Cheating, Truth-telling, and the Practice of Freedom

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Reconceputalizing the work of teaching

Proposal

This essay emerges from a series of wonderings about our ideas about honesty and cheating, as tied to Foucault’s discussion of truth-telling, after an incident that took place in my teaching. The vignette that serves as trigger for these explorations is as follows:

I’m teaching a graduate level course, and two students are taking the course from China, while the rest are in person. Each one of the two students turns in a final paper that is well written, makes a clear argument, barely uses readings from the class, and is only tangentially related to the topics of the class or the issues of concern to the two students, as I gather from their class participation. I prepare feedback and as I’m attaching the files, I accidently see in the metadata that the names that appear under the “created by” tag, seem to be those of Nigerian men. I google them and there are two men with those names who are teachers in Nigeria and work for an academic consultancy firm that, upon further digging, offers to write papers for a fee. Students in China, taking a class in a US university, paying a Nigerian firm to write papers for them. My reactions are a mixture of anger, fascination, and puzzlement.

The theme of the 2024 CIES Annual Meeting is The Power of Protest. When one thinks about protest, one tends to imagine people on the streets, large demonstrations and performances, and a movement towards liberation. But what if protest were to take a different form, one that is usually not recognized as such, especially when the protest is against something we may hold dear?

The vignette above has multiple possible readings. The most common, given the reaction of peers and administration (and at times myself), is that these students tried to cheat by paying someone else to do the work for them. In their culture, corruption and dishonesty are common practices, and by being abroad, they have not had the chance to adjust to our academic culture. This interpretation is the one that leads, in myself, to anger on two accounts: they tried to take me for a fool, and maybe even worse, they forced me, a progressive educator, to take on the much-despised role of the police. Why couldn’t they just ask for help, given how approachable I am? There is a second reading, perhaps complementary to this one but adding a “warmer” layer, that takes into account the collective trauma of the pandemic, the difficulties of technologically mediated learning, and the fact that these students may have been otherwise occupied. What they did is still clearly wrong, but…

The potential reading I am interested in suspends some of the terms we perhaps take for granted (honesty, cheating, culture) and considers on the one hand, the global knowledge economy, and on the other, the possibility of multiple games of truth confronting one another. Foucault used “truth” in two distinct, yet related, ways. In the mid-1970s, Foucault discussed truth mostly as a particular kind of discourse, that is, as a set of statements bounded by certain rules that determined what could and could not be said, with the specific characteristic of being embedded in a certain authority: “'Truth' is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. 'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A ‘regime' of truth” (Foucault, 2010a, p.74).
In the early 1980s, in his lectures at Louvain, Foucault deals more directly with the subject’s role in their own submission through practices of truth-telling about the self (Harcourt, 2016). However, this avowal –Harcourt points out-, also opens up questions about the power embedded in those acts of truth-telling, and in their refusal, something that Foucault begins to examine in his latest works on ethics as care for the self and the practice of freedom (Foucault, 2006; 2010b). In claiming that we all know that all power is not evil, Foucault (2010b) expresses: “I do not think that a society can exist without power relations, if by that one means the strategies by which individuals try to direct and control the conduct of others. The problem, then, is not to try to dissolve them in the utopia of completely transparent communication but to acquire the rules of law, the management techniques, and also the morality, the ethos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play these games of power with as little domination as possible” (p. 298).
Following this, I propose to explore an interpretation of the vignette as a series of avowals and approximations at pedagogical ethical acts. What if, for instance:
The students were demanding my own avowal, my admission that, as progressive as one may want to believe one is, policing and institutional pedagogies are inextricably intertwined, forcing me to acknowledge my role in my own submission?
Their papers were seen as a protest, that is, a practice of freedom, against the idea that an elite US university could ever contribute to dismantling the global knowledge economy, and the centuries of colonial exploitation that led them to desire/be made to obtain a degree from a place that may have little of interest to offer to them in terms of knowledge?
Cheating could be, in some cases, be seen simultaneously as a specific form of truth-telling that is both a subjection to, and a push against, the regimes of truth that constitute the modern, Western university?

As we start to deal more and more with AI, we will need to rethink what is meant by cheating, and the logics under which we are operating in order to denounce, and police, students’ behaviors. My hope is that this essay moves the conversation in a direction that serves justice through self-examination.

Author

• Dani Friedrich, Teachers College, Columbia University