Dean of Discipline: Tales of Old-School Punishment by Bare Allen

Author:Bare, Allen [Bare, Allen]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: CF Publications
Published: 2014-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

I looked at her with interest. “Would I be guessing wrong if I guessed that that had something to do with your decision to accept a position at Emberley?”

She nodded, flushing a little. “After a lifetime of Catholic education, from kindergarten to the doctorate, I could have found a place in a Catholic college. Some of them are strict enough to satisfy anybody, but they tend to be very conservative places. I felt as if I’d been in that world long enough.”

“You mean Emberley represents a different flavor of conservatism?”

“No, it’s more that the conservatism is all on the level of study habits and personal discipline, which I’m all for. At too many of the schools I was thinking of, the conservatism extends to ideas as well. Emberley’s combination of strict discipline and liberality of thought is a pretty rare combination.” She was still twisting that strand of hair.

“I see what you mean,” I said. “But to come back to the present case, we can’t go letting students get away with copying their papers out of the encyclopedia, can we?”

“Um, no, I don’t suppose we can do that, but . . . .”

“Let’s suppose for a moment that Linda Walker has had such a slack education up to this point that she didn’t have any concept of plagiarism. Well, she has one now. It’s unfortunate, perhaps, that she had to learn so painfully, but if she’d committed an error of that magnitude in the real world, the consequences would have been even more painful in the long run.”

Kate twisted her hair tight, flushing again. “Well, I still feel that I was at fault in not laying this all out very explicitly for the freshmen. If I’d done that part of my job properly, Linda wouldn’t have suffered.”

I looked at her for a minute. “Your scruples do you credit,” I finally said, “but, even if I agreed with you that Linda committed the plagiarism only because you didn’t explain to her that she wasn’t allowed to, what am I supposed to do? She was paddled yesterday; she can’t be unpaddled now.”

Kate looked very unhappy. “I should have come to you before. But it took me a while to work this out in my mind, and I-”

“Perhaps you weren’t sure that her transgression was entirely your own fault?”

She nodded. “I think that’s likely. But still, some of it was mine, and . . .”

“And what? What can we do about it now?”

Kate went very red. She swallowed and stammered a bit, looking down at the hair she was still twisting between her fingers. Finally, “I think it’s only fair that I should be punished, too,” she said in a small, choked voice.

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