The Layers of Social Justice Conferences

Academic or organizational conferences centered on social justice form a two-sided ecosystem, like the ocean on either side of an equatorial thermocline: the well-lit layer where professionals bask and sport about the dim reach of the slow-moving clients—or constituents or stakeholders, members or customers, special interest group or community, depending on the agency and the year. What never changed was the dynamic. The conference was organized around those at the top of the food chain, who made their living from those below. If you ran a nonprofit, or wrote papers about those who needed the services of a nonprofit, you floated in the warmth of power and influence. You were approached by corporate reps and interviewed for jobs, you hung out in the bar in good clothes and laughed with the journalist who had just sucked dry an angry, badly dressed member of the latest social justice struggle then tossed the husk back into the cold, oxygen-starved depths.

Nicola Griffith, So Lucky (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux: 2018), p. 85

Why Would Students Choose Cheating over Learning?

What are his thoughts on the fact that two hundred cheaters in his class of six hundred presumably felt that they could benefit more by passing the class than by learning from it? It seems fair to assert that Quinn and his university sowed the seeds for this type of blatant disregard for the honor system by failing to create a "community devoted to learning." When at least one-third of all students are proven offenders, it is the environment and not the individual that must explain itself.

Dave Tomar, The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 81.

University Excels at . . . Parking Enforcement

No department was as well organized as Parking and Transportation. The school couldn't issue a schedule without two overlapping classes. It couldn't approve your financial aid without losing your paperwork. It couldn't print your transcript without accidentally faxing your medical records to the student listserv. But if your meter had expired twenty seconds ago, you could be damn sure that a parking attendant was already writing your ticket out nineteen seconds ago. Such graceful efficiency.

Dave Tomar, The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 22