Harmony means everyone gets a passing grade

Last Friday, China Youth Daily reported that a young teacher with the College of Art at Shanghai Normal University had been punished by the school for failing a number of students who had plagiarized their term papers.

During a grading session in February, Mr. Ma noticed varying degrees of plagiarism in the papers of eight students, so he marked them zero, submitted his grades, and went on vacation. At the start of the spring semester, the administration hauled him into the office and ordered him to change the grades; when he refused, they punished him for being “subjective” – he had overlooked several other plagiarized papers.

Ma believes the main reason for his punishment is that the college is upset with him for “making trouble for the school and destroying its harmonious atmosphere.” Here’s an excerpt from the CYD narrative:

The second time they talked about the matter occurred in the administrator’s office not long after school resumed. There, Ma said that he did not intend to cancel the scores.

“So long as there is one sentence of the students’ own writing in their papers, you cannot give a zero,” said the administrator, “shocking” Ma. Another line was even more “stunning”: “You either pass them all, or fail them all.”

During this time, he heard that the parents of the students he had failed had come to the college en masse to denounce him. He felt that the parents were exerting pressure on the college.

…

Several months later, on 13 June, Ma was called to the administrator’s office, where he was told that he was being punished for “second-degree instructional malpractice”. The punishment contained, in addition to the “subjectivity error” of the paper grades, a second item related to a sketch class from the previous fall. The punishment decision said that Ma had not completed his educational duties in that sketch class.

…the administrator said that this demonstrated that he was not intentionally going after Ma. He repeatedly stressed that if he wanted to take care of Ma, he “could have long ago – there was no need to wait until today. In addition, I could have given him an even harsher punishment.” “We have been trying to rescue him all along, but this teacher…” The administrator’s words trailed off.

…Ma condemned some of the things the administrator said to him for having the “tone of the Cultural Revolution.” He even prepared a “record of sayings,” in which he recorded some of the things the administrator had said, such as “you’ve got a lot of problems.”

The administrator did not deny these words, but he believed that Ma’s secret recordings were “disrespectful” to him. “Even if we go to court in the future, I won’t be afraid of him bringing out those words as evidence. The facts are there. No one can erase them.”

The administrator held in his hands Ma’s “proof of guilt,” the evidence, he stressed time and again, that he “did not act excessively.” The materials included “records of student interviews” and “letters from parents,” and he invited the reporter to look them over.

Critics noticed the presence of “unwritten rules” in this incident. Ma, who had not been a teacher very long, received a call shortly after the Spring Festival in which the administrator demanded, “As a teacher, how could you give those students zeros?”

On Saturday, The Beijing News ran a commentary by Zhi Ling, a Beijing teacher, that dug into the real reasons behind Ma’s punishment:

If you ask me, the root cause of the punishment of this teacher who upheld his academic ideals was not because of a subjective “mistake” involved in not discovering the other students’ plagiarism, for using “limited” academic experience to put an end to “unlimited” academic plagiarism would strain expert scholars. The true reason for Ma’s punishment is actually that he poked a hole in the window-paper that looked on the unwritten rules, just like the boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes who told the truth.

The administrators’ behavior can corroborate this. When interviewed by the reporter, one administrator expressed his “painful effort.” He worried about Ma: a young man who just had to blow up the situation, “I’m afraid this is not beneficial to his future.” Reading between the lines, by upholding academic principles he stood in opposition to other people who desecrated academic principles. “One man’s struggle” assaulted the integrity of a wide range of people, so it’s not hard to imagine a result in which those involved were relegated to a different class of people. So it’s easy to understand why the administrator maintained that his “painstaking care for the young teacher had been misunderstood.”

In addition to the same old complaints about “unwritten rules,” Ma’s claim that the school avoided dealing with plagiarism by appealing to “harmony” touched a nerve with some critics. Here’s a bit by Liu Changfeng from the Guangming Daily website:

Mediation and mixing together, a harmonious life of peace with everyone – this is not the normal way things work. As it goes in the theory of revolutionary struggle, so it goes in real life. Ma was labeled a “destroyer of harmony” because he tossed a stone into the placid lake surface; he destroyed the sham harmonious exterior. Walking lock-step with the leadership and speaking in the same voice is evidently the measure of harmony in the minds of the leaders of that college. It is obvious that this kind of harmony is not the type of harmony we pursue or desire; on the balance it is just a false harmony, a work ethic of one-hundred-percent equivocation. This kind of unprincipled, fake harmony cannot win over our hearts and minds.

At the same time, the explanation of the college leadership was a repeated emphasis on the evidence they had for punishing this teacher – the “records of student interviews” and “letters from parents.” It is clear that these are the things that spurred the school’s decision to punish Ma. And the “records of student interviews” and “letters from parents” are clearly the things that “brought trouble upon the school.” So we can totally see that the school’s decision to punish Ma was entirely dependent on the pressure exerted by the student’s parents. And the opinions of the students and their parents are the evidence for the conclusion that Ma “brought trouble and destroyed harmony.” So we see very clearly that the punishment came out of pressure exerted by parents rather than being purely an instructional incident. It’s obvious that objectivity is hard to maintain in the handling of this decision, and bias is very likely.

Harmony is not blurring of principles or a simple submission to avoid pressure. Nor is it arrogance that encourages plagiarism and fosters copying. Harmony requires practicality, it needs truth-seeking. A “harmony” where academic integrity bows down to power and to individual interests is, I think, not one that we need.