> The institution and the community condones, if not promotes, academic dishonesty, emphasizing prestige over intellectual growth. Academics are no longer the priority of the students or teachers at Harvard College.
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> This prevalence of academic dishonesty is symptomatic of a pervading mentality on campus that neglects the classroom.
> Nicolaus Mills ’60, a literature professor at Sarah Lawrence College, points to a weak emphasis on undergraduate teaching as an underlying factor that enabled the scandal to take place on Harvard’s campus.
> ... As professors invest less time in the classroom—a product of pressures to establish themselves primarily as researchers—so too do teaching fellows and students.
The above attitude unfortunately has been (and will continue to be) copied by any institution hoping to place itself among prestigious names. My alma mater, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) made a huge shift in recent years (2006-) towards firing much of the "clinical faculty", which was the name reserved for faculty who did not engage in research, and instead merely taught.
Unfortunately for students, faculty who do engage in research often consider the teaching component of their careers as an afterthought (or worse, an annoyance).
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The single most important thing I learned when I was a child tutor is this: Without enthusiasm you've got nothing - zero - to work with in a student. And if they don't have it coming in you've got a non-trivial problem. You can't teach enthusiasm, it's imparted only one way.
Enthusiasm is contagious. It's part of the draw of being in a school in the first place, around so many other bright people who are willing to be there and spend the time learning. Then you get to this:
> “The modal Harvard student takes their courses as seriously as they think the instructor is taking the course,”
And it's painfully understandable that the experience will be damning for the average student, regardless of institution.