Harvard's Cheating Scandal and the Failure of Mentoring

cross-posted from Dagblog

The Harvard cheating scandal has ground to something like its conclusion, with somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 students being suspended asked to withdraw. There's been a lot of discussion, from different perspectives, about student ethics, educational standards, and what the world is coming to. (Harry Lewis's blog provides some of the smartest inside perspective, shaped by a strong personal viewpoint.) There are those who claim the students are getting a raw deal, while others view those students as symptoms of an ethical collapse. But none of those opinions are based on full information since the school, rightly, will never release the specific details of individual students' misbehavior. College students should face appropriate consequences for their actions, but they should also be allowed to live their bad decisions down.

Some people. including very smart people, are calling on the university to be more open about exactly what went wrong in this particular course (whose design did have some genuine and documented flaws which contributed to the problems). But that will not and should not happen, not because Harvard is circling its institutional wagons (although it might be), but because it has chosen to protect the faculty member involved, a junior professor a few years out of graduate school. That is a sound ethical position for them to take. In fact, Harvard refuses even to name the course or the faculty member involved (although both, at this point, are widely known), and I will follow their lead by leaving him unnamed.

Does this mean the professor is getting off unpunished? No. He is finished at Harvard. They are not protecting a powerful faculty member from the consequences of his actions. They are behaving ethically toward a faculty member they are in the process of firing. His ability to find future employment has already been severely damaged. Nothing is served by damaging his career further with a public report detailing his mistakes. He slipped up out of normal carelessness, with hideous results; there is no question of malice or dishonesty. He should be allowed to try, at least, to rebuild his career. And the truth is, Harvard may have let this faculty member down.

When a junior faculty member messes up this badly, there has almost always been a failure of mentoring. The reason might be the junior faculty member. Not everyone accepts or acts upon the guidance they are offered, and not everyone interprets that guidance well or puts it into practice effectively. But some people are also given bad guidance, or no guidance at all. That is an abdication of professional responsibility.

New PhDs do not turn into fully professional members of the faculty overnight, or by themselves. It is the responsibility of a junior professor's senior colleagues to guide her or his professional development. Everyone at Harvard knows this. And most likely some members of this professor's department were specifically assigned to be this junior colleague's mentors, as an explicit component of their teaching and advising load. Mentoring junior colleagues is not simply part of an obligation to the colleagues themselves, but to the students. If you put students in a classroom with a relatively inexperienced teacher and you give that teacher no professional feedback or guidance, bad things can happen. In this case, bad things did. A large lecture class ended with at least a quarter of the students suspended and more on probation. The school has taken a beating in the press. And a promising young scholar's career has crashed and burned so badly that I can smell the smoke from here. My question is: where were this person's senior colleagues? Where was his department chair? What advice were these people giving him?

It's clear that the course where the cheating happened had a well-established relationship as a gut, whether it developed that reputation before this faculty member took it over or after. Many of the students had taken the class because of this reputation. It is also clear that during the semester when the cheating occurred, Spring 2012, this changed to some extent, and the exam questions became significantly more difficult than the students expected them to be. But the professor is alleged to have spoken about how easy the class was at the start of the semester, which if true suggests that there was some change of direction after the course had begun. It's also well-established that the course assignments were structured in ways that made collaboration, which was explicitly forbidden, fairly easy: four take-home exams which students were given more than a week to complete, during which time they were allowed to use their books, their notes, and the internet but forbidden to discuss the exam with one another. So the exam design created substantial opportunity for cheating (which does not excuse the students, but should still have been avoided).

The faculty member in question was coming to the end of his fourth year at Harvard, which meant he was also undergoing a year-long, make-or-break review. According to Harvard's faculty handbook (which they publish online), he would have undergone an earlier review, designed to give him feedback on his progress, during his second year. If he succeeded in his fourth-year review, he would have been given another four-year contract, a somewhat better job title, and a chance to earn tenure in year seven. If he did not succeed, he would be given a last year teaching at Harvard while he looked for another job. His job title seems not to have changed, which suggests that he did not pass his review and that he will be leaving Harvard after the spring 2013 semester. Whether he was in trouble before the cheating scandal, or whether the scandal itself sank its chances, is impossible to tell.

(That this person has presumably been looking for a new job this year, during the same months in which people have been calling for full public disclosure of his role in the scandal, makes it obvious why Harvard would not release any damaging or embarrassing information. Doing so while he was actively seeking a new job would have done him material harm.)

My question is what the junior professor was told before and during his personnel reviews. Certainly, he would have been advised, repeatedly and emphatically, to pay enough attention to publishing his research. Harvard's research expectations are extremely high, and the junior professor also needed a strong research record for the outside job market (since tenure at Harvard is often a long shot). He would have been told to compile a strong teaching record as well. But exactly what was said to him about teaching is an open question. He would almost certainly have been told both that his teaching should be good, whatever "good" means, but also that he should be careful not to spend so much time on teaching that his research suffered. Teach well, but budget the time you spend teaching. That's already a pretty complicated message for a brand-new professor who's working up all his courses from scratch and learning to teach completely new kinds of courses. (No graduate student oversees a course with hundreds of undergrads and a team of teaching assistants.) But then the really thorny question: what does the university mean when it says good teaching? What actual benchmarks does that imply?

Is the goal to keep your teaching evaluation numbers high? That goal could pretty easily lead a new faculty member to turn a large lecture course into popular gut for students seeking easy A's. And teaching such a course would also be less time-consuming, for someone being urged to protect his weekly research time, than teaching a class with more challenging assignments and tougher expectations. So a young teacher creating a popular if notoriously easy class might think he was acting on the advice he had been given. On the other hand, a young teacher developing a reputation as a soft grader might also get pushback from his colleagues, and be urged to shed that reputation. Even at a school where grade-inflation is the norm, standing out as an easier-than-normal grader is risky.

I'm curious about the timing of the apparent shift in the troubled course's difficulty, with the professor allegedly talking genially about how easy the class was at the beginning of the semester but the exam questions subsequently becoming harder than students expected. It's worth noting that the professor's department would have voted on his review case early in the semester, sometime in January or February, after which the professor would have gotten a formal letter containing professional feedback. If he'd been told, officially or not, that he needed to change his reputation for easy grading, he might have felt pressure to show signs of that change as soon as possible, even if that meant breaking with sound teaching practice by holding students to a standard they did not expect.

That is mere speculation, of course. And it will remain that way, because Harvard is not going to publicize details that might damage their students or their junior employees. Certainly, those individuals should be held responsible for their decisions, and they apparently have been. But the buck does not stop with the junior members of any university community. The responsibility ultimately lies with the people who hold the power within that institution, the administration and the senior faculty, who have been specifically charged with the responsibility to oversee the educational mission. Harvard needs to look hard at itself, as any school does after a scandal. But it is the senior faculty, the people responsible for setting the standards and guiding newer faculty to meet them, who need to look hardest at themselves.

The Ivy League/Wall Street Connection

cross-posted at Dagblog

Ezra Klein recently tried to answer the question "Why is Goldman Sachs full of Ivy Leaguers?" by interviewing a Harvard/Goldman alum. (h/t to a righteously repulsed DougJ). But Wall Street's love affair with Harvard and Yale isn't just a question of why Ivy Leaguers go to Wall Street (the question Ezra begins with). It's also a question of why Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms work so hard to recruit Ivy League undergraduates. And Ezra’s interviewee only deepens the mystery:

Why Goldman thought I'd be good for investment banking is a very fair question. There are a lot of Harvard people at Goldman and they've put a lot of effort into recruiting from the school. They really try to attract liberal arts backgrounds. They say this stuff isn't so complicated, that you'll pick it up as you go along, that it's all about teamwork, that they have training programs. That being said, it would be very hard to get a full-time job there without a previous summer internship.

So, Goldman Sachs is putting forth serious effort to recruit undergraduates with no particular academic preparation for banking, and to train them. The training is relatively uncomplicated. (It's a two-month summer program, over July and August; they give new recruits June off.) The wooing is aggressive ("in your face" in the word's of Ezra's source) and protracted, beginning by the recruit's junior year at the latest. And the pay scale is easily enough to attract smart and talented people from across the country. But clearly, Goldman Sachs attaches a specific premium to the Ivy League degree. And it’s not just Goldman Sachs; an acquaintance who once worked for a hedge fund tells me that the hiring there was driven by an almost obsessive focus on pedigree (not only undergraduate pedigree, in this specific case, but even prep school pedigree).

Now, almost all Ivy Leaguers are bright, but they’re not an intellectual breed apart. Every college in America has some students smart enough to thrive at an elite university. What’s different about the Ivy League classroom (or a Duke or Chicago or Stanford classroom) is that it contains nobody but those students. A roomful of Ivy League students and a roomful of students from a more typical university aren't like a major league team and a minor league team, but like an All-Star team and an everyday team. The everyday team has its stars, who could easily be on the All-Star team, but the All-Stars have dispensed with the average players. Goldman could get equally smart and talented newcomers without spending two years luring each new kid from Princeton, Cambridge, or New Haven. And they might get people who were actually interested in the business. So why the Ivy fixation?

I have three thoughts:

1) Investment Banks Are Looking for Aggressive Competitors
Ivy Leaguers are smart, and "hard-working," in the white-collar elite's sense of that word: able to focus obsessively on complicated tasks for long stretches of time. But the things that really set elite undergraduates apart from other student bodies are their competitiveness and ambition. Those are the traits that motivated those students to go to the Ivy League in the first place, and being on a campus filled with other ambitious and competitive people reinforces them. Such students are ambitious in many different ways, some laudable and some not, some of their ambitions exclude investment banking. (Some want to be great artists, or great surgeons, or world-changing philanthropists.) And their competitive drive is expressed (or politely concealed) in many different ways, some more evolved and some not. But the one thing that is true of every Harvard undergraduate, by definition, is that they applied to Harvard College, knowing that it had the harshest acceptance rate in the country. They have an easy time imagining themselves overcoming extremely stiff competition.

Not all of those kids fit into particular stereotype, and some wouldn't be caught dead in Goldman Sachs. But among them is an unusually high concentration of people who will set out to win any competition that is proposed to them, and to pursue any end that it is set as a goal. They might have no intrinsic interest in banking per se, but once you talk them into becoming a banker (because it seems like a safe job, and you're offering), many of them will set out to become the best banker in their recruiting class, or their department, or their firm, simply because they will always try to be the best. And alumni of famous schools are accustomed to competing intensely against challenging competitors; they adjust to cutthroat Wall Street fairly smoothly. Employees who are motivated by their own competitive tendencies are relatively easy to motivate, and they stay motivated even after they have gotten personally rich. Goldman Sachs traders try to rack up more and more enormous bonuses for the same reason pro athletes look for bigger and bigger contracts long after they have any need for more money: because it's a way of keeping score.

2) The Clients Like It
Princeton grads might not be any better at the business of banking than alumni of Inglorious State, but they have more practice talking to other people who went to Princeton. Whether an Ivy League student started out from a privileged background or not, by graduation most of them can get along smoothly with privileged people. They make the same chit-chat, they watch the same movies and read or pretend to have read the same books, they like to shop and eat and vacation in the same places that their bosses and most of their clients do. That tends to make things smoother, both with the Ivy-educated bosses, who naturally tend to hire and promote junior employees who resemble themselves, and with the clients, who are reassured by bankers who have been socialized in very particular ways. More than they should, some clients tend to trust Ivy Leaguers, because of the signs of social class and because of the Ivy League credentials themselves. Clients can't ascertain how good every employee of a firm is at his or her job, but the exclusivity of the firm gives them the sense of dealing with highly qualified people. When even the interns went to Dartmouth and Yale, the clients assume that everyone at the firm is very bright, even though another firm full of CUNY night school grads might get the same results. That impression of brilliance is a marketable commodity.

Goldman Sachs trades on that air of exclusivity and excellence, even when they've deliberately taken advantage of their clients. Here's part of an e-mail from the loathsome Fabrice Tourre, explaining how some Goldman clients responded to being sold junk that Goldman Sachs wanted off their own books:

...I feel very strongly it binds clients even closer to the firm, because the alternative of take ur money to a finn who is an under performer and not the best, just isn’t reasonable. Clients ultimately believe association with the best is good for them in the long run.

In this case "association with the best" is what customers were paying for at the expense of their own portfolios, which their "elite" bankers deliberately undermined. Note the lack of irony with which Tourre describes rival firms which don't profit at their own clients' expense as "not the best." Clearly, "the best" has a very peculiar meaning here.

3) Expectation of Entitlement
Tourre's world view, in which a high-powered firm is worth your business even if it loses you money, exemplifies the value system of Wall Street corruption: one expects rewards not so much for particular results, but for one's elite own status. The clients, like the world, are imagined as owing the bankers a living, and a princely one at that. It's easier to bring young bankers and traders into a corporate culture of outsized entitlement if they had a privileged educational background first. Ivy Leaguers are used to being told that they are the elite, and that their privileges are a reward for their own specialness and brilliance. Not every Ivy Leaguers comes to believe in their own massive entitlement, but most of those who do not either don't go to Wall Street or don't stay. And the Ivy League does make it easy to believe that you are special, and that getting in is a natural route to boundless success. It's easy for the Lloyd Blankfeins of the world, who sold hot dogs in Yankee Stadium as a kid and then got into Harvard, to imagine that once he got to Harvard he was a made man; that's why some people apply to Harvard in the first place. If you're running the kind of shop that Goldman Sachs has evidently degenerated into, where profits are put above everything else, hiring some kids who already think they deserve millions of dollars for getting high SAT scores makes sense. Those kids won't question what the firm is doing; they'll simply fight each other to earn the highest commissions every quarter, schmooze the clients, and take their obscene financial rewards as a reflection of their own wonderfulness.

Of course, not every graduate of Harvard or Princeton or Cornell suffers from such a grotesque sense of personal entitlement; but all the Wall Street firms need is a share of the percentage of Ivy League kids who do. Not everyone with a Harvard degree turns into Lloyd Blankfein. Many other people have used their Yale or Dartmouth education in decent or admirable ways. Those schools give their students enormous opportunities, and their alumni choose how to use them. A fancy college won't make you an amoral and elitist greedhead unless you choose to become one. But if an amoral, elitist greedhead is what you really want to be, the Ivy League will make becoming one easier. And if that's what you want to do with your life, Goldman Sachs might have a job for you.