Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No49
Newsletter Themes: the importance of learning languages, and the dangers of overlooking plagiarism
As universities and colleges prepare for a return to teaching, it’s worth looking at the higher education stories that have dominated the local and national news over the holidays. The announcement that Aberdeen is to close its languages department raises questions about the nature of a university as a ‘comprehensive’ (i.e. all-embracing) centre of learning. Rex Last, a former head of the languages department at the University of Dundee, writes about the value of learning foreign languages and describes how the long-term erosion of provision in universities and schools in Scotland has made it increasingly difficult to study them. Last’s concerns raise the wider question as to whether Scottish universities are living up to their social responsibility to produce knowledge and staff who can teach the next generation.
Meanwhile, in the USA, the story that the President of Harvard University, arguably the world’s top university, had passed off the work of other people as her own raises important questions about academic integrity. The fact that it took so long for Claudine Gay to resign from her position suggests that the university’s diversity policies may be compounding problems arising from lack of academic integrity. Is there a danger that universities such as Harvard, and Scottish universities too, apply different or lower academic standards of judgement to staff and students from minority groups? Are we eroding the core values of the university in a vain attempt to address historical or social wrongs? These issues need to be discussed, but academics raising them are often branded as ‘right wing’ or extremists. SUE welcomes input from academics concerned about academic stands and academic freedom.
This week SUE’s written work on children’s rights made the news (see below in the news round-up), and our parents’ groups are back in action. If you want to get involved, contact Kate Deeming, our Parent and Supporters Group Coordinator (PSG@scottishunionforeducation.co.uk). Over the next few months, we want to look at the role of parent councils and parental involvement, or the lack of it, in schools. If you have any stories on this subject, please get in touch.
Penny Lewis, Editor
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Learning a language should be at the heart of secondary and higher education
Rex Last was Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Dundee from 1981 to 1991, having worked for nearly two decades at the German Department of the University of Hull. After becoming the sole carer for his wife, Oksana, who died recently with dementia, he wrote a book deploring the plight of the carer: The Informal Dementia Carer – Who Cares? And he has written several novels.
I nearly fell off my perch when I opened my copy of the Times to discover that the University of Aberdeen, one of Scotland’s top institutions for language teaching, is seriously considering wielding the axe to modern languages. The rot had set in a long time ago with my own department at Dundee University. The institution had scored bottom of the pile in the latest national assessment of universities, and it duly committed the same sacrilege as Aberdeen is now contemplating on modern languages, discarding a thriving and successful group of staff and students because we were the low-hanging fruit and vastly outnumbered by those in the medical, technical and scientific departments. Now Aberdeen’s potential closure is being driven by low numbers of applicants because of cuts in the classrooms, a self-fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one.
But it didn’t take long for the university to back-pedal and suggest that, given the extent of the protests the decisions have engendered, joint language degrees might still be on offer. It is not made clear what impact that would have on the proposed staff cuts, nor on where the non-existent students and financial resources for these courses would materialise from. The decision-making skills of the university management leave a lot to be desired, particularly since shutting down a department tends to be a non-reversible process with a direct negative impact on the lives and careers of staff and students alike. I note with a rueful smile that the Green MSP Maggie Chapman, commenting on the proposed axe-wielding, stated that it would mean that Aberdeen could no longer call itself a ‘comprehensive university’. Now there’s a thought.
A quiet war of attrition on modern language teaching has been waged for many years within the educational establishment generally. It is a discipline which has flown in the face of the ‘modern’ trend away from subjects perceived as perversely difficult, like Classics and language generally. There had been half-hearted attempts to introduce French, German, Spanish, Mandarin and more in primary schools, but the lack of qualified staff and the absence of a suitable initial curriculum which laid the foundations and segued seamlessly into the secondary classrooms caused the movement to more or less peter out.
And let me raise the dreaded D words – languages were Difficult, Demanding and Disciplining: you had to learn stuff by heart and suffer the indignities of getting something wrong, and you had to work your way step by step, with each stage becoming more challenging than the one before, until pupils gave up and voted with their feet for subjects with the comfort word ‘studies’ in them. With potential learners finding their attention spans whittled down to a few moments watching a YouTube short, why expect the poor dears to challenge their brains with more demanding material taking years to master, if ever. Lower the standards until it meets the dwindling aspirations of the clientele – that’s far easier than challenging them to rise above themselves. And, anyway, here comes AI riding to the rescue, completing the deskilling process. Why bother?
I won’t bang on about the future career benefits of studying one or more languages; I’ll simply remind you of all those Cassandra-like warnings about the detrimental shock to the jobs market of the advent of computing back in the day. Sure, the kind of jobs changed, but it was simply a matter of adjustment and fitting in to rapidly evolving new patterns of employment. My argument lies in a different area: interpersonal skills, the ability to think on one’s feet, and an awareness of the interrelationships between one language and another – just three of the many benefits of learning a foreign language. We have already given up on the positive benefits of learning Classical Latin and Greek, and whole generations have been culturally kneecapped by having lost the ‘open sesame’ password to the linguistic and cultural Aladdin’s cave those ‘dead’ tongues can yield up. That deprivation took a long time to occur, and like with modern languages, it started in the schools, where the dreaded myopic drive for ‘relevance’ left language learning as irrelevant (everyone speaks English, don’t they?), too hard (mustn’t strain the brains of the tender young) and old-fashioned (the taboo word) in the face of the white heat of technology. I recall, as a pretty raw lecturer attending the annual conference of Germanist lecturers at universities in the UK (way back in the 1960s if you must know), being present at a discussion on Classics teaching or its absence. The speaker asked those of us who had studied the discipline at university to raise our hands, and I was one of the red-faced few who tentatively did so. Soon modern languages, now circling the educational plughole, will follow suit, and our children’s education will be all the poorer for it. Bonne chance, as they used to say.
Do Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies undermine academic integrity?
Diane Rasmussen McAdie, a professor of social informatics from Edinburgh, reports on the Claudine Gay story and raises concerns about DEI policies, double standards and plagiarism.
The ongoing Israel–Hamas conflict is starting to have an impact on education in the UK and across the globe. The story of Harvard President Claudine Gay is particularly important for anyone concerned about the future of higher education.
In December 2023, members of the United States House Committee on Education and the Workforce received testimonies from the presidents of three top American universities – Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) – on the issue of antisemitism on their campuses.
At the hearing, Rep. Elise Stefanik from New York, a Harvard graduate, asked each president: ‘Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate [your university’s] rules on bullying and harassment?’ University of Pennsylvania’s president, Elizabeth Magill, answered, ‘If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.’ Following intense and immediate pressure from stakeholders, Magill resigned. Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, avoided answering Stefanik’s question directly, instead making vague and unfocused statements such as ‘that type of hateful, reckless, offensive speech is personally abhorrent to me’ and ‘when speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying, harassment, or intimidation, we take action’.
Gay did not resign following the hearing, but her testimony put her in the spotlight; concerns that Harvard may be protecting students and staff involved in antisemitic activity led to questions about Gay’s academic integrity. Allegations of Gay committing plagiarism in her doctoral dissertation, and in subsequent academic publications, started to circulate.
According to The Harvard Crimson, the daily student newspaper, Christopher F. Rufo (a so-called ‘right-wing activist’) and journalist Christopher Brunet intentionally released the story of plagiarism while Harvard’s governing boards met to discuss the controversy surrounding Gay’s antisemitism testimony. When in January Rufo and Burnet’s revelations went viral, Gay stepped down from her role as president. However, she remains a professor at Harvard, with a reported yearly salary of $900,000. With a tenure of just over six months, she had the shortest presidential tenure in Harvard’s long history.
Gay’s story has become predictably politicised on social media. She is a black woman and a leading equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) activist. American author and Boston professor Ibram X. Kendi claims that Gay is the victim of a ‘right-wing’/’racist’/’conservative’ witch-hunt to destroy her only because of her race.
Kali Holloway of the Daily Beast wrote that Gay’s resignation was ‘a win for right-wing chaos agents ... it was never about academic plagiarism, it was about stoking a culture-war panic to attack diversity, equality, and inclusion.’ Holloway certainly must have meant ‘equity’; the E in EDI/DEI is always ‘equity’, which is very different from equality, as James Lindsay has explained: ‘Where equality means that citizen A and citizen B are treated equally, equity means “adjusting shares in order to make citizens A and B equal”.’
In EDI culture, historically marginalised or underrepresented groups such as racial minorities, women, and LGBTQIA+ individuals were not treated as well as straight white men, so schools and universities must try to attract more people from these marginalised groups to make up for past transgressions against them. This means that in academic hiring and student admissions, the characteristics of specific groups are considered of greater importance than the merit or qualifications of individual applicants.
It is shocking that Gay did not resign because of her testimony regarding campus antisemitism. It is astonishing as well that verified plagiarism by a professor at one of the world’s most prestigious universities has (i) become a political ‘left vs right’ issue and (ii) has not led to the complete end of her academic career.
As a senior academic at a Scottish university, I teach students that they must cite their sources in a format expected in their discipline, and that they must not copy and paste sentences and paragraphs directly into their papers without placing quotation marks around the other author’s words. Even new university students who inadvertently leave out quotation marks or correct citations and references risk a referral to an internal academic integrity investigation, as per university policy. If found guilty of academic misconduct, this will lead to a failing mark, a required resit, or dismissal from the university, depending on the severity of the case and the number of times the behaviour occurs. Why should Gay’s academic misconduct be treated any differently after plagiarising in a range of writing since the mid 1990s?
The reluctance to judge Gay by the same standards as her peers and her students sets a dangerous precedent for the future of academic writing and education in general. Plagiarism detection software such as Turnitin allows educators to check the ‘similarity score’ of students’ work against previously submitted work, journal articles, websites, and books. If large sections are direct copies from other sources, the work is subject to an academic integrity investigation.
Turnitin is not an end-all solution. It is more difficult to prove that students wrote their own papers when they commission customised essays by professional writers. And now, educators contend with pupils and students submitting papers written by Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools such as Aithor. Aithor is marketed as ‘Your undetectable AI writer’. Scrolling down its home page, one can see the tool is ‘chosen by students from renowned universities’. Harvard and Cambridge are included on the list.
The prohibition of plagiarism in academic institutions is NOT a political issue. It is not about discrimination against a person’s race, gender, any other individual characteristic, or any combination of these characteristics. It is about academic standards, the honest pursuit of education, and the furthering of human knowledge. They are pillars of an educated citizenry who can read, interpret, communicate, and debate empirical facts with an eye towards advancing humanity. These were the goals of the Scottish Enlightenment. Looking at the recently released Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2022 results, it is possible to conclude that education has lost its way globally.
We must return to Enlightenment ideals in Scotland. This is more important now than ever, as the two most prestigious universities in America, MIT and Harvard, have fallen to EDI, antisemitism, and the degradation of academic standards. The other universities have followed them.
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/in-depth-scotlands-adoption-of-un-child-rights-will-undermine-parents-say-campaigners-5544810?utm_source=uk_morningbriefnoe&src_src=uk_morningbriefnoe&utm_campaign=uk_mb-2023-12-12&src_cmp=uk_mb-2023-12-12&utm_medium=email&est=JCWAGkZJa6TrHpj6oocpfFxi5%2BwXvaIpvo8fGu7OMHSqseRjgIOGxOZdn1of25PmADfjbg%3D%3D&utm_term=premium&utm_content=1 Owen Evans, IN-DEPTH: Scotland’s Adoption of UN Child Rights Will Undermine Parents Say Campaigners. Critics say the law is a ‘trojan horse’ which separates children from the family unit. 12/12/23
https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/scotland-to-continue-giving-puberty-blockers-to-children-5544875 Rachel Roberts, Scotland to Continue Giving Puberty Blockers to Children. Glasgow gender dysphoria clinic should allow children as young as twelve to take drugs despite decision in England to halt such interventions, watchdog finds. 12/12/23
https://archive.is/2023.12.12-175605/https://www.scotsman.com/education/education-scotland-snp-vows-new-focus-on-knowledge-and-maths-in-revamp-of-under-fire-curriculum-4443414 Calum Ross, Education Scotland: SNP vows new focus on ‘knowledge’ and maths in revamp of under-fire curriculum. Jenny Gilruth pledges action to ‘disrupt’ downward trajectory in international study. 12/12/23
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/23964931.gender-recognition-reform-mbm-fought-scottish-governments-plan/?ref=li Kevin McKenna, Gender recognition reform: How MBM fought Scottish Government’s plan. 04/12/23
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/12/17/the-myth-of-the-trans-brain/ Malcolm Clarke, The myth of the ‘trans brain’. The notion that you can identify a transwoman via a brain scan is based on dodgy science and misogynistic stereotypes. 17/12/23
https://archive.is/rXXIH Louisa Clarence-Smith, Schools told to presume children can’t change their gender. Long-awaited trans guidance for teachers says they do not have to use preferred pronouns of pupils who want to socially transition. 18/12/23
https://archive.is/BNKe9 Steven Edginton, Social workers accused of teaching ‘trans ideology as fact’ to vulnerable children. Campaign group Sex Matters says ‘dangerous and unscientific’ guidance issued by independent body needs to be ‘scrapped and rewritten’. 16/12/23
https://archive.is/H9lAt Louisa Clarence-Smith, Department for Health blocks plans to ensure doctor signs off on children changing gender. Ministers say not enough doctors can respond to gender transition requests or decide on what medical grounds they should use to approve them. 18/12/23
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/speechunion_cancelled-singer-arrested-over-trans-rights-activity-7143163142796185600-M72a/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios Free Speech Union, Gender critical singer Louise Distras was arrested by West Yorkshire Police. 22/12/23
https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/christian-teacher-guilty-of-unacceptable-professional-conduct-for-refusing-to-teach-lgbtqi-ideology-5551004?utm_source=ref_share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ref_share_btn Editorial, Christian Teacher Guilty of ‘Unacceptable Professional Conduct’ for Refusing to Teach ‘LGBTQI Ideology’. 21/12/23
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