Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/377020
FAN FORUM TEACHING LESSONS As a 37-year veteran of the teaching profession, please allow me to make several points concerning the "aca- demic fraud" at Notre Dame: 1. Cheating occurs at every school level from elementary classrooms to post-graduate work. It is never con- doned, and good teachers reduce the opportunities for cheating to occur. In this day of the Internet and social media, the weight accorded to "take- home" assignments must be assessed intelligently. Any professor who as- signs that much importance to a take- home assignment is either naive, lazy, or incapable of devising appropriate and objective evaluation instruments. Assign the student an "F" for that pa- per and average it in with the other valid evaluation instruments collected in that class. 2. Father John Jenkins, Notre Dame's president, says that students must bear the responsibility for the results of their bad decisions. Does this also apply to Jenkins and his administra- tion? When President Obama, a lead- ing supporter of abortion, up to and including what is known as "partial- birth" abortion, was awarded an honorary degree from Notre Dame, a grievous moral error was committed. One might call it "Catholicism Fraud" at the least. Who was suspended? Who lost even a day's pay? Lead by example, Fr. Jen- kins. Resign your post and explain to all that you are trying to be consistent in applying Notre Dame's discipline FROM THE WEBSITE As expected, much discussion the week of the Michi- gan game centered on the status of whether five Notre Dame players currently not with the team, pend- ing going before the academic honors committee, would be reinstated. To many, the delay in the decision led to the opinion that this is the type of red tape that will eventu- ally lead head coach Brian Kelly to go to the NFL. However, there was a strong rebuttal from one of our top posters: HamonWry22: He'll have about 18 starters coming back next year, all of the key players in skill posi- tions (assuming Everett Golson returns), a strong recruiting class in the works for '15, and potentially even stronger for '16. Life ain't a bowl of cherries, but where's he going to walk into better talent than that? Or, instead of working with Jack Swarbrick, he can work for Jerry Jones or Dan Snyder. It's life. Pick your poison. You think Lou Holtz and Ara Parseghian didn't have to put up with stuff like this? Ara left because the pressure was wearing him to the bone, not because he couldn't deal with the craziness of Res Life, which was much more unpredictable than this. BE HEARD! Send your letters to: Letters Blue & Gold Illustrated P. O. Box 1007 Notre Dame, IN 46556 or e-mail to: lsomogyi@blueandgold.com