Is It Ethical To Pay Students For Good Grades?
by Peggy Curran
Paris Arnopoulos made an offer Concordia University had to refuse.
Four years later, he still can’t quite figure out why.
Because what do you do with a professor when he stops being a professor?
And how do you go about saying no to a professor who is willing to work for free?
Arnopoulos taught political science at Concordia for 33 years before he retired in 1996, a time when government cuts, bulging deficits and an aging faculty pushed many Quebec universities to offer sweet early retirement packages.
But he thought he still had some teaching left in him.
“When we left, the old rector (Fred) Lowy gave a speech, saying ‘Don’t disappear, please stay around Concordia and share your wisdom.’ I took it seriously.”
So Arnopoulos went to the university with a proposition: He would continue to teach a class or two in the fall semester, but would pump his salary and more back into an endowment fund, which the university could use to offer scholarships.
Concordia accepted Arnopoulos’s unusual offer until 1998, when it told him that if he wanted to stay on, he’d have to join the part-time faculty association. Arnopoulos, convinced he’d end up at the bottom of the teaching rota, declined. But Concordia continued to give out scholarships for political science from the Arnopoulos endowment, which by 2000 had topped $30,000.
By 2006, Arnopoulos was in his early 70s but still itching to teach. After much lobbying, he persuaded the political science department to let him give a seminar course.
This time, Arnopoulos came up with an innovative plan to offer rebates to students who took his course.
“If a student in my course passes, he gets back the money. If he gets a C, he’ll get a bit more and if he gets an A, he’ll get double. Is that a good idea?”
Concordia didn’t think so. Arnopoulos taught one session but wasn’t asked back. His wages went into the endowment fund, but he said no one even bothered to tell him which students had received scholarships.
Concordia official Chris Mota said Arnopoulos wasn’t actually teaching for free because he received his wages and chose to reinvest them in the university through the endowment. She said the university had “ethical” problems with the notion that the same person who was handing out the marks would be handing out the money.
“I thought my system of giving people back their money was a good one. It would be an incentive to work harder to get higher marks. Isn’t that what the university is trying to do?” said Arnopoulos, who concedes there were tax advantages for him in giving the money back through the university.
It’s difficult to imagine there are a whole lot of retired professors out there like Arnopoulos who are both willing and able to give their wages away.
“It cannot really be a problem that they were afraid there would be riots in the street to take my course. C’mon,” said Arnopoulos, who estimates his endowment would top $100,000 by now if Concordia had let him keep teaching part-time in 1998.
“I’m a maverick, and I suppose they cannot handle it. But it would be so easy. Let me teach and give them money. What’s wrong with that?”
Arnopoulos wonders how Concordia, an institution which prides itself on innovation and encourages volunteer engagement, could be so conservative about trying something new.
“Technology is advancing at a crazy pace, but social technology is sluggish and not open to new thinking,” he said.
Personally, he believes society needs to find better ways to use the skills which older people have to offer after retirement.
“Before, you took your pension and a couple of years later, you died,” Arnopoulos said. “Now you take your pension and 20 years later you are still going. I want to do something, and there is no way I can do anything.”
