“Doing Good Work in a Noisy, Messy World”: People Cheated in Gov 1310 Last Year

On Monday, you no doubt received but did not actually read an email from Jay M. Harris, Dean of Undergraduate Education and Chair of the Academic Integrity Committee. While its title may have tricked you into thinking it was a guide to actually getting work done when you live in a tiny Wigg suite with four other girls, it was in fact yet another reminder that students at Harvard have cheated.

Included in the email was an invitation to an Oct. 10 event on academic integrity that will no doubt make you feel guilty of cheating—regardless of whether you have or not—and four questions about the importance of academic integrity. I didn’t know the answers to any of them, so I did what any other Harvard student would do: I collaborated with my classmates. Unfortunately, they were useless, as were Google, my dad, Siri, my first cousin once removed, Wikipedia, and the card-swiper at brain break. Alas, I was left to answer the questions for myself:

“How do we craft a robust culture of integrity at Harvard College?”
Good to know that Dean Harris also feels the need to throw in SAT words to make himself sound smarter. Does using a thesaurus count as academic dishonesty?

“What recognition and rewards matter to us?”
Noch’s and Insomnia. Why else do you think we participate in so many clubs?

“What distracts us from doing right?”
The dining hall panini maker being broken for an entire week, having to sleep in a bunk bed, almost getting hit by bicyclists in the Yard, emails from deans asking us broad, abstract questions…

“Why do our residential community, the academic disciplines, and the professions depend on integrity?”
Because our tutors live four floors below us, we have take home exams, and there are always incredibly naive twin rowers just waiting for us to steal their ideas.

Now that we have that covered, couldn’t someone have told Dean Harris that piling four rhetorical questions on top of one another isn’t the best way to get a college student’s attention on a Monday morning?

Works Cited
Harris, Jay. “Doing Good Work in a Noisy, Messy World: A Faculty-Led Discussion on Academic Integrity.” Email message to Harvard College students, 30 September 2013.