Cult of Silence

Now is the time of final exams at the university where I teach. As often happens, a young man asked about his grade on his term paper, and, as sometimes happenes, I had to say that it had some very serious problems. Part of it seemed to have been downloaded from one web site with one point of view and the other part from another web site with a different point of view. He admitted that part of the paper had indeed been downloaded directly but then offered a defense that all of my colleagues now hear more and more often, “But at least I did something. I know other students in this department who go to web sites where they get papers that have got good grades at other universities, change the title, move a comma here and there, submit it as their own and get a five (the equivalent of an A).”

“I won’t ask who, but could you at least give me the electronic address where they get the papers.”

“I’m no stool pigeon!”

“I’ll give you three days to at least redo your paper with your own analysis of what you know about the topic based on the information you have and what more you might find. Your grade will be based on that,” I told him. Given the circumstances, I really could not find it in my heart to be more severe, and his exam had been fairly good. In addition, I have also faced the same situation at the master’s level and knew that this undergraduate had a point.

Why students do such things is easy to understand. There have always been students who cheat, but Ukraine’s stressed economic situation obliges many of them to work full time to keep body and soul together, finding any possible shortcut becomes almost an imperative for some, and a quick Google search on the word referat (Ukrainian and Russian for term paper) will turn up so many sources of readymade products in Russian and Ukrainian, that tracking any one of them down is impossibly difficult for instructors. Thus, the risks seem small, and there are those who will do it, unaware of the fact that they are really only cheating themselves of what they supposedly came for in the first place, an education.

Yet, my student’s response exposes another problem that in this society extends far beyond the hallowed halls of academe. There was the Soviet cult of informing on your neighbor complemented by the fear of being informed on by them such that you watch what you said even with your best friends and lovers. This has given most people such distaste for what they see as outright betrayal that they find it morally difficult to come forward with information on wrongdoing under any circumstances. If, however, nobody comes forward, the wrongdoer gets away with it, and his success in breaking the rules only encourages others to follow his example. How can you fight corruption when those witness to it are convinced that whistle-blowing is somehow immoral? Thus, the problem of corruption in this society is not only miserable salaries that virtually force officials to be corrupt but also a cult of silence wrapped in a situational morality that evolved out of the morally bankrupt System of Communism, a regime that banned the Bible and left people to make it up for themselves as best they could. This Soviet-spawned code of morality serves only to insulate those who have been corrupted from exposure by their more moral colleagues. Those promising to come in and end corruption might well ponder on this. The task in Ukraine is likely to be far more difficult than they imagine. China, for example, has on occasion imposed the death penalty for corruption, but really addressing the problem calls for something more than laws and punishments.