Since tangents from my last post spawned quite a rich debate (seriously, I haven’t had such a fun Wednesday in a while!), I thought I’d comment on something that Derek stated and something to which I alluded in my first comment of the previous post, that is, the state of decline that some academic institutions appear to be in. I hesitate to speak for academia in general because a) across the board generalizations are not useful for an interpretive or ethnographic purpose, and b) because I can only speak about the university I’m attending, as well as cite anecdotal evidence from another reader.
When I went to college for the first time (the real time, when I spent four years earning a real degree), I was absolutely in love with everything about it. I loved the culture of smart, interesting people, who loved to be smart and interesting; I loved (and was totally afraid of) all the brilliant nutty professors who had written books that I’d seen in the bookstore; I loved walking through the old Gothic buildings and sitting on a quad that American presidents had sat on. I thought of this institution — my institution! — as a hallowed place where learning was revered and all else political took a backseat to that. In short, I believed in the legend, I basked in the image, and part of me still does and always will. I’ve said over and over that going to Yale was the best decision I have ever made in my entire life, and I don’t think that will ever change.
This isn’t to say that this legend was in any way real. Grade inflation exists at Yale just as it does anywhere else, perhaps to an even greater degree. There were plenty of drunken idiots and rich brats who didn’t revere knowledge the way I did, or at least the kind of knowledge that I did. My life there wasn’t a dreamworld all the time by any means; but still, I felt safe there, safe in ways social and psychological. Part of feeling safe means I was afforded the opportunity to grow and make mistakes, to get my very first D on a paper and not feel like my identity was shattered, safe to develop an identity that incorporated aspects academic and non. And I felt challenged there - as someone who grew up being told how smart she was and never really putting much effort into my classes in high school and ending up with A’s regardless, it was challenging, humbling, and extremely exciting to be surrounded by people who were not only smarter than me but smart in ways that I hadn’t even considered before.
This is not about that, though. This is about the place I’m at now, the smaller Jesuit school where, as the following story will attest, the administration, the governing body (made up of priests and laypeople, though that’s not really relevant to the story), acted in accordance with what their students demanded without considering what was actually best for those students, not to mention the right or brave thing to do.
I heard this story only recently, well into my final semester at school. It’s about a professor who taught an upper level class required for majors in a smallish department, so there were only 5 or 6 majors in their junior year that particular year. The required junior year class is apparently notoriously hard and the group of them were fairly close, having bonded to study/commiserate. The end of the fall semester rolled around and the professor was getting ready to administer the final. On the whole, the class had done poorly, their grades hovering in the C and D region. Apparently, just before the actual exam, the students got together and decided that if they all just bombed the exam, the professor couldn’t possibly give them all failing grades.
So that’s what they did. Instead of nutting up and studying for a hard test in a hard course, they all walked in there and failed the final. When the professor was grading the exams, he quickly realized what had happened and went to the dean. He explained that all these students had earned F’s, but he suspected something else was going on and wasn’t sure what he should do about it. The dean called a meeting with the students and the professor and it was decided that because the circumstances were so unusual, the final would be readministered and the students would all get another chance. Unusual, but fair enough - the students got another chance to act like grown-ups, the professor didn’t have to have an entire class of F’s, and the university didn’t have to report terrible GPAs.
So the test was readministered. This time, 2 of the students did well, earning far better than a passing grade. The other 3 students once again walked into the classroom and turned in an exam that qualified them for a failing grade. And THIS time, those three students went to the dean and complained — for the first time all semester — that this professor was a bad teacher, unapproachable, unhelpful, etc. It was his fault that they had failing grades - they couldn’t grasp the concepts because of him, despite their best efforts.
So a full-scale academic investigation, complete with sets of hearings and meetings in front of the dean and administrative board, was launched. Here were the facts: 5 students failed the first time around, only 3 the second. The professor had clearly announced office hours, had offered his services as well as the services of tutors in the department. In the hearings that followed, the students admitted that they had banded together and planned to fail the first time, but this was because none of them had learned anything the whole year, so what choice did they have — despite the fact that two of them recorded above average grades the second time around. The board demanded that the professor contact former students to have them write him letters of support, vouching for his integrity and effectiveness as a teacher. He also had to have other faculty members write him support letters and sit in on his classes as evaluators. Some “impartial” members of the Jesuit board also sat in on a few of his lectures to evaluate his effectiveness as a teacher, one even going so far as to interrupt the class with questions that were not directly relevant to the subjects at hand. The professor was forced to give all his students in that particular class C’s, despite the fact that only two of them had actually earned that grade.
This process went on for months, and finally the board came to the conclusion that he was not at fault, that it was the students who had misstepped. So they revoked the students’ grades, recorded failing grades for all of them, and subjected them to XCOM, right?
Wrong. Absolutely nothing happened to any of those students. The professor, on the other hand, though he was allowed to retain his tenure, has not received a promotion in the eight years since this incident, despite repeated appeals to do so (he was in his 3rd year of Associate Professorship; typically, promotion to full Professor occurs after 5 years as an Associate, according to the precedent at this university and in this department). This professor is a published scholar, has had numerous faculty and student endorsements for his case, and has had the endorsements of professors at other institutions. He has done research at universities around the globe and is noted in academic circles as an expert in his particular field (electron microscopy). He has been published in Science (yes, that Science).
This professor is my father.
And because three snot-nosed, rich brats who didn’t want to do the work had the tenacity to take their false case to the highest governing board at school, knowing that their $40K tuitions and the school’s desire to maintain erroneous academic standards would trump the voice of a lone professor in a small science department, he will probably stay an Associate for the rest of his tenure, secure in his job and finances, but broken in spirit and forever disillusioned in the institution he’s called home for 20 years — the worst, worst kind of safe. Science is his God (I got that from him) and he told me that when he came to the school in 1978, he felt it was literally the best choice he had ever made. I recalled the thing upon which I bestow that honor, and a little piece of my spirit broke too, forever.