I wonder how much of this is just COVID still. Chris Hayes hosts an interview podcast (it’s mostly good, I promise!) and his schtick is “COVID and our reaction to it is under-utilized as an explanation in almost all facets of life”. I couldn’t help but think about that during the last section of this essay, and it’s similarities to much of Dr. Musgrave’s writing on COVID over the past years.

I mostly think, as someone who recently graduated undergrad (in ‘20), that COVID accelerated something that was already bad: cheating/not participating. I went to an almost-ivy (WFU) and in my upper-level English courses, a lot of classes went by where it was very clear that I and maybe one other person were the only ones who did the reading. (These are classes where almost the entire 90 minutes were meant to be a student-led discussion on the reading.) My professors seemed wholly unequipped to deal with students who chose to take the course (not a gen-ed!) but did not have any interest in reading. My upper-level political-science courses were bad but not AS bad, depending on the professor. All my gen ed courses were pretty bad.

When COVID hit it really felt like a genie got let out of the bottle that couldn’t be put back in (not dissimilar to the remote work stuff). Cheating was incredibly rampant when I was an undergrad. I assume it only became the standard through ‘21.

I see some self-flagellation when I hear profs talk about this stuff but as someone with the experiences that I’ve had, I just don’t have a ton of sympathy for the students that cheat/give courses zero of their mental energy, especially because I hear it couched in the language of social justice too often. (“Students are being ground down by an economic system that does not care about them, so why should we expect them to give that system any of their attention” etc.) I was there! And the general vibe is just that 19-year-olds would rather drink or scroll

on TikTok than read. (This is undoubtedly much more the case at an expensive semi-prestigious school like WFU.) Reading regularly is about habit-forming, and it’s the easiest thing in the world to assume you’ll get around to doing something without recognizing that your own habit structure makes it nigh impossible.

I don’t know what I’m trying to say or why I’ve suddenly written a small essay in this comment section. I think Dr. Musgrave makes a lot of important points about cynicism and the economics of the professor-student relationship. I wonder how young people who are used to cheating (ie someone else like Quizlet or whoever doing the thinking for you) will fair in the workplace. Maybe they’ll be fine! I just don’t know.

Anyways, to make this comment productive everyone should read Matt Crump’s essay on being invited into a GroupMe that his students used to cheat, if you haven’t already. Not sure where it is but if you can track it down, it’s worth it.