Friday, December 1, 2006

The Columbia Cheating Scandal...not all that scandalous?

A Message from Tube O. Toothpaste
As a student at Columbia University's J-School, I am appalled at the media response to this pretty minute situation. We learned (yes, in Sam Freedman's ethics course) about the rumor mill that influenced the MSM in the wake of Katrina and yet, somehow, we have elevated a small situation (which involved a handful of students) into a schoolwide fiasco. It reminds me of the "telephone" game--It starts out with "oh, one or two people cheated" to "alert the media, this is the cheating scandal of the year." It's absolutely ridiculous on all fronts. But, as one professor pointed out, you can't put the toothpaste back into the tube. If that's the case, what do we do now? I guess we clean it up the best we can and hope it doesn't leave those white-chalky marks on our oh-so-precious ivy-league degrees.

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