Inside Higher Ed has a report on a new frontier in administrative idiocy:
After passing a new online test on ethics required of all state employees, [a] tenured professor in the English department at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale received a notice from his university ethics officer and from the state inspector general that he was not in compliance with state ethics regulations, a failure that state officials said could result in punishment that included dismissal. The reason? He had completed the test too quickly.
Yes, that’s right. Professors were asked to read a bunch of material on ethics training, and then take an online test. If they completed the multiple-choice test in less than ten minutes, they were presumed to have cheated, and held to be in violation of the regulation.
Truly, the mind boggles.
The professors talked about in the article have retained lawyers, and are threatening to sue the state and the university for being a bunch of utter morons. Well, ok, something more legal-sounding than that, but that’s the basic idea.
(This was discussed recently on some blog or another, but I can’t for the life of me remember where. My first reaction was “Oh, that can’t be true– there must be something else going on,” but the Inside Higher Ed piece describes exactly the same idiotic procedure mentioned in the blog post. I’m sorry I doubted you, whoever you were.)