, more ominously, cooking meth.    

Regardless of social circumstances, the Valley exerted a strange, centripetal pull on its natives.  I remember the case of one young lady who was fortunate enough to earn a full-tuition scholarship to a good private liberal arts college.  After graduating, she worked several months in Washington as a White House intern.  Most new college graduates would have parlayed these accomplishments into a solid job or getting into a competitive graduate program.  Instead, she returned to the Valley, unemployed, to live with her mentally ill mother and rehab failure father.  Family is family, after all, even when they poison your life.

It's little surprise, then, that kinship in Stultus Valley frequently took on an ugly cast.  In fact, domestic dysfunction was one of the Valley’s few spectator sports.  The first incident which comes to mind took place on my very own block.  My next door neighbor then was James Hall, the Stultus County sheriff.  James was a tall, burly man whose physical stature belied a teddy-bear personality.  James’ nice-guy demeanor and approachableness resulted in a steady stream of constituents coming to his front door with some grievance or other.

Early one morning, around threeish, I was roused from a sound sleep by a godawful ruckus.  This was unusual; the very best thing about Linden was that it lacked the street sounds you’d have to put up with elsewhere.  Ordinarily the only thing you heard in the dead of night was the occasional hooting of owls. 

A peek out the living room window gave me a front-row view of unfolding events.  The source of the commotion was a diminutive middle-aged woman shouting and pounding on Sheriff Hall’s front door.  Cattycorner across the street was a young man in handcuffs being led by two deputies to a cruiser parked at the curb, lights flashing.

I recognized the guy.  He was the unemployed live-in boyfriend of the checkout clerk at Linden’s hole-in-the-wall grocery, recently discharged from the military after a tour in Iraq.  It appeared that he’d taken exception to something his boo had said, evincing his displeasure by first beating, then choking her.  Fortunately, she managed to get away long enough to dial 911.  Before the cops arrived the boyfriend, this heroic combat veteran, called his mommy for help.

And so there she was, at this ungodly hour, demanding that Sheriff James Hall, clad in but a t-shirt and sweatpants and rubbing the sleep from his eyes, order his deputies to release her only child.  James, often too accommodating for his own good, normally afraid of losing even one vote on Election Day, this time put down his bare foot and said no. 

Mom was apoplectic.  “I’ll have your badge for this!” she screeched, as if she could somehow invalidate the will of the Stultus County electorate with her unbridled wrath. 

Peering through the drapes, taking it all in, I suddenly realized the harridan having an emotional meltdown on James’ front porch looked awfully familiar.  After a moment, I remembered who she was.  She was Belinda Marinero, the new administrator for the county domestic violence prevention program. 

If it hadn’t been for the harrowing ordeal her son’s girlfriend had just suffered at his hands, I would have laughed at the irony.  Not that I was surprised that someone in the Marinero clan had gotten into trouble.  One of the few entertainments in a town like Linden was the county court docket published biweekly in the Valley’s only newspaper, The Stultus Rooster.  The name Marinero appeared often, this one charged with burglary, that one with public drunkenness, another with assault, etc.  Word had it that there was a Marinero relative in state prison for manslaughter.  Still another was in the county lockup, indicted for child molestation and awaiting trial.  I guess you could say that being a Marinero held a sort of rural outlaw cachet, but I wasn’t terribly impressed.

Back to Belinda: I’d met her only once, and that was enough to form a bad impression.  About a week earlier, I’d attended a board meeting for the town community center.  Since it was noontime, a few folks arrived early to have lunch first.  When I got there, Karen, the center’s director, was sitting at the table with a companion who was wolfishly devouring what looked like fettucine alfredo from a takeout container.  The woman was fiftyish, haggard, with badly dyed auburn hair and a heavily lined, vaguely simian face. 

This, I was told, is Belinda.  Belinda ceased her pasta slurping long enough to nod and say, mouth still full,  something along the lines of, “You’ll get to know me soon enough,” whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.

It wasn’t long before I found out.  Belinda’s personality matched her swinish table manners.  I was at the meeting to discuss a recent study commissioned by the state concerning risk factors for child and spousal abuse.  The study found that these risk factors included low levels of educational attainment, economic distress, and substance abuse. 

All of this was pretty boilerplate stuff, conventional wisdom to anyone working in social services.  I was merely the messenger, of course, but Belinda seized upon my report as a personal affront.  She tore into me with an unexpected fury, red faced, voice increasingly strident, telling me with a near-murderous intensity that I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.  Why, her rat bastard alcoholic ex-husband left her when little Jacob was still crapping his diapers, leaving her to support the family on a cocktail waitress’ salary.  She didn’t need some overeducated smartass telling her she was someone who might abuse her kid.

The room fell silent.  I’m seldom at a loss for words, but Belinda’s unprovoked, hate-laden tirade left me speechless.  Karen, normally quite friendly towards me, fixed me in a hard stare.  These people were exceedingly tribal, and I’d been in town long enough to know I was alone.  As the outsider, I was wrong.  Knowing it would make things worse if I actually tried to reason with Belinda, I simply closed my report and the meeting moved uncomfortably on.

I’d mostly put the incident out of my mind until young Jacob decided to use his girlfriend as a punching bag.  And what happened to the star-crossed couple, you ask?  About what you’d expect, actually.  The district attorney didn’t press the case against Jacob with much zeal.  After all, you don’t want to jail somebody who’s related to half the county and is Linden’s one and only Iraq war vet. 

In the end, Jacob was merely fined and given a year’s unsupervised probation.   Shortly thereafter he moved back in with the girlfriend, who was overjoyed to have him back. 

A true story, sadly.  But that’s what family means in Stultus Valley.     

Next Installment: The Business of Stultus Valley is…?   

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar