Would you like an A with that?
(Spring '02)
Higher education's ever-present controversy over grade-inflation
would be a textbook example of missing the forest for the trees--if
not for the reprinting of textbooks into umpteenth editions, itself
an example that threatens forests both real and
metaphorical.
As one of the 43% of all faculty in colleges nationwide with
part-time, no-benefit status, I could go on and on about the
bottom-line-ism that has turned higher ed into a business--as it has
already rendered American politics, sports, and medicine, not to
mention much of our journalism, entertainment, and arts.
However, I teach in public colleges and universities with low to
moderate admissions standards. Here the bottom-line might as
well be the only line: We cater to a generation very much
enthralled by the concept of cool.
While it is true that cool has roots in the past,
including the occasionally still-used hip of my own youth,
cool is different. Teenage rebelliousness, for better or
worse, peaceful or violent, once stemmed from a desire to create
change. Today, that is uncool--and quite the opposite
when we consider that participation in the conduct of a school, the
life of a community, the politics of a nation violates the first
three rules of cool: Do not think, do not read,
and--above all--do not care about anything other than your own
amusement.
If the word student still has anything to do with intellectual
curiosity, then the phrase cool student is a contradiction in
terms.
In this context, grade-inflation appears paradoxical. Year
after year, students make less effort, yet expect and get more
reward. Many feel slighted when their essays gain grades as
high as B+ and A-. Those outside academe may think that
Doonesbury's occasional treatment of this is exaggerated for
comic effect. Inside academe, the satire is redundant.
The cool response to any grade is indifference, but if it
stings enough to penetrate cool, a complaint will reach a
dean. In the latter case, the word cool will assume its
equally meaningless yet all-purpose, let-it-slide, grown-up guise,
appropriate. Either way, and with either word, this is
where education ends and business begins.
Students who shrug away silently will have sufficient say at
semester's end. It's called the student evaluation, a dozen
or two questions by which they rate teachers and the class on a
numerical scale. Since this is anonymous, chronic absentees
have equal voice with diligent students; the many apathetic outweigh
the few engaged.
As consolation, we have the comic relief of seeing yes-or-no
questions answered in degrees. One semester I taught a
literature course for the first time and thought I would probe the
class for interests for a week before setting a schedule. A
night class with older students free of the trance of cool,
its student evaluations were quite high, including many marked
"completely agree" for the statement "syllabus provided at
first class meeting."
As always there were the two or three marked "completely
disagree." Any college instructor who still looks at these
things knows that many students will mark the same column--favorably,
unfavorably, or anywhere in between--for every question. An
instructor can ask for questions or comments every two minutes in any
classroom, and there will still be a few evaluations on which the
statement to that effect is marked "completely disagree."
No matter how many questions are on the forms, each is a variation on
the only question that matters in a business setting: "Did
you have a good time taking the course?" For cool
students, it's a measurement of how much the teacher was willing to
let their indifference slide.
Instructors insist, vehemently, that our "professionalism"
precludes any chance that student evaluations of us influence our
evaluations of them. Either we want to pretend that
grade-inflation did not begin with the advent of student evals, or we
are as oblivious as a Beltway lobbyist to any concept of conflict of
interest.
Students who complain to deans will get swifter results.
Here's a sampling of stories any instructor of required freshman
classes can tell:
* A student with his name on the opening day roster fails to
show for the first two weeks of class. On the third week I tell
him he is too late, even though by now it is no surprise that in week
four I'm notified by the registrar that he is duly enrolled (i.e.
his tuition is paid) in the class and must be admitted.
* Following a student appeal, I submit a text I recall from my
grad school research alongside her essay, identical from start to
finish, as the dean agrees. Apparently, however, I did not
"provide sufficient warning" in addition to a statement about
plagiarism already on my syllabus, and so she is simply withdrawn
from the class. Without penalty, unless you count the implied
reprimand aimed at me.
* After two warnings, I evict three giggling and chatting
students from a class. Next day a dean asks me to meet with
them to "explain" my action. It's a "teachable
moment," she declares.
If this was still education, all of these would be laughable moments,
fodder for Doonesbury. But just as so many instructors
are now adjunct to what is left of faculty, much of higher education
is now adjunct to what is overwhelmingly business. In all of
the countless cases each semester represented by the above scenes,
college administrators do not see a conflict between student and
teacher so much as one between a source of revenue and an
expenditure. Doonesbury, meet
Dilbert.
As Nick Bromell, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst, concluded in the February, '02, issue of
Harper's: "Students who are really customers deserve
teachers who are really businessmen." Taking Bromell's
lead, I propose that we make the controversy of grade-inflation and
perhaps many other inconveniences of higher education disappear by
simply adjusting our terms accordingly and honestly:
* Not students, but customers, a word that logically
follows cool;
* Not teachers, but clerks, awaiting the day when we
are required to wear happy faces and never fail to ask the customers
if they want their A in paper or plastic;
* Not deans, but accountants--or, taking into account
the enrollments they set for classes requiring the writing of
essays, meat-packers;
* Not accreditation agencies, but academe's Enroners,
signing off on each other's balance sheets;
* And finally, not grade-inflation, but customer
satisfaction, and as anyone who has ever worked retail knows, the
customer is always right.
Except, of course, at the college bookstore where the vendors (who
still call themselves "publishers") really soak 'em with
endlessly "revised" editions to prevent the re-use of their
absurdly bloated textbooks, all trees be damned!
With honest terms, the entire forest of American higher education is
so clear-cut.