Day after day, I noted and downloaded the stream of messages on grades,
grade inflation and related issues, but could not --in the midst of the
end of semester rush-- take the time to read them. This morning a piece
in the NEW YORK TIMES on my old alma mater (Stanford) caught my eye and
inspired me to deal with the subject politically, i.e., by writing an
intervention into an ongoing struggle. So I did, and you all will find it
appended below. When I finished, I printed out the collection of Pen-l
messages and read them to see if I was missing anything important that
might fit into the line of argument I had laid out. There was a little
overlap but not much, so after posting the piece to the Stanford student
newspaper I decided to post it here for discussion. It turns out that
the last paper of the quarter has already been put to bed, so the piece
will only circulate among some student and faculty activists I've been in
touch with today and will NOT appear in the paper, at least not this
quarter.
I've posted it as a reply to Penny's intervention because I liked her
broad questions demanding that the subject be situated in a larger context.
So, without further ado.
WORRIED ABOUT GRADE INFLATION? ABOLISH GRADES!
by Harry Cleaver*
(Stanford Ph.D., 1975)
Special to the Stanford Daily
Austin, Texas., May 31 -- 6:30am. Bleary-eyed, I sip my caffeine and flip
through the morning New York Times looking for inspiration, some sign of
grassroots struggle, maybe even a victory to get the adrenlin flowing.
Finally, on page 7, a title jumps out at me: "At Stanford, A Rebellion On
Grades". All right! Something's stirring at my old alma mater!
"The grade F does not exist here", I read, "The C is fast becoming extinct."
Hmm! The current generation has things well in hand, I think to myself.
Maybe they are pushing for the complete abolition of grades. At a place like
Stanford, that would be a real change!
But no, reading on I discover that instead of students in rebellion against
grades, a handful of conservative faculty members are trying to crack down
on students, to whip up faculty support for harder grading! So the anti-
grade inflation counter-revolution has come to Stanford! It's a campaign I
know well, for it has been going on here at the University of Texas where I
teach for years.
The arguments for harder grading, I see, are familiar, especially: "Stanford
doesn't give failing grades. This penalizes good students at the expense of
poor students." What such statements really mean, of course, is that
employers can't identify students who do what they are told and work hard
because their record of obedience and toil doesn't stand out if the grade
hierarchy is too narrow. Standard ploy: mobilize the workaholics against
the slackers. Use the would-be CEOs against the independently-minded
who resist discipline and follow their own paths of learning.
Let's cut through the euphemistic rhetoric of the debate and get to the real
issues.
The fight over grade inflation is about the imposition of work and how
much freedom students have to pursue their own studies, in the classroom
and out. The harder the grading, the more students have to obey higher
"authorities" (professors and the adminstration). The easier the grading, the
more time and energy are liberated for each student (or for groups of
students collectively) to think independently, to read on their own, to
explore aspects of life they may have just discovered, or to delve into
whatever issues their intellectual and sensual curiosities may have raised for
them.
Sources of Grade Inflation: the Historical Background
During the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s, many of us who were
students (and a few professors) understood this. We saw that the university
had been organized by business as a factory to produce both research and
waged workers. We fought to sever the links with business, partly through
easier grading. We fought to open space and create time to do the things we
felt we had to do (such as research into Stanford's complicity with the war
against Vietnam) and the things we wanted to do (such as all those bizarre
and fun courses that thrived for a while in the Mid-Peninsula Free
University we created alongside Stanford). We looked at how the
university had divided up knowledge and sought to mold us into narrow
disciplines and set to work overcoming the divisions and creating our own
syntheses. We caught glimpses of all the drama of life the university
excluded from its curriculum and set about creating the courses that weren't
being taught (Black Studies, Women's studies and so on) and went outside
the university to get what couldn't be brought in.
At the time success on the grade front was mostly achieved indirectly rather
than directly. The general atmosphere created by frequent confrontations
with both administrators and professors led even
