Wednesday, September 28, 2005
THE PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY VANGUARD has an opinion piece up about Southern Illinois University and the whole Kodee Kennings story.
It's easy to see how the (New York) Times could see (former SIU Daily Egyptian Editor Michael) Brenner's foibled counterfeit as a humorous endnote. In an era where male prostitutes hold positions in the White House press core it's hard to see the ridiculous fraud of a small time student publication as anything dire. But the perjury of Michael Brenner represents a much more worrisome trend. His fabrication, the result of hyper concern over his career, was a calculated decision to disregard the ethical responsibilities of his position. That a student, more than a year away from graduation, would endanger, and ultimately ruin, his career as a journalist, keeping up his ruse for two years, is a telling indication that the education he received at SIU ultimately failed him.
But it's not just SIU that needs to recognize this failure but the institution of higher education in general. Brenner's act, while admittedly an outrageous one, is just an example of how educational institutions, beginning well before college, are concentrating so heavily on creating a work force, on the bottom line, that they're ignoring their responsibility to well roundedness of their students.
And that's certainly a good argument to come out of this whole mess.
8:12:00 AM
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