The evil of cribbing would be far more easily controlled and the cribber more rapidly eliminated if the members of the faculty were as a whole alert and helpful. In fact many of them are indifferent, and many more are asleep. They are in most cases, I am sorry to say, as indifferent to the situation as is the undergraduate himself.
"If my students want to crib in my classes," I often hear an instructor say, "they may; it isn't up to me to act as a spy and a policeman over them. If they do crib, I should rather not see them, and even when I might be led to suspect that they were doing so, I prefer to think well of them, and to treat them as if they were gentlemen." And no one better than the student knows exactly how the individual instructor feels about these matters, and no one thing is more potent in helping to confirm him in the habit of cribbing than this same indifference on the part of his instructors.
"You can't tell me that 'Bobby' doesn't know about that cribbing that goes on in his class," a junior said. "He's too sly a dog not to get onto a practice that is as open as cribbing in his class. He doesn't want the trouble or the unpopularity that would result if he reported the men, and so he prefers not to see what is going on." But in refusing to see it he lost the respect even of those who were cribbing under him, and indirectly encouraged one of the most vicious practices in college. A good many members of the faculty feel that their honor has been compromised when they report a man suspected of cribbing and those in charge of disciplinary matters do not find him guilty.
