I was very divided over the various resolutions from the PEP academics session. While there certainly are some good suggestions, there are also many others that show a lack of understanding about higher education and the student’s role within it. I’ll start out with some of the points I agree with, moving on to some points of contention later.
I whole heartedly agree with all of the statements regarding a desire for a more challenging academic atmosphere on campus. Examples of this range from a call for more speakers, debates, lectures, etc. on campus to concerns about professors expecting mediocrity from their students. We do not need incentives or rewards for good grades, as someone suggested; what we need, as others pointed out, are professors that encourage and demand excellence. In order to remain at all relevant in the future of education, Rollins must step up its academic performance. Much of this rests on the students themselves; we have excellent professors, administrators, and facilities, but the students are often the lowest common denominator. I will return to this point shortly.
There are also some other points that I agree with but on a qualified note. Examples of this are calls for more intro classes, more seminar classes to prepare people for graduate school, and more options for study abroad. Obviously, everyone would like to see students have a wider range of choice when selecting their courses. However, this agreement is, as I said, a qualified one. We cannot hope to offer more courses without more professors, and at present we cannot hope to hire more professors without more classrooms and offices. We would have build new buildings and pay their salaries, for which no one presents any kind of plan at all. So yes, I agree that these things would be nice and, if possible, we should do them; I also recognize the difficulty in bringing them about.
This brings me to the points over which I disagree with the resolutions. Some of these are complaints that fail to understand the workings of this kind of institution. For examples of this, one needs look no further than to people saying that evaluations should affect professors regardless of tenure. Evaluations already do; they affect raises and so on. If students want it to affect whether or not the professor stays on, then they should make their suggestion the elimination of tenure. Another example is resolution calling for increases in service learning and mandatory study abroad requirements. People are at Rollins to be trained for different kinds of futures; making blanket pronouncements about students needing more service learning is to favor only a certain kind of education.
I also disagree with the belief that the honor code should be de-emphasized. Honesty, the resolution states, should be the choice of the students. This kind of statement is absurd. It demonstrates not only a serious misunderstanding of the principles ethics, but also a narrow, isolationist view of human behavior. As members of a community, all of our actions affect one another. We cannot consistently making academic integrity anything less than a top priority and still claim to be educating students for the real world. The consequences of cheating, or even of knowing about cheating and keeping one’s mouth shut, in the real world only become more severe; just ask the guys at Enron.
The general problem with many of the suggestions is the motivation behind them. Rather than taking accountability and responsibility, the students have suggested a lot of changes the faculty and school can institute to make their lives easier. We are as responsible for most of the negative aspects on campus as the faculty or administration is. Just because something about the way the school is run doesn’t make us happy doesn’t mean that it isn’t good for us. In a horrible appropriation of the words of Gandhi, we must be the change we wish to see on campus.
