Milken’s Sentence
I am writing in response to two seemingly unrelated articles in the Nov. 22 paper. One is by Larry Gordon about Prof. Michael Moffatt’s study on student cheating and the other is by Scot J. Paltrow about Michael Milken’s 10-year prison term.
According to Moffatt’s survey, about 45% of students cheat occasionally. The worst offenders were economic majors. I quote Moffatt: “With all the inducements for cheating in undergraduate education, my question now has become: Why doesn’t everyone cheat rather than resist temptation?”
U.S. District Judge Kimba M. Wood said the following to Milken: “Your crimes show a pattern of skirting the law, stepping just over to the wrong side of law in an apparent effort to get some of the benefits from violating the law without running a substantial risk of being caught.”
The last statement sounds to me like a classical definition of the term cheating . What if Milken had done nothing else but to cheat on a grand scale? And where did he most likely develop this skill?
CHRISTIAN KARL
Los Angeles
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