Voices
efiting many people has morphed
to one where whoever makes the
biggest, fastest buck for a few
privileged individuals gets rewarded to an obscene degree. And
when the bubble collapsed, those
folks all kept their money and
stayed out of jail.
So back to Emory and the
handful of other schools in the
last few years where cheating on
test scores has been discovered.
What’s at stake here and what is
being measured? My institution,
Oglethorpe University, is not jockeying for a top twenty ranking position, and we are not consumed
with the whole ranking game. We
do end up in most books or ranking systems that list the country’s
best colleges and universities and
that’s always a nice thing. But
whether we are 157 or 196 really
means little to us or our students.
Instead, we are concerned every
day with providing the most rigorous, relevant, and affordable education we can.
Could what happened at Emory
happen at Oglethorpe? I’d like
to think not because I know the
people here who are responsible
for reporting this same data, but
no one should ever be so smug.
Would it have benefited us as an
LAWRENCE
SCHALL
HUFFINGTON
09.09.12
institution to add forty points to
our median SAT scores? I guess
so, but only in a very small way.
It looks like it didn’t help Emory
all that much either. Would it
have made the individuals responsible for recruiting students
look better? For sure. Would it
have made me as president look
better? The answer there must
be yes, as well.
In the end, institutions are
just people working within a culture.
People will make bad
It is the
decisions from time
responsibility
to time. It is the reof the culture of
sponsibility of the
the institution
culture of the instito reward
tution to encourage
ethical decisionand reward ethical
making based
decision-making
on things that
based on things that
really matter.”
really matter. When
the culture and the
system fail to prevent individual
excesses, self-correction is the
only alternative.
That’s what Emory is doing
now. I hope someday the system
in which higher education rankings are tallied, which rewards
numbers over learning outcomes,
will change for the better. I
am not holding my breath.