I completely agree. Especially for entrepreneurs, it's a super important skill that is not easily learned but often creates incredible advantages and opportunities.
Seriously? I have stayed in Manhattan for couple years and done my share of jaywalking occasionally in clear sight of NYPD. May be I am just lucky but this just doesn't resonate with me.
Yes, there are things which are culturally acceptable, but technically against the rules. Just because you get away with murder, and don't get caught, that doesn't mean murder is OK.
It's quite clear that plagiarism was badly enforced, but anyone who admitted to it would have been severely punished. Most of your examples are completely different - they are things that nobody cares about, even if you get caught.
Arguably, it's a terrible system if severe crimes are routinely left unpunished. Either the penalty should be lowered, or they should enforce it better.
So while I don't just blame the students, I think it's a sign that the system is fucked. The students are part of it, as are the lectures, and universities (do they fire lecturers who don't try to catch cheats, the same way they fire unpopular lecturers?), employers (perhaps they should test graduates to see if they are actually competent?), and society in general.
Yes, I'm guessing that this sort of thing is very common at Harvard (and, to be fair, in all colleges). They reasoned that the risk of getting caught was low enough to justify the cheating.
And they got caught. They lost their bet. So now they should pay the price.
Jaywalking is illegal in most (all?) US cities, but in many it's completely acceptable behavior. Jaywalking in Seattle (edit: was Manhattan), on the other hand is not done and you better not do it within eyesight of a police officer. Jaywalking in the Netherlands is completely fine (even right in front of the police), but in Germany it's not. The laws are the same, but the culture is different.
There are thousands of examples of socially acceptable behavior that doesn't correspond with the law. Drinking in public. Sometimes fine, sometimes not. Forging a signature. Occasionally fine, usually not.
Startups break laws all the time too. You have to get a product out first, and only when you start making money you get lawyers involved to make sure everything is going by the books. But if you aren't making real money yet the government really doesn't care whether you follow every law to the letter. And as a founder you have to decide which laws can be broken safely and which laws must be obeyed. Get it wrong and you may lose your company: either through legal trouble or because it doesn't get off the ground. The founders talk freely about the laws they broke. They brag about it! It's considered clever. Relentlessly resourceful. It's a fine line.
So if the culture in Harvard was such that cooperating for take-home exams was sometimes acceptable and sometimes not, then I consider that a legitimate excuse. It's easy to test too. Just look at the exams of that course of the previous years and check if people worked together on those too. Compare with other courses. If the results show that students consistently break the "individual work only" clause for some courses and not for other courses then the students probably didn't think they were doing anything wrong. They were just acting in the socially accepted manner.