Original posting on my Yahoo 360 blog at Sunday May 13, 2007 - 10:16pm (CDT)
So lazy! I'll do little more than link to this post on TheRealityCheck.org and observe, out loud, that while I'm not familiar with the specific individuals involved, that I found something very familiar about the standard of injustice being described. Let's ponder the absurdity of sending wave after wave of young people through a place where the fix is always in and the very notion of fair play isn't so much as paid lip service, and then being surprised when a good number of them come out with more than slightly dented consciences themselves. The faculty and administration at our universities were once expected to remember that they were role models for their students, and so, even if being merely human, they could be expected to sometimes slip short of sainthood, they were nevertheless expected to hold themselves to a much higher standard than that commonly encountered in the outside world.
There is a considerable difference between striving to live up to a higher code and slipping, and simply not bothering to try at all, as one tries to see exactly what one can get away with. The tragedy of our era is that those whose recognition of that difference is most crucial, such as those who have so much power in determining the course of the beginning of a young person's adult life, aren't expected to recognize it at all, and that the free-for-all that results is reacted to with a wink and a shrug, rather than with the widespread sense of outrage that civilised attitudes would demand.
