Anderson Cooper is right. How can you respectfully call yourself an institution of higher learning and at the same time pay Snooki of The Jersey Shore – an ungrateful little hobgoblin – to address your student body. Cooper lashed out at Rutgers for recently paying the Jersey Shore star $32,000 to share her insights, if one can use those words within the same sentence. To add insult to injury, that is more money than Rutgers paid Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winner Toni Morrison for her commencement address.
For Rutgers, this raises a few ethical questions regarding obligations to students and, more broadly, the secondary school system as a whole. Progressive education often integrates extracurricular interests into the realm of scholarly intuit, but here we have a blatant encroachment on reasonable thought, or so some might think.
Rutgers’ actions constitute an embarrassingly shameful statement regarding values. In dollars and cents, Rutgers has sent a strong message by putting a higher value on Snooki, a reality “star,” than on one of America’s and the world’s greatest novelists.
It is equally important to question the financial ethics in this issue. The Rutgers University Programming Association, who sponsored the event, issued a clarifying statement: “No state funds, tuition money, or donor contributions are used for these events. The students use funds designated for student programming. The show was promoted as a comedy act, not an academic program or lecture.” At a time when Gov. Chris Christie is shredding teacher unions and patting Gov. Scott Walker on the back for squeezing money out of blue collar paychecks, I think it’s fair to ask where these “funds designated for student programming” come from. As a person whose aunt teaches fifth grade in a public school not far from Rutgers and is forced to buy, with her own money, notebooks and pencils for many of her students because their parents cannot do so, I have a problem with taxpayer money going to an overpaid and rather useless cause, “comedy act” notwithstanding. I mean, they are in Jersey; they can find a Snooki comedy act at any local bar.
It could be that the ethical lines are too blurred to decipher who is wrong and who is right in this situation, so let us defer to Prof. Jack Rappaport, an ethics professor at La Salle University, in Philadelphia. Rappaport recently paid a few strippers to come in and give lap dances, while he conducted a lecture on Platonic and Hegelian ethics.
Possibly, Rappaport thought Platonic and Hegelian ethics so impossibly complex and anticipated that his charges would not grasp it anyway. So he cut their losses by throwing in lap dances; is this yet another gross, unethical abuse of power and responsibility? As cool as it is, this eminent professor was suspended, pending a university investigation. Nevertheless, the situation speaks to the general questions of what is passing for higher education and what is passing for student enrichment programming. In short, how low is the bar in American higher education? And are there any governing standards?
Both of these events vomit in the face of the clich? that a college education teaches people how to think. We have to question how many other stories are out there that Anderson didn’t get wind of. In addition, ethicists advise us to use the following as a simplest litmus test for judging behavior: What if everyone did it? In this case, what if every university used funds and students’ time to lapse into mindless self-indulgence and send distorted messages to students, in the guise of higher education? And so these stories must be publicized, and people must be called out on them. David Foster Wallace addressed this issue: “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”
Wallace goes on to warn, “…because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.” In the end, misuse of public funds, misuse of tuition payments and wasting class time all count less than this last point. With that in mind, are Rutgers administrators, RUPA, Jack Rappaport and their ilk ethically liable? You decide.
Dennis O’Reilly ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in economics.
