makeshiftmind

So today I’m glancing through Business Week, and I see a small article on the link between recent business scandals and our institutions of higher leaning, er, learning. The article is a brief summary of a study conducted by the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, which concludes that, of 50,000 students surveyed in 69 schools:

• 27% of journalism majors admit to cheating [on major exams]
• 26% of business majors admit to cheating on major exams
• 54% of business majors admit to cheating on written assignments, engaging in plagiarism, and copying friends’ homework

Is it any wonder that the business world is full of “Enrons” and the big media is full of liars and spinmasters? Ironically, the students who cheat least in school were students in the hard sciences (19%). I guess it’s a little harder to obfuscate physical realities like, say, gravity by cooking your books. Honesty has no meaning to these people because they do not believe that reality is true, in the sense that reality cannot be bent or broken by what we believe or what we wish.