THE ANGRY PROFESSOR

THE ANGRY PROFESSOR

 On November 10, 2010, Professor Richard Quinn stands before his class in the School of Business Administration at the University of Central Florida. The students had previously finished their midterm exams and they're expecting to hear a lecture that day. But such is not to be.

Quinn began by saying that he’d taught for 20 years and that today, he was going to give a lecture he’d hoped he would never have to give. He said that a student had anonymously notified him that there had been cheating on the midterm exam, that students had gotten the questions prior to taking the test. (As Professor Quinn had graded the tests, he’d become suspicious that something was wrong because the grades were one and one-half times higher than the midterms of all previous years.)

He estimated that 200 students in the class were involved in the scandal. Not only that, but reports had also come to him that students were bragging about having advance knowledge of the exam and of the high scores they made. He told the class, “We know who you are and we know where you are. The midterm exam will be tossed; everyone in the class  will retake it.”

He gave a time period that the students would have--a fifty-hour time period to come in and take the exam. He said, "There would be no excuses for not taking the exam except a note from God. Even if you have to give birth during the exam, you are still required to be present and accounted for and take it."

Quinn told them that he’d notified the ethics committee, the Business Administration faculty, the dean, and 20 other universities as to the cheating. He went on to tell them that the university was going to protect its integrity; that such behavior would not be tolerated.

Then, speaking personally, he told the students, “To say that I’m disappointed is an understatement. I’m physically ill. I’m disillusioned. I’m disgusted. I’m trying to figure out what my last 20 years [of teaching] were for.”

Then, in the strongest words of them all, he was so offended by their cheating, he slowly said, “To those of you who cheated . . . don’t call me . . . don’t ask me to do anything for you . . . ever.”

That was some strong statement, something the students needed to hear. But what he said raises a serious issue. Those students, when they leave his class, will attend other classes, many of them in the Department of Arts and Sciences, courses like English, epistemology, and philosophy. In those classes, their professors will teach them that absolute truth doesn’t exist, yet in the School of Business Administration, Professor Quinn and all the other faculty members proceeded to punish them as if absolute truth does exist, that cheating will not be tolerated at their institution because cheating is wrong.

But if truth is relative depending on the person, the culture, and the times, who’s to say what’s right and wrong? Who is to punish students if absolute right and absolute wrong do not exist? Their other classes will teach them that each individual has “his truth,” that "You have your truth and I have mine, all is relative," they learn.

The denial of absolute truth catches fallen man in a trap: logically, according to his denial, he should  make no moral judgments, because a moral judgment of what’s right and what’s wrong can’t be based on “That’s the way I feel about it.” The next person could say, “I feel exactly the opposite.”

The trap is sprung: he can’t make judgment calls on the basis of relativism, but he has to do just that. He can't live without doing so.