Educational Indulgences

Almost five hundred years ago, the Catholic Church was in all its glory. Easily the foremost denomination in Europe, it was rich and powerful, and growing richer. In the midst of a building boom, it had recently started construction on the new St. Peter’s Basilica, which was to be the largest cathedral in all of Christendom.

The problem was that the church’s ambitions exceeded the assets at its disposal. More money was needed; hence a fund raising drive was in order. This entailed dispatching papal emissaries to distant outposts so that they could sell indulgences to the faithful.

Indulgences were writs that presumably allowed sinners to speed their journey from purgatory to heaven. In return for cash, the church promised that the souls of the departed would literally have to spend less time cooling their heels as they waited for eternal salvation.

Martin Luther, until then an obscure German monk, went ballistic. How could the Pope’s legate, Johann Terzel, make such a claim? It made no sense to believe that one of the Lord’s servants could commit the Creator to so significant a decision—and do so for something as crass as money.

As a result, Luther issued his Ninety-Five Theses. In these, he challenged the corrupt practices of the Church, thereby launching the Protestant Reformation.

Today another powerful institution has gone into the indulgence business. Not monolithic or spiritual like the medieval church, but nonetheless arrogant and over-ambitious, contemporary universities have entered the salvation business. And they too have done so for cash on the barrelhead.

What is being sold today is not entry to heaven, but the credentials to move ahead in the commercial marketplace. The instrument for doing so, however, is not a signed document from the Pope, but official credits that allow the bearer to graduate with a college degree.

The means whereby this fraud is perpetrated is the on-line college course. It is supposed to be the equivalent of a traditional college course, yet rarely is. Inferior in the materials taught and the information acquired, it often bears little resemblance to what it theoretically replaces.

Why, you ask, is this done? The answer is money. Colleges charge a premium for on-line courses. The schools get more per credit hour and their instructors are remunerated with additional dollars per head they teach. So conventional has this practice become that no individual school can afford to repudiate it lest its competitors leave it behind.

Nowadays one hears computer based learning lauded as the wave of the future. It is said to be innovative and efficient. No doubt it is convenient. But is it effective? Its partisans say yes, but most students concerned with learning say no—at least in the humanities and social sciences.

Almost everyone agrees that there is more cheating on-line, but the apologists for web-learning assure us they will soon have this weakness under control. By the same token, most acknowledge that the communication between the teacher and student is truncated, yet they counter that this is more than compensated for by the individual attention made possible.

In fact, quality suffers. Some insist that the for-profit schools, which specialize in on-line courses, will eventually be the model for higher education. Nonetheless, these folks must also admit that the diploma mills cater to vulnerable students, many of whom cannot hack it at a traditional college.

The truth is that easy answers did not work five hundred years ago and they will not work now. Back then shortcuts to heaven were an invitation to buy one’s way out of trouble. Today they allow the lazy and unmotivated to obtain the simulation of a college education without having to invest the intellectual energy required by the real thing.

What we lack—that early modern Europe found—is someone to sound the alarm in a way that is heard. Without this, we too may wallow in corruption.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University