Soul of Maryland liberal arts college is challenged

ANNAPOLIS, Md. - At St. John's College, education is an act of faith. Faith in the desire to learn and in the Great Books used to gain such wisdom. Faith in the ability to accomplish this task on your own. And faith in a system that puts its faith in students to do so.

The aims at this tiny liberal arts college seem higher, purer than at most schools. Here, knowledge is pursued for its own sake. Great bodies of work are read in order to be poked, prodded and torn apart; ideas that great thinkers have expounded upon for thousands of years are re-examined and turned upside down. Finally, each student uses all those semesters of learning to thoughtfully write, present and defend a major piece of work during their senior year.

It's a system that St. John's has taken pride in for more than six decades, since the creation of the school's revered New Program curriculum established it as one of the most prestigious and quirkiest liberal arts schools in the country.

Which explains why, more than a year since one bright, well-thought-of student showed how easily that system could be fooled, and since others who learned of her deception failed to report it, St. John's is still debating what some have termed a "treasonous" act: the plagiarism of a senior essay, an essay awarded one of the school's top prizes.

With a new semester under way, school officials are adamant that their system remains intact. But a school dedicated to tackling civilization's great questions still seems confounded by a few of its own: Why, at a school where grades are not important (they aren't even handed out); where there are no lectures, no tests and no research papers; and where success is determined by abstract and subjective measurements based on participation and analytical ability, would anyone choose to cheat? And what, if anything, should be done to prevent its happening again?

Lynette Dowty might have gotten away with it. But, like some fatally flawed character in the Greek tragedies she'd studied, she proved to be her own undoing.

She arrived at the Annapolis campus in the fall of 1993, having come from her home in Granite Bay, Calif., to attend St. John's. Almost immediately she stood out among the school's 400 students.

Physically striking, nearly 5-foot-10 with long, wild red hair, she was bright, talented, charming, slightly cynical.

"She wanted to project strong," said Kamielle Shaffer, who got to know Lynette in her junior year. "She enjoyed being noticed. She liked being the center of attention."

Not an easy task at St. John's.

"This is an unusual place. It is not for everybody," said William Braithwaite, a St. John's tutor - there are no "professors" here - for three years. "The students who choose to come here are highly self-selective, creating a richness of conversation going on here that cannot be imitated at any college or university in the nation."

Students are drawn by the curriculum known simply as the Program. Created in 1937, it is a unified, all-required curriculum based on classic works of literature. All students read the same books, in the same order. There are no majors, no departments. Just reading and oral and written debate.

It's the Program that attracts thousands of applications every year despite tuition and fees of about $27,000 per year.

For students, the payoff is an intimate education with class sizes no larger than 20. These 18- to 22-year-olds will tell you, without cracking a smile, that they are here to learn important things from Homer, Plato, Herodotus, Aristotle, Kant and Nietzsche.

It was in this environment that Dowty decided to commit academia's worst offense.

May 18, 1997 was commencement day for the 90 seniors. Sitting with her classmates, Kamielle Shaffer found herself crying.

On stage above her stood Dowty, smiling and waving as she accepted the school's coveted Senior Essay Prize.

"I was horrified. Enraged. Stunned. How could anyone do this and get away with it?" said Shaffer, a soft-spoken, 23-year-old woman. "I was watching this huge wrong that's been done and wondering, 'How do I deal with it?' "

What Shaffer and a handful of others in the St. John's community were dealing with that day was the rumor that Dowty's prize-winning essay was a fraud. The rumor had been making the rounds since April, when Dowty herself had apparently confided in a friend.

That any student would choose to cheat was hard to accept, let alone Dowty, who, by all accounts, was more than capable of writing a prize-winning essay.

Zoe Andriolo, who befriended Dowty when they were first-year students said, "I always knew her as an excellent writer. Everyone did."

When Dowty announced in September 1996 that she'd chosen "Moby Dick" as the subject for her senior essay, few were surprised; Herman Melville's tale was her favorite. She told friends she had spent six weeks over the summer studying the novel, even drafting the first pages of her essay. By the essay deadline at the end of January, she had gone through several drafts with her tutor.

That spring came the whispers about Dowty. And then commencement day and the prize. Despite her tears that day, Shaffer left school without saying anything.

"Was it my right to say something?" she asked. "I wasn't so sure then and I'm still not. I left it all behind."

The whispers finally reached school officials the next winter, after tutor John Verdi learned of the Dowty rumor. St. John's quickly launched an investigation. After two months, it was determined that Dowty's essay was "essentially identical" and "unmistakably copied" from an essay by 1976 graduate David E.R. Clement.

"We take a lot of things seriously here, and cheating is one of them," says Dean Harvey Flaumenhaft. "To take another student's work and appropriate it that way is a massive violation. It took time to get to the matter, but it didn't take a long time to know what to do about it."

The college's Board of Visitors and Governors revoked both Dowty's degree and essay prize this past spring. She also was formally expelled, in order to prevent her graduating by submitting a new essay.

The one person who might bring the most understanding to the plagiarism incident is not talking. At least directly.

According to her father, Jimmy Dowty, Lynette Dowty has decided not to appeal her expulsion and loss of degree. She "has written her letters of apology," he says. "She has told them she was sorry. We want to move on."

NewsCom09/30/98 10:00:05 AM

10-01-98