BY AARON BARLOW

Old News Department: Selling diplomas as a means to economic success turns them into a commodity—and people find all sorts of ways to pay, if not by work then by cash. When different diplomas are seen as providing different dividends, people angle to get those they believe most valuable, some paying through work but others, again, with cash.

The question is, what do we do about it?

Do we continue to ‘come down hard’ on those who would rather buy than earn a degree?  No. That doesn’t work, for it elides an important point: We come down hard only on those who get caught. That’s generally a small percentage of people buying educational certification or placement. Though it does create a risk, buying a degree is a chance many see worth taking. As in drug trafficking, the potential profits make the gamble attractive.

We professors can’t solve this problem. We control neither perception about higher education nor the purse strings of its operations. If we, as the broader American culture, want to defeat, to take just one example, the ‘paypers’ that are being produced for American students wanting to purchase an education without doing the work by people in Kenya, Ukraine and India, we must change how we view education and stop being cheap about it.

But doing that is going to take more than faculty can provide.

What we can do, though, is start the process by taking control of our image and reasserting pride in our profession.

I know, you’ve heard it before. But the common American perception of college professors is not only wrong….

It’s ridiculous.

A fallacy about education runs deep in the American psyche. It’s the one that claims that each of us knows enough but that we just don’t have a piece of paper showing it. It’s the one that leads to colleges giving credit for ‘life experience,’ as though what we learn just by living is the equivalent of what is gained through the classroom. It’s the one that sees education as passive and ‘real’ life as active. It’s the one that posits that each of us is an autodidact with the ability to discern truth from fiction, the position that Mark Zuckerberg recently took when he said to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “Congresswoman, in most cases, in a democracy, I believe people should be able to see for themselves what politicians they may or may not vote for are saying and judge their character for themselves.” In other words, it’s the one that claims our innate knowledge suffices against all attempts at persuasion.

Even at education.

We who have spent our lives dedicated to learning tend to recognize this myth, but we are loathe to contradict it, recognizing that doing so runs against much of the American foundational myth of individualism and also smacks of self-flattery: Worried that others will perceive our championing of our education as a claim that we are better than the rest, we end up making no claim at all.

This, ultimately, has the effect of making even belief in the most outlandish of conspiracy theories as “viable,” in many minds, as belief in the results of real and careful trained study. With Maggie Smith’s character Countess Violet Crawley in the Downton Abbey movie, most Americans believe, without evidence, that they are “expert in every matter.” It’s an easy step to justification for laying out cash for a diploma.

Almost all of us believe we are experts without study and are worthy, based on nothing more our own beings, of certification.

Cheating to get it, then, is of no matter. For we do have the knowledge.

To counteract this silliness, we involved in higher education, from the new freshman at the least exalted community college to the worshiped sage atop an Ivy League department, need to stop being ashamed of the process we are involved in, the process of learning through method, discussion and re-evaluation.

Scientific Method has meaning, as does the Socratic Method.

Meaning lies in refinement through process, not in absolutes or definitions. Intellectual discussion (not debate) requires rigorous defense and flexible attack with the goal not of defeating the other but of understanding the strengths and weaknesses of varied positions. Re-evaluation presupposes the possibility of being wrong, an essential element behind all intellectual growth.

We should be proud of this process and of the traditions behind it.

Instead, we have allowed ourselves to be distracted by other issues (significant ones, yes, but distractions still)—to the point where we are too often more apologetic for our knowledge and skills than we are proud.

Whatever our personal political leanings, we on the faculty should learn to be proud when called “liberal college professors,” taking the word “liberal” back to its pre-1960s non-disparaging meaning.

Education does mean something beyond the framed sheepskins on our walls, but only we who have legitimately worked at it are in positions to explain it. Yet we have ceded our positions as experts to an odd egalitarianism, taking the idea that anyone can learn on their own to mean that everyone has, in fact, learned.

Sometimes it seems as though we no longer have any respect for our own profession; a plumber often has more pride than we. When someone offers suggestions, the plumber says something like, “I’ve been doing this for twenty years. You?” We never respond like that.

Sometimes, we should.