DISSEMBLING AS WE GO: WHY NOTHING IS REAL, NOT EVEN "WE!"

DISSEMBLING AS WE GO: WHY NOTHING IS REAL, NOT EVEN “WE”!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 2008

“DISSEMBLE: to hide under a false appearance; to put on the appearance of; to put on a false appearance; to conceal facts, intentions, or feelings under some pretense.”

MERRIAM WEBSTER’S COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY (1993)

Shauna Moffit, a star football player at the University of South Florida, who played for a USF’s top 25 team in the Sun Bowl in El Paso, Texas, and is now eligible for the NFL draft, has become infamous for something other than football, academic cheating.

This has come to light as he apparently deserted his wife and 3-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son two months ago, and recently filed divorce papers after five years of marriage.

Just when his career looks golden with a possible multi-million dollar contract with some NFL team, his wife and children find themselves in the lurch. So, it should come as no surprise that the wife might use what little ammunition she has to clip her husband’s wings by telling the rest of the story of her husband who recently received his degree in communication from USF.

It appears that she and her sister wrote many if not all of his academic papers on their computers. They have proof of this, the wife on her work computer, and the sister on her home computer. Additionally, Moffit’s sister-in-law took at least two on-line courses for him in which she claims he failed to participate at all.

These on-line universities promise to be an oasis for dissembling with the world papered with degrees of students that are not only cynical of learning but of the whole academic institution that honored them with degrees. I once ghost wrote a book for a professional who gave me a huge box of material and asked me to turn it into a book, which I did. Now we are on the brink of ghost written degrees and dissembling careers.

Today, according to the Tampa Tribune, a week after this drama first surfaced, USF president Judy Genshaft turns the problem over to her USF spokesman, Ken Gullette. He immediately starts the spin that it is a “domestic dispute” and there will be no investigation “unless professors come forth with complaints.” Meanwhile, the NCAA lurks in the background with possible academic and athletic sanctions.

AGE OF AMBIVALENCE REIFIED

This has become a headline story in the local newspaper when it is actually a reflection of our ambivalent times, which go back as far as I can remember. Cheating is what people do to get an edge when society makes having an edge important.

Take the “Patriots Paradox,” as Time (January 14, 2008) magazine puts it. The New England Patriots football team of the National Football League, with by far the best team in the sport, cheated when clearly it was not necessary.

Coach Bill Belichick justified his unethical approach to coaching with the weak plea, “We get judged on our performance. And that’s what drives our decisions. Performance.”

The Patriots were given a huge fine, but hey, that’s only money, no big deal. Thirty-five years ago, the Miami Dolphins had an undefeated season when Don Shula coached them, when the ambivalence between playing a sport and creating a dynasty had not yet become a moral wrecking ball.

Technology was just rearing its ugly head, as chemistry had not yet become the diet of the times for professional athletes. That said we were no longer comfortable as human beings; we had to be super human beings, what Nietzsche called “superman.”

In the late sixteenth century, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare were creating dramatic literature that has never been surpassed.

In the late sixteenth century, science was gaining momentum in solving the mysteries of the universe, but science then as now had little appreciation of the human soul, and so we languish, then as now, in ambivalence and confusion.

Science was trying to create a Faustian edge when it knew little, then as now, about whom we are, where we are, or why we are. In the absence of such knowledge, distraction from self-ignorance became the drive to perform.

Eric Hoffer, the dockworker turned philosopher, once said, “To understand your time study the way it plays its games.” He then went on to say that this is the boilerplate of how society sees itself and is reflected in its mirror.

DISSEMEBLING AS A WAY OF LIFE

When I was a chemistry student at the University of Iowa, and had a reputation of acing all the tests, two students approached me with ten-dollar bills, and asked, “Can we sit on either side of you in the final?” Naively, I said, “You can sit wherever you like.”

Then they tried to give me the two ten-dollar bills, which today would total more than $100. “You don’t understand,” they said, “we want to copy your work. We need to get a good grade in this course or we won’t graduate.”

It so shocked me that I yelled out, “Get out of here,” and they did. But I learned something that I didn’t know to that point; dissemblers are not so easily discouraged.

The chemistry final took place in the amphitheater. Seats at the top to the bottom of this student assembly were at a sharp angle ending in the narrow lecture platform of the professor at the bottom. Unbeknown to me, these two students positioned themselves above and to the side of me so that they could see my work, work I failed to cover up. They relayed the answers to each other as I wrote.

The examination was complicated in that it asked for equations that involved several steps to eventual completion. This included correct catalysts at each step, and calculation of the proper yields. A typical equation would be a page or page and one half, all in alphabetic symbology according to the Periodic Table.

When my grade wasn’t posted, I went to my professor who told me the amazing news that he had three identical papers, one of which was mine.

Not only had I failed to “ace” the course but I registered a low “B,” having gone off the rails to one problem with a wild answer, as did two other students.

My professor wanted an explanation. Typical of my personality, which has not changed appreciably in over fifty years, I said, “You can’t be seriously. Why would I cheat when I am the best student in the department?"

I was reminded of this when Alex Rodriquez of the New York Yankees, and MVP of the American League in 2007, was recently asked in a television interview, “Have you every used growth hormones or performance enhancing drugs?” He answered as I did, indicating he didn’t have to take anything to have an edge; his talent was enough.

“I know,” my professor said with a smile, “but I would like for you to explain how you got lost in this one problem, only to have identical work show up in two other papers.” For some reason, I played ignorant, and he left it at that. We then had an amicable discussion from that point on.

Years later, when I was a chemical sales engineer in the field for Nalco Chemical Company, my colleagues wondered at my edge, leading the district in sales quarter after quarter. It was rumored that I cheated; that I gave my customers special prices or some kind of gratuities, when none of this was true. I only gave them good service and partnered with them to solve their problems.

This approach was finally formulated in a book (Confident Selling Prentice-Hall 1970). The book demonstrated that from my earliest days I never believed in shortcuts, but did believe in looking at problems intuitively as well as cognitively.

Years later, now a mature student in my late thirties, I returned to the university to pursue a Ph.D. One of my professors, who noted I had some facility in writing, asked if I would consider writing some papers for him, indicating he would make it worth my while. I refused and not politely. The professor was much younger than I was. While I failed to take his bribe, I didn’t report it, as I should have. Dissemblers are equally guilty when they are complicit in the scheme.

Still later, now a management psychologist at Honeywell, I continued to be an adjunct professor at Florida Institute of Technology and the University of South Florida. One course was “management theory & thought” in which I asked the students to conceive their own theory. I received two almost identical papers in which the content varied slightly but not the context, or subject matter. Moreover, the writing style was clearly the same. It turned out they were a husband and wife, one working at Honeywell, and one for the city of Clearwater (Florida). I had had the wife in a previous course and recognized her style and conceptual skills. It was obvious that her husband didn’t write his paper. I had a conference with them, indicating what I had found.

The husband said, “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing. You’re going to write your own paper.”

“What if I refuse?”

“Then you fail the course.”

He wrote the paper but neither one of them ever spoke to me again.

Dissembling isn’t always this direct. One student of mine from another company with a Ph.D. in physical chemistry, which is a difficult discipline that I know from having taken a course in it, wrote such a deplorable paper that I couldn’t give it a passing grade, which is a “B” in graduate work, or the student gets no credit for the course.

We met and I told him I thought he could do much better; that his paper wasn’t graduate level work. There was anger if not hate in his eyes bordering on belligerence. Ignoring this, I said, “I sense a problem here because I know you are a brilliant man.”

With that statement, his hostility seemed to melt, as did his pride. He confessed that he was dyslexic; that reading and writing had always been difficult for him but, for some reason, not quantitative thinking. He further confessed that he needed an MBA because it was required for promotion in his department.

“But you’re a research scientist; you don’t work much with people, do you? Mainly with algorithms, right?” He nodded.

“Are you in management, or interested in being a paper pushing manager?”

He smiled, “No, but in our place whatever the work you have to have this. It’s part of the drill.”

So, in his case, dissembling was the personality not only of the individual, but of the organization as well. Perhaps the company could tell its stockholders that its scientists were business savvy, another dissembling facade.

There is no one that is more susceptible to directness, to honesty whatever its nature than I am. This scientist and I worked hard together and we got him through the course with a well-earned “B.” He went on to earn his MBA and get the promotion he desired.

Still later, now a director of Honeywell Europe, I was given a project where we would conduct a popularity contest of the “best executive” in Europe with a criteria of indicators to guide the contributors. This was a contest that extended from one end to the other end of Europe and included all manufacturing plants and national subsidiaries.

Honeywell Europe employees loved the contest and submitted impressive arguments for their favorite executive. My people were well involved in evaluating these submissions, when my boss noted that the person whom he thought should be so recognized was not even nominated. At that point, he closed the contest. His person would be recognized as the “most popular executive” at the next Honeywell Europe Conference, and so it happened.

SO WHAT?

The test of ambivalence is the degree to which dissembling captures the essence of society.

When women feel the need to show their cleavage to be desired, and men their growth hormone physiques to appear virile; when people have nose reshaping, eyelifts, Liposuctions, breast reduction or enhancements, facelifts, collagen injections, or Dermabrasion, dissembling is in play.

When people need Viagra to perform, or a series of drugs to get through the day, dissembling is in play.

Nature is put on hold, as is conventional wisdom, and narcissism becomes therapy for an anxious age.

We drive big or sporty cars because they make us feel big or sporty. We push our children to excel beyond their interests and abilities because it makes us feel important and good parents in their reflected glory.

We keep moving to the periphery of our being because ambivalent detritus occupies where we once had a center.

Somewhere along the line, shortcuts became more important than experience. We became obsessed with the goal and forgot the journey, yet the journey is all we ever have.
It is the reason why when what we wished for is accomplished, we say, “is that all there is to love?” It is never love, either of things or persons, but self-dissembling possessiveness.

It is why billionaires cheat; why winning coaches cheat; why good students cheat; why great athletes cheat; why everyone cheats failing to realize the only loser in the equation is the cheater, not the cheated.

Is there any hope to regain our moral center? It was Alexander Lowen who put it best, “The path to joy leads through despair.”

The child must die to give birth to the man. America remains an obsessed society in terminal adolescent refusing to grow up because it has never had to grow up. The time will come when necessity will not be an option, and America will mature as all peoples have in the past, not out of strategy but out of necessity. We are moving in that direction and time will only tell when it will arrive.

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Dr. Fisher’s latest book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). Check out his blog and website: www.fisherofideas.com