American youth are taught, in a thousand ways, to define themselves in competition with those of their generation—in schools, in sports, in the early achievement of public distinction, and the aggrandizement of wealth. Thus students matriculate at competitive colleges having succeeded in a culture that rewards academic success and demonstrated high academic potential. Inevitably, all is reduced to competition and invidious distinction.
In a kind of Gresham's law of schooling, such competition scours ways or stunts the desire to learn for learning's sake, for the "joy of learning singular things"—or the connections among them—and the intellectual self-reliance such things lead to. Students do not pursue personal records; they pursue the highest possible Scholastic Aptitude Test scores (with all the ridiculous and clattering baggage of special courses to prepare to do well on the SATs), the highest possible grades (including absurd markings like 4.1 or 4.2), and distinctions that exalt and reward them above their fellows. Earned admission to famous and competitive colleges is believed to assure admission to the best law and medical and business schools, which in turn leads to . . . etc., etc.
In this context, in such rich soil, the seeds of a willingness to compromise personal integrity in the name of personal gain find a most congenial and nourishing home. Our culture emphasizes competitive academic success, and such success confers the highest prestige. The connections, incidentally, between such success and the distinctions earned in certain competitive sports are multiple, and given recent, and hideous, punctuation in the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan episode.
Many, perhaps a majority, of American secondary school students cheat. We can see why. But diagnosis does not lead easily to prescription. Our interest is in the various means by which the different institutional cultures in our colleges train or educate young people not to cheat.
Some use fear and shame. Some have single-sanction penalties, in which cheating leads automatically to dismissal, although, given the severity of the punishment, it is likely that such a system may militate against reporting the cheater. Others require the observer to confront the thief or the liar and some retain the formal and formulaic archaism, to be written and signed on examination papers: "On my honor I certify that I have neither given nor received aid."
The essential issue is that the roots of character and integrity are planted in childhood, watered, tended, and cultivated in adolescence, and are not reliably capable of effective pruning in early adulthood. Nonetheless, academic programs that implicitly or explicitly emphasize the fecklessness of cheating (in distinction to its wrongness) are, it seems to me, moving in the right direction. Where competition for grades is sharply reduced, cheating must be reduced apace; but the reduction of such competition should stimulate—rather than impede—those who seek a real education.
In an ideal undergraduate setting, which I take to be the small residential liberal arts college—in which professors are motivated fundamentally by the desire to teach and live among the young, in which education proceeds by discussion, in tutorials, in small seminars, and in which understanding is measured in ways that cannot really be counterfeited—cheating simply is not a useful option. Obviously, there are exceptions; there always will be. But the daily, constant demonstration that the purpose of undergraduate education is understanding, and the beginning of the cultivation of wisdom—not competitive advantage or academic "distinction"—is a potent immunizing substance.
Unfortunately for them, the federal military academies more-or-less reproduce the most flagrantly contributing factors in the national climate of pushing and shoving, lusting and striving, for competitive professional and academic advantage. It is not their intention to do so, but they do it all the same. Then, in exasperation and public shame, they blame themselves for succumbing to the virus that their new recruits have brought in with them and their means of healing themselves are never original or radical.
The time has come to look at the issue in a radical way, by asking the question, "How can we educate midshipmen, cadets, and officer candidates not to cheat, and to live a life of moral and professional integrity after they leave us?" There may he a number of answers; the current code is a laudable ideal. Apparently, for many students, it is just that. It is not an answer.
Mr. Bunting is Head Master of The Lawrenceville School, Lawrenceville, New Jersey. He was an enlisted Marine before he graduated from the Virginia Military Institute as First Captain of the Corps of Cadets and was commissioned in the U.S. Army. A Rhodes Scholar, he served with the Ninth Infantry Division in Vietnam, taught at the U.S. Military Academy and the Naval War College, and was President of Hampden-Sydney College 1977-1987.