UPDATE: I have learned that Stanford Dean Jenny Martinez has instituted an investigation into the student who bragged about submitting a false attestation to having completed the mandatory freedom of speech training, and that the investigation will seek to determine whether other students also submitted attestations without watching the video presentation. Dean Martinez did not respond to my email inquiries.
In an earlier post, I criticized the Wharton School’s Professor Maurice Schweitzer for this comment about business graduate students, an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
“I don’t tell my Ph.D. students, ‘Never plagiarize work, never make up data,’” he said. “I assume that’s obvious.” But in hindsight, he acknowledged that it would have been better to supervise the data collection more closely. “Clearly we need to be more vigilant and less trusting than we’ve been,” he said.
I noted that Northwestern’s first-year law students must attend a mandatory program on plagiarism and academic honesty, and, like law students everywhere, they take a required course on legal ethics. But perhaps the instruction is futile.
A recent article in the Washington Free Beacon describes Stanford Law School’s “mandatory half-day training session on ‘freedom of speech and the norms of the legal profession'” as a “campus joke.” According to the Free Beacon,
[T]he promised training wasn’t much of a crash course in free speech. Instead, it was an online program that required barely a minute’s effort, according to five people who completed the training as well as screenshots and recordings reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. Students were given six weeks to watch five prerecorded videos, most about an hour long, then asked to sign a form attesting that they had done so.
The videos could be played on mute, and the form—which could be accessed without opening the training—did not ask any questions about their content, letting students tune out the modules or skip them entirely.
More worrisome was the shameless response of at least one Stanford law student:
“I watched none of the videos,” one student said. “I never even opened the links. On the day the training was due, I went to the attestation link provided by the university, checked a box confirming I watched the videos, and that was the end of the matter. Whole process took 10 seconds.”
Signing a false attestation is among the most serious ethical offenses a lawyer can commit. Bragging makes it worse. If such conduct is widespread at Stanford, the law school is facing a profound problem. The response to a vapid requirement cannot be lying about completing it. Students who are concerned about mandated law school programs must still complete them; the remedy is complaining or reporting (including anonymously), not falsifying.
The Free Beacon did not comment on the student’s admission of cheating, and of course I do not expect a journalist to out his informant. On the other hand, the Stanford administration should immediately take steps to determine, if possible, how many students submitted the attestation without viewing the training.
If nothing else, the entire Stanford student body should be cautioned that false attestation is an honor code violation. Far from a joking matter, similar conduct among lawyers would lead to professional discipline.
Posted by Steve Lubet on July 13, 2023 at 04:59 AM