Dartblog

A group of nine senior boys at the Hanover High School—just paces from Dartmouth—has been caught thieving final exams in order to cheat in math and chemistry courses. Bob Hansen has more details here.

It sounds as though the school is going rather lightly. During my time at dear old Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School, there was a grade-changing scandal in which a student used an administrator’s PC to change his grade. The penalty was, if I recall, expulsion. But in Hanover, it seems that folks are blaming “high pressured academic culture.” The community, you see, is to blame; it, not the perpetrators, weighs with responsibility. “The entire community must be willing to take a hard look at how it might have unwittingly contributed to this problem and work together to find solutions,” the local newspaper’s liberal columnist said. (His son was one of the cheaters.)

It is occasionally offered that the modern far-left is godless. But their “communities” have all the marks of a wanton, all-powerful, unknowable deity to whom all can be ascribed and all must be surrendered. Someone has committed a crime? It is all part of the Community’s plan. Do we dislike the culture here, or the prevailing social mores? It is time to sacrifice to the Community.

O, Community, let not mine eyes gaze on the burning-white final exam packet here under Mr. Smith’s desk at eleven o’clock at night at Hanover High. O, but your will surpasses mine; your will is, indeed, mine. I take the test. May these unfortunate events be prevented in the future by your Communal grace.