The Fine Art of Cheating; R. K. Foley, Jr.

Ridgway K. Foley, Jr. The Fine Art of Cheating PERIODIC REVELATIONS of academic scandal enliven collegiate commu nities and titillate followers of cur rent events. Every few years, the popular press reveals a consortium between university ballplayers and professional gamblers designed to predetermine the outcome of school athletic contests to benefit the knowledgeable •inside bettors, to "beat the point spread." Recently, particularly on the West Coast, other instances of fraud and deceit have come to the fore. "Student athletes" receive college credit for unattended classes often held at nonexistent in stitutions or in places little more than diploma mills. Standins take tests and write term papers for the pam pered few. Teachers award high grades for little effort. Coaches offer illicit monies to encourage the fa vored to participate in sports for the dear old alma mater. Grades or de grees in exchange for sexual, politi calor monetary favors are not be yond the realm of reality.

Righteous indignation comes into immediate conflict with pious justi fication concerning these endeavors. The offended rail against unethical conduct, only to be met with excuses from the groves of academe belabor ing the fine educational efforts put forth on behalf of the college com munity. Poverty-stricken and dis advantaged students and overMr. Foley, a partner in Schwabe, Williamson, Wyatt, Moore & Roberts, practices law in Portland, Oregon.

644 THE FREEMAN November worked, underpaid faculty members apparently encounter great diffi culty in differentiating right from wrong and, in any event, focus on these minor misadventures obscures the wonders worked by public edu cation greatly benefiting the world. A Sacred Cow Certain subjects reside beyond the bounds of fair comment in this topsy turvy world: challengers to these unassailable institutions and myths find themselves pilloried by the press and ostracized by polite society for even suggesting that the emperor traverses the highways and byways stark naked. Public education rep resents one of those sacrosanct sub jects above reproach. Nevertheless, at the risk of censure and misunder standing, allow me to opine that the American public receives, at best, a dime's worth of education for every dollar spent, that the myriad exam ples of common cheating portend a much more serious moral ill, and that public education, far from constitut ing a Heaven-ordained precept, is just plain ineffective, indifferent and wrong. Moreover, attempted re forms (like the voucher system) do nothing more than perpetuate the evil rather than scourge it.

The true victim of academic ex cess will not be found by the unob servant many; the real injured par ties are those honest, upright, producing members of society who involuntarily contribute part of their privately-created property to the plunderers who exact tribute and transfer that wealth into the maw of public education. Certainly the hon est student or teacher loses too, but one cannot afford much sympathy for willing participants in misdoings; the seminal harm befalls the simple taxpayer-citizen who funds the transfer payments so that rowdy, lazy and rotund muscle-men live well and recei ve college degrees for learning how to move chairs in an audito rium. The depth of the art of cheating in the twentieth-century educational system taxes the fainthearted. Many students receive tuition waivers, book allowances and housing grants (not to mention food stamps) from the state or federal government.

Their classmates collect reduced in terest or free student loans, most of which are never repaid. Tuition de frays but a slight share of the cost of modern teaching; the remainder emanates from a variety of federal, state and local subsidies. Professors procure a plethora of tax monies by way of research grants, often em ployed in the most abysmal, waste ful or shocking endeavors. Schools intercept other forms of public fund ing to facilitate compliance with various entitlement and social pol icy programs mandated by govern ment. In short, an endless litany of perversions, diversions and boon1982 THE FINE ART OF CHEATING 645 doggIes blemish the once-fair visage of the grand old dame of education. ControlsFollowSubsidies Stealthy but iron-fisted state con trols accompany the current mania of intervention in the educational process: the carrots of grants and loans convoyed by the sticks of sanc tions and penalties for noncompli ance. Thus, a furor arises because the federal government in its egali tarian wisdom decrees equal fund ing and opportunity for male and fe male sporting events, participants and teams. Detractors of this lofty premise point out that college foot ball and basketball-played by men-produces high revenues; therefore, these grieved alumni, fans and participants decry the funda mental unfairness in taking monies generated by male sports to fund women's teams. By a parity of rea soning (apparently obscure to the multitudes) is it not also fundamen tally unjust to plunder the taxpayer citizens to support athletic contests or, indeed, schooling for other peo ple? If it is wrong to pay halfbacks to run off tackle, is it not equally wrong to compensate scholars from public monies to study the mating instincts of armadillos?

The aspect of governmental con trol exceeds the simple examples employed. The state pervades the entire educational process: it de crees who shall teach, who shall attend, what shall be taught, and what subjects are an~thema; in a phrase, it determines tljle participants and sets the agend~. It punishes non compliance or deviation by a series of sanctions, from. the withdrawal of grants to the revocation of accredi tation to the threat of imprisonment of dissenters. With the aid of a com pliant media, those who jostle the public educational process are shamed, ridiculed or mistreated. Once tax dollars are expended for a stated public purpose, one can make a stronger case j for implementation of governmental controls to assure adherence to announced state social policy and the avoidance of apparent unfairness or discrimination. The next logical step: coerce into compli ance those few institutions which accept no state recompense whatso ever and which ~erely wish to teach their charges ~o follow their own stars.

Thus, a perceptive observer can chart issues on a continuum: (1) What should be done about overt cheating in public education? (2) Should some st~dents be permitted a degree for attendance upon courses without intellectual content? (3) If nonchallenging ~ourses exist, should public funds be employed in any manner in that endeavor? (4) To what extent should state social policy de rive enforceme:pt from the public school arena? (5;) Should the govern ment control education in the purely 646 THE FREEMAN November private and voluntary realm? (6) What constitutes the proper role of the state in the teaching process? Each of these questions (and the myriad sub-issues intervening on the scale) deserves separate treatment on the merits, increasing as they do in difficulty and importance from beginning. to end. The modern nos trums prescribed for the earlier in quiries constitute mere placebos which hinder analysis by obfuscat ing the seminal concern expressed by the last question. Thus, the much heralded voucher system would pro vide a tax credit or similar subsidy allowing parents to choose the schooling for their offspring; yet, that system, in all of its varieties, would continue to assign the state a cen tral role in the learning process: the government would merely broaden the agenda, but it would still decree the boundaries and the participants, and it would proceed to transfer wealth involuntarily from the pro ductive into the educational process.

Again, the debate over content (be it sexual education, evolution ver sus creationism, Biblical studies, or something else) merely constitutes a skirmish over who shall control the calendar and the substance; it does nothing to dethrone government and return it to its proper place. Fur thermore, the recent attempts to remove tax-exempt status from in stitutions not currying favor with the educational establishment represent one more attempt to police sub stance. I Defenders of public education as sure all who will listen that Hercu lean efforts by the faculty and administration have wrought won drous results, leading to the conclu sion that modern students are bet ter, brighter, and more learned than anyone else. Pure bunk! The public educational miasma stifles initia tive and dampens creativity so that those lucky few who do learn any thing do so in spite of the system and not by reason of it. The adher ents simply confuse cause and con sequence and, more importantly, by virtue of their vested interests they are unable to judge critically.

Standards Have Declined The fact of the matter is that to day's standards and students have declined dangerously in the main; the best and the brightest cannot read, write, spell, divide or think analyti cally; they receive pap not chal lenge, and they respond in illiterate lockstep. Ask any discriminating employer who must interview appli cants for positions of promise and trust: the mill run may be nice folks but they are woefully ill prepared to meet and surmount intellectual challenges. Moreover, another more subtle and sinister attribute mars modern pub lic education: the thwarting by the state of dissent. Oh, certainly, we 1982 THE FINE ART OF CHEATING 647 mouth the pleasing phrases of the First Amendment and Milton's Ar eopagitica,but when it comes down to the nub of the matter, our chil dren learn not critical analysis but unquestioning recital of faded fact and patent fable.

For example, how many economic departments across this land still preach the discredi ted Keynesian faith? Or, more to the point, how many such classrooms see a fair comparative exposition of Austrian, Keynesian and monetarist ideas? Again, in political economy, how many students receive training solely from professed. Marxists to the ex elusion of even an introduction to the axioms of the private property or der? Or, if one of one hundred fac ulty members pronounces the mer its of a voluntary society, is he well qualified and amply endowed in in tellect, or more likely, is he a ridic ulous and inane caricature of a true believer in liberty? These questions bear repeating in all disciplines. The frightening truth: by and large, public schools teach values and theories which perpetuate that sys tem and which sanctify the precepts of those in power and, by reason of state mandate, no discerning stu dent is free to go elsewhere in a quest for knowledge. The inquiring pupil must tolerate and survive and at tempt to overcome the babble which assails his eyes and ears in every classroom. 2 Look to the Arguments Proponents of public education advance three arguments in support of the state schdol: (1) the education of the young constitutes a proper and inalienable function of government; (2) without state intervention into the realm of edliIcation, most pupils would go untaught; and (3) since so ciety as a wholejbenefits from an ed ucated populace, all persons should contribute toward the teaching of the progeny of the. few. Reflection re veals that all of these reasons lack merit.

First, consider the appropriate functions. of government: education is not among them. The state-the public monopoly of force-is suited only to channelHng conduct by means of coercion. Destlructive elements are ill suited to creative challenges. Force proves effective only in restraining undesirable conduct, not in occa sioning virtue. As Edmund Opitz re marks, "to educate" is not a transi tive verb. Leam~ng requires an adept teacher and a Willing student. Com pulsion plays no ,vital or effective role in the process. i Hence government possesses neither a natural aptitude nor a necessary adroitness regard ing the enlightenment phenomenon. Second, no reason exists to. sup pose that children would learn less in a private and, voluntary system of education. Leonard Read has noted recently that learning occupies a high point on the value scale of most par648 THE FREEMAN November ents from every walk of life, so high in fact that no one when queried ever advised him that they would forgo education of their offspring in a free society featuring a voluntary school system. 3 Surely the structure, content and performance of a freely functioning private school system would differ and improve upon the present op pressive endeavor: after all, freedom has the open texture which accom modates creativity and fosters inge nuity. Learning would develop in untold and unpreordained paths; those who desire to improve would find great benefits in the system whereas those who merely take up space by reason of illogical laws would find another enterprise-such as honest toil for fair recompense more to their liking.

Perhaps those athletically in clined individuals would continue to delight their partisans by their periodic gridiron feats or court ex ploits, but it seems likely that school teams would soon revert to students playing ball for fun and recreation, not as a subsidized and masked business fortified by the taxpayers, many of whom care naught for the weekend antics of Saturday's he roes. In short, those who can and wish to learn would do so, without the im moral application of force to compel endowment of the system by unwill ing participants. Third, should society (or, more correctly the productive individuals in society) pay for education as a matter of justice? The argument proves too much. Society represents an open -ended exchanging frater nity which fosters trade and ex change of goods, services and ideas, as well as warmth, friendship and harmony. Each person in a society benefits from free exchanges of value with others, yet that very advantage would be substantially abased by the introduction of force in an atmo sphere which requires liberty.

Voluntary Exchange Is Best Voluntary exchange of value di minishes where the element of coer cion creeps in: compulsion restrains the free development of ideas and predetermines the end, thereby shutting out the enormous possibil ities for creative activity. Again, in a shortsighted sense, A benefits when B learns to be a doctor, but A pays for that benefit voluntarily by ex changing some of the value he cre ates for the application of B's skills. Each person gains from the devel opment of his or her virtuosity; who can employ some sort of social· cal culus to decide whether A benefits more than B does when the latter secures his diploma in surgery? Furthermore, formal education does not serve as the sole or even the highest means of personal develop ment. All of us know of wonderful people who mastered a craft or im1982 THE FINE ART OF CHEATING 649 parted great virtue and knowledge without a degree or, indeed, with very little schoolhouse training. Each person or family should choose the type and extent of nurture from an ever-widening shelf of illuminating choice. Society, and the individuals in society, benefit the most from the vast creativity fostered by such a reign of freedom.

Rampant cheating and chicanery in the academy serve not only to be tray proper morality but also to dis close a greater malevolence within. Public education induces such wickedness simply because it is con structed on wrong principles: force, not freedom. In a free society, the sting abates and true wisdom flour ishes. ® Wise Strategy -FOOTNOTESISee, e.g., Kaus, Robert M., "How is Bob Jones U. Like Ms. Magaziine," The American Lawyer 63-64 (April 1982).' Of course, the key issue of whether any institution should receive tax-ex empt treatment is never addressed. See my "The Elements of a Fair System of Taxation," The Freeman, September, 1982. 20n my venture toward degrees in "higher education," I developed an interesting tech nique: I divided my notebooks into two parallel columns; on the left, I wrote down that which I needed to regurgitate to pass the course; on the right, I took notes 'of thoughts which, for me, approximated the truth. The content of the competing columns differed vastly! I have found the right hand section of help in life after col lege.

3See Read, Leonard K, "One Way to Assess the Future," appearing as Chapter 25 in How Do We Know? (The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, 1981), 105-109. IDEAS ON LIBERTY TRYING to answer an involved question about some socialist panacea in one or two minutes is hopeless and unfair by the test of intellectual justice, for the same reason. Unless ample time is available and will ingly offered by those who will be judging your case, it is probably better not to enter that particular courtroom at all; it would be better to refuse to accept its jurisdiction. In other words, it would be better to refrain from offering your views on all these questions ,at that time and place. The wise libertarian is one who uses his tim~ to the best advantage, who employs whatever honest strategy will best defend the concepts he holds dear. To do that is not cowardice. Why $uffer bruised shins bat tling the keepers of the sacred cows in an arena of injustice and disad vantage while so many fertile fields for libertarian talent remain un tilled?

F. A. HARPER, "Sacred Cows and Bruised Shins"