by Howard Gardner
Below is an excerpt from Howard Gardner’s op-ed from The Washington Post:
On Monday, approximately 1,600 freshmen arrived at Harvard College. On Wednesday, I had the pleasure of spending 90 minutes with 20 of these students. They impressed me with their intellect but also with their empathy and willingness to listen to and learn from one another. They were excited by the opportunity to be at Harvard; they used such superlatives that I joked to colleagues that in a few years, they would be so critical, if not cynical, they would have a hard time believing their earlier enthusiasm.
On Thursday, I and many others learned of the university’s largest cheating scandal in living memory. According to news reports, close to half of the 250 undergraduates in “Introduction to Congress” are being investigated for allegedly cheating on a final examination. The fate of individual students is not yet known, but this event will clearly be a stain on Harvard’s reputation as large and consequential as that suffered by the service academies in earlier decades.
Many wonder how this could have happened at “MGU” (man’s greatest university). They will ask whether a large number of the same enthusiastic and loving students I met with Wednesday might well, in a year or two, be part of a cheating scandal themselves. The answer, I fear, is yes.
I’ve been at Harvard for more than half a century — as an undergraduate, a graduate student, a researcher and, for almost three decades, a professor. I know the university well, and in many ways I love it. Yet almost 20 years ago I became concerned about the effect that market ways of thinking has on our society, particularly our young. Colleagues and I undertook a study of “good work.” As part of that study, we interviewed 100 of the “best and brightest” students and spoke with them in depth about life and work.
The results of that study, reported in the book “Making Good,” surprised us. Over and over again, students told us that they admired good work and wanted to be good workers. But they also told us they wanted — ardently — to be successful. They feared that their peers were cutting corners and that if they themselves behaved ethically, they would be bested. And so, they told us in effect, “Let us cut corners now and one day, when we have achieved fame and fortune, we’ll be good workers and set a good example.” A classic case of the ends justify the means.