Harvard grad Eric Kestler tells ABCNews.com that a “culture of cheating” exists at the university, making the current investigation into mass cheating the rule and not the exception.

“When I was a student there, I definitely noticed there was a culture of cheating there,” Kester [author of this book about Harvard] told ABC News today. “There’s a lot of pressure internally and externally to succeed at Harvard and when kids who are not used to failing feel these things, it can really bend their ethics in ways I didn’t expect to see.”

Kester said he struggled through a calculus class during his time at Harvard, and at one point was approached by a group of students who were planning to cheat….

Doing just a brief bit of web surfing shows a couple of things about this matter: One, it’s getting a huge amount of attention (no surprise there, given the brand name involved); and two, Harvard is getting off, in a sense, by getting lumped in with students cheating at colleges across the country. While in the short term this conflation may be something of a mitigating factor, in the longer term it does have the effect of diminishing Harvard’s sense of exceptionalism; the idea that it is not like every other college in the country.

I’d posit that it’s possible Harvard is actually far worse than other colleges when it comes to cheating. Here’s why: Students around the country do whatever it takes to get into Harvard, which must take them into lots of grey areas, so why wouldn’t they continue that behavior while they’re there? THe end justifies the means.

Two, academics have long been secondary to extracurricular pursuits at Harvard, so students may feel more comfortable cutting ethical corners than they would at other colleges.

And three, some of the faculty’s most celebrated figures rely on ghostwriters and graduate students to do their work, or, as Niall Ferguson recently showed, pursue work that is more popular and remunerative than credible, and show little interest in traditional academic pursuits such as teaching—so what message does that send?

I’ll admit to stirring the pot somewhat here for the sake of argument. But to me the larger question underneath this discussion is really to what extent scholarship is valued at Harvard, as opposed to the pursuit of worldly success?

As the competition to get in only increases, and the tuition continues to soar, that emphasis on results—money, power, fame—only intensifies. Learning becomes not an end in itself, but a means to an end. And you now have students from ever more diverse backgrounds without a common cultural appreciation for the virtue of scholarship per se, at the same time that Harvard has largely abandoned any teaching of ethics or attempts to shape the character of its students in any particular fashion.

All things considered, perhaps what’s surprising about this cheating investigation is not the size of it, but the fact that it didn’t happen sooner…..