Students have no morals, says vice-chancellor
Brunel's vice-chancellor, Steven Schwartz, has provoked outrage by accusing students of having no moral standards. "Plagiarism, incivility, rudeness and reneging on legitimate debts - all of these are depressingly common among university students," the Telegraph quoted him as saying.
Thank goodness no academics could ever be accused of being uncivilised, rude or of going back on their commitments. Happily, in our experience all university staff are perfectly polite and reasonable at all times, with high standards of personal hygiene and an unerring tendency towards punctuality and the prompt return of assessed work.
After all, as Professor Schwartz put it, if "we cannot even get them to understand that they should be polite to others and that they should meet their obligations", how can they be expected to "analyse ethical issues such as stem cell research or nanotechnology or euthanasia or gay marriage"?
He was talking about students, of course, but there is worse to come. Damningly, today's universities are not indoctrinating their students with a particular set of moral and ethical values.
Instead they are quite unreasonably letting students come up with their own ideas on what is right and wrong, or possibly even hoping that they might have decided already. Our research suggests that students go to university to learn about other things, but anyway: it's disgraceful and something must be done.
"I believe it is time for universities once again to articulate a moral vision of what they are trying to achieve, and then live up to it," he continued to rant.
Deciding what that moral vision is would, of course, be enormous fun. Perhaps Professor Schwartz could mediate as a stem cell researcher, to use his own example, and a theologian come together to discuss whether certain branches of medical research are ethically sound. Or as two lecturers from the politics department meet to decide which of capitalism, communism and anarchism it would be morally right for the university to support.
It could help to get a few mathematicians in on the action to work out the probability of every single academic in a university agreeing on everything. That's assuming they could agree on a figure, of course.
Professor Schwartz did have one good idea, although it does sound vaguely familiar. "We must meet our classes on time, return assignments promptly and mark fairly," he reckons. It's almost revolutionary - surely he can't have plagiarised that?
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