The Ethics of Realism

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about how the current generation of college students is less interested in hard work while simultaneously demanding greater recognition in the form of higher grades – it’s a favorite topic of the sort of commentator who enjoys telling us about the breakdown of our educational system and the pending destruction of our civilization as a result. I mostly ignored these stories until very recently; the stories aren’t all that different from the ones that ran thirty years ago about my generation, especially when you account for the differences in the world these students are training to enter. My generation didn’t have all of the online time-wasters that this generation does, and we’d never have gotten away with using Wikipedia as a primary source for research data. But we had time-wasters of our own, and just as little concept of what the real world was going to be like, and I didn’t imagine that the new crisis being “viewed with alarm” by the media would be any different…

Then I became an educator myself, and I began to realize that, as usual, the truth lies somewhere between the two extremes. My students at MSU are something of an elite; having made it into one of the top undergraduate business programs in the Western Hemisphere, they are by definition in the top 5% of all business students at their level. One might think that this would make them less susceptible to the dissipation and feelings of entitlement that the conservative commentators are always going on about, but the ratios of good students to those who are either marking time or avoiding work does not appear to have changed much from when I attended college in a third-rate university twenty-nine years ago. The more interesting question, at least from where I’m sitting, is what are we supposed to do about it…

As college instructors, we can’t really do much about the work ethic or work habits of the young men and women we instruct. I tried to make it as easy as possible, by issuing a detailed schedule as part of the syllabus, reminding my students of deadlines, and providing exercises in class that build on each other and the assigned material. At the same time, I made a point of trying to interact with my students as adults – the way I would with younger colleagues who had been assigned to me in a work setting, not the way a teacher treats a class of rambunctious teenagers. This had mixed results; my best students claim to have gotten a lot out of my classes, and a some of them have written to me well after graduation to say that they were experiencing exactly the conditions and challenges I told them about. A few have even asked my advice about work issues or projects they are working on now. None of this kept some of my students from grubbing for better grades, however, and protesting that they deserved an “A” despite not doing any of their coursework…

The question I’m driving at here is whether instructors like me are doing our undergraduates any favors by trying to make our classes as much like the real world as we can. Should we have cracked down on these behaviors; run the program according to the standards we were held to a generation ago (which might give even the most work-averse of our students a fighting chance in the real world), or just accepted that since most of their competitors would have been given classes with no work in them and straight “A”s just for showing up, we were hurting their future chances by trying to give them challenging work and grades they actually deserved?

Or to put it another way, do we as teachers have an ethical responsibility to give our students the training (and the grades) that they need, rather than the things that they want (and feel they are purchasing)? In some of the other professions and disciplines things are probably different, but in Management all we can do is give our students tools that may or may not help them to accomplish their future tasks; the best student who ever lived could attend the best business school that has ever existed, and he or she might still never use any of the things they learned in class. That being the case, should we even try to demand performance from our students, or just give them all “A”s and hope for the best?

It’s worth thinking about…