Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/143

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the dishonesty around him. He thinks no less of the cribber; the dishonest man is in no sense a pariah in his eyes. It is not his funeral, he says. If the man wants to crib, that is his business. It is a personal right, like chewing tobacco, or eating frogs' legs which no one should interfere with. If the modern undergraduate should have propounded to him the question that Cain tried to dodge in the Garden, he would unquestionably refuse to accept any responsibility as to his brother's conduct; it is up to every man to look out for himself, he would maintain. Even with girls the case is not different. I have known the most popular and the most influential girls in college to crib their way through an examination without apparent shame, who seemed to lose by the act nothing of their influence or of their popularity. If cribbing is common one does not lose caste by being guilty of it.

I used to have the feeling that the man who cribbed in an examination did so because he felt that he had to do so—he was in a corner from which he could not extricate himself without resorting to some illegitimate means—I thought it was usually a matter of a sudden overwhelming temptation to which the man yielded because the pressure was more than he could resist. Quite the contrary is usually true—nine-tenths of the people whom I have known to crib did not need to do so at all so far as passing the course in question was concerned. They cribbed because they thought it was easier, because they did not like the instructor, because other people were doing it, because they thought the examination was unfair, because they were pressed for time, because they