Is cheating getting worse? (Or does it just seem that way?)
Felicia R.Lee/NYT NYT
Saturday, October 4, 2003
iht.com
NEW YORK L. Dennis Kozlowski, the former
chairman of Tyco International, is on trial, accused
of looting his company and investors of $600
million. Schoolchildren are pirating music and
films online. Renowned historians have
plagiarized colleagues' work.
''You have almost an acceptance that humankind
cannot resist the pressure to cheat, whether it's
Sammy Sosa in a slump or Kobe Bryant cheating
on his wife,'' said Michael Josephson, president of
the Josephson Institute of Ethics, a nonprofit
organization in Los Angeles that works with
schools and businesses to advocate ethical
behavior.
Josephson is among many Americans who have
heard about Kozlowski's trial and the corked bat
used by the Chicago Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa
and may believe that America is in the midst of a
new cheating epidemic. It is nearly impossible to
turn on the television or pick up a newspaper or
magazine without hearing someone lament the
current decline in morals. But is there any hard
evidence that more people are more dishonest
now than in the past?
For the most part, no. Several historians and
ethicists say there is simply not enough data on
cheating to draw conclusions; nor is there any way
to make empirical comparisons about cheating
over time. Rules, laws and mores constantly
change in areas like finance, sports and politics.
The Securities and Exchange Commission
regulations intended to keep accounting honest,
for instance, were not created until the 1930's.
Random drug tests are relatively new to sports
competition. As for sexual mores, surveys are
notoriously unreliable and reflect changing moral
standards.
Even David Callahan, a political scientist with a
forthcoming book titled ''The Cheating Culture:
Why More Americans are Doing Wrong To Get
Ahead,'' concedes that ''by its nature cheating is
intended to go undetected, and trends in
unethical behavior can be hard to document.''
If there is one place where the moral flagmen have
a case, it is student cheating, because studies
have documented its rise in recent years. And
there is broad agreement that the Internet has
certainly made it much easier to plunder other
people's work. Yet even in this area educators,
ethicists and lawmakers warn that the Internet
has created a murky territory of outdated laws and
shifting standards.
''Law, technology and ethics are not in sync right
now,'' said Senator Norm Coleman, a Minnesota
Republican who on Tuesday 9/30 held a hearing
on illegal file sharing and privacy.
Ann Fabian, an associate professor of American
studies and history at Rutgers University in New
Brunswick, New Jersey, agrees. ''The Web has
changed notions of intellectual property, and we
don't have the norms to deal with it,'' she said.
''The language of cheating - which we think of a
stable, moral point - has to evolve, too.''
As for most other areas, previous ethical lapses
can certainly compete with today's. Sports? Even
the very first game of baseball's first modern World
Series, in 1903, was tainted with rumors that the
Boston Americans threw the game. Politics?
Between Tammany Hall's electoral fraud and
Watergate's dirty tricks, some historians have
argued that politics is cleaner now than ever.
Business? How do you think the robber barons
got their name?
More recently the 1980's featured spectacular
financial scandals starring Ivan Boesky and
Michael Milken, and enough cases of scientific
fraud and plagiarism that Congress felt compelled
to hold hearings on that problem, too.
To some historians the current outcry about
increased cheating is not surprising. What is
known as the declension view of history - dating
back at least to the Puritans - always has one
generation bemoaning the morals of its successor,
said Louis Masur, a cultural historian at the City
College of New York.
''It's a meditation, a debate, a discussion that goes
way back,'' he said. ''Now what's changed is the
amount of coverage. It's not that kids didn't cheat
at Yale 30 years ago, but now it's easier to do so.
The media coverage follows and inundates us and
changes our sense of it, the pervasiveness of it.''
Zachary Karabell, a historian who writes about
American culture, agrees. ''We go through these
cycles where we've found the formulas for social
cohesion and then cycles where we've gone to hell
in a handbasket,'' he said. ''We're in a hell in a
handbasket phase.'' People have had to deal with
the sudden economic insecurity that followed the
1990's bubble, he said, and ''cheating touches a
chord that we've lost something.''
Like Karabell, some experts say the alarm about
more cheating is tied to wider anxiety about social
changes, like those that came after Sept. 11 or the
new global economy. Transitional periods - a war,
a recession, an economic boom - have historically
caused people to pay more attention to their
souls.
From the moment Massachusetts Bay preachers
in the 1680's warned against vice and moral
turpitude, Americans have fretted about a growing
lack of morality and virtue. The rise of the market
economy and big cities in the 1820's through the
1840's added to that perception. A pervasive fear
of confidence men gripped city dwellers, said
Jackson Learscq, a professor of history at Rutgers.
The Gilded Age, those decades immediately
following the Civil War, were marked by prosperity
and growth but also by wretched excess and
scandal of all kinds. In the Credit Mobilier
Scandal of 1872-73, for instance, the Union Pacific
Railroad sold or gave shares in its construction to
influential congressmen, who approved federal
subsidies for railroad construction.
Some of the New Deal legislation was spurred by
bank and brokerage fraud in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries, with the Securities and
Exchange Commission finally established in 1934.
''The distrust of Wall Street has been there from
the beginning, as the distrust of unearned
wealth,'' Mr. Lears said. That distrust has long
been a constant anxiety in American's moral and
commercial lives, he said, adding, ''This anxiety
built through the 19th century as we went though
periods of boom and bust, and there was little
government regulation.''
Those who argue that cheating is more pervasive
now are familiar with this history, but they
counter that now there are more practitioners and
less guilt.
Donald L. McCabe, a professor of management at
Rutgers in Newark, has become known as a
''cheating guru'' for his widely reported surveys in
the last 10 years of how and why high school and
college students cheat. He has also looked at data
going back to the 1960's.
Not only is cheating significantly up since then,
Mr. McCabe has found, but many students do not
consider it a big deal, saying it was just a modern
fact of life. His study this year of 16,000
undergraduates at 23 colleges and universities
found that 38 percent had taken material from the
Internet and passed it off as their own. Forty-four
percent of all the students surveyed said it was no
big deal. In a 2000 survey only 10 percent of
students admitted to Internet cheating.
Some ethicists argue that student cheating -
whether using the Internet to plagiarize or finding
a rogue way to ace a classroom exam - is the
''canary in the mine,'' about the extent of wider
cheating now and in the future.
''There is no question that students point to
things in the larger society as rationale and
justification for their cheating, whether its
Michael Milken, Bill Clinton or Enron or their
parents cheating on taxes,'' said Donald L.
McCabe, a professor of management at Rutgers in
Newark, has become known as a ''cheating guru''
for his widely reported surveys in the last 10 years
of how and why high school and college students
cheat.
Josephson said his institute surveyed 12,000 high
school students in 2002 and found that 74
percent admitted cheating on an exam at least
once in the past year, compared with 61 percent
in a 1992 survey. In 2000 34 percent of high
school students agreed with the statement ''A
person has to lie or cheat sometimes in order to
succeed,'' compared with 43 percent who agreed
in a 2002 survey.
To Callahan, whose book is one of the first
scholarly attempts to evaluate the current bout of
cheating, new economic pressures for those at the
bottom and more goodies for those at the top is
partly responsible. He writes, for example, about
Sears auto-repair workers who cut corners
because their jobs were at stake. He based his
argument on interviews, surveys and studies in
fields like accounting and law.
Rushworth Kidder, president of the Institute For
Global Ethics, a nonprofit think tank in Camden,
Maine, points to Americans' increasing
disillusionment with public institutions as one
reason for more cheating. ''You've got a pervasive
decline in trust,'' he said. Since established
institutions can no longer be relied on to behave
honestly or set standards, everything - including
ethics - becomes ''individual and negotiable.''
As for Josephson, he acknowledges that the
question of whether there is more cheating cannot
be definitively answered. But he is grim
nonetheless. ''Whether there's more cheating or
not, it's bad enough,'' he said.
The New York Times |
