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 those professors who
were not being directly challenged to be careful about provoking their no-
longer-compliant students. (Most professors, of course, deny such
influences.)
Less antagonistically, the combination of challenges to received academic
"truth" together with the positive assertion of new values undercut some
professors' certainty about what they were teaching and made them more
open to recognizing that there were many more valid paths to a meaningful
"university education" than they had dreamed. (Professors tend to prefer
this more progressive explanation that credits their openness rather than
blaming their fears.)
The Wider Economic Context
This history of academic struggle parallels a similar history in the economy
as a whole. The conservative outrage against "grade inflation" mirrors their
better known outrage against price inflation. The current campaign against
"grade inflation" should be understood as directly parallel to the more than a
decade-old assault on "inflation" that has characterized the last five federal
administrations (Carter, Reagan {2X}, Bush, Clinton).
Ever since Jimmy Carter brought Paul Volcker into the Fed to spearhead an
all-out monetarist assault on prices by tightening the money supply and
driving up interest rates, U.S. economic policy has been dominated by a
continuing preoccupation with inflation. Current debates over Greenspan's
repeated jacking up of interest rates are only the most recent manifestation of
this concern.
Hidden behind the distaste for price inflation of conservatives (and of policy
makers more generally) has been a more profound abhorence of wage
increases that exceed productivity growth, raising costs, threatening to cut
into profits and spurring companies to raise prices in order to defend their
bottom line. (This the textbooks call "wage-push" inflation.)
During the same period that militant students were achieving higher grades,
militant workers in private industry and public service were also achieving
higher wages. Partly these gains stemmed from their own struggles. Partly
they stemmed from young workers bringing to their jobs militant attitudes
learned earlier on the streets and in schools. Partly they stemmed from the
parallel struggles of peasants in South East Asia and elsewhere in the Third
World. The rise in American wages was accompanied, and partly
supported, by an expansion in Federal welfare and warfare expenditure
("demand pull" inflation) and an accomodating monetary policy that made a
general rise in the price level possible.
Wages and Grades
We are not, however, just talking about analogies here. At the heart of the
clear historical parallels between grade inflation and price inflation, lies the
basic homology between grades and wages. As a general rule, wages are
the monies workers get in return for working for business (whether directly
in industry or indirectly in the state, whether in Stanford's industrial park,
or on campus). The harder they work, they are told (often fraudulently),
the more wages they will earn. Grades, on the other hand, are supposed to
be IOUs on future wages. Good grades now, "educators" promise, will
mean good wages later. Grades, like the university diploma, are both an
index of work performed and an indicator for business of an individual's
willingness to work in the future.
Just as business always seeks to pay out wages in an hierarchical fashion
(to divide and conquer its labor force), so too does it expect schools to pay
out grades in a similar manner. Effective grades are those which make it
easy for business to choose low entropy workers over high entropy
workers, i.e., those whose energies are available for work, over those
whose energies are deployed in other ways. The current conservative attack
on "phony grades" must be understood as a response to the perceived
erosion in the usefulness of grades to business.
The policy perscriptions for fighting price inflation and grade inflation are
also similar: tight money and firings among the waged, tigher grading and
more flunking among students. In both cases high unemployment is used
to weed out the slackers and instill fear and a willingness to work harder
among those who remain. In both cases, the opportunities for self-directed
activity are squeezed by the imposition of increased authority and discipline.
Along with such overall policies go the micro restructurings: the closing of
plants and businesses where workers have too much power and high wages
which have undermined profits, the closing of specialized study programs
created by student struggles. Greater scrutiny of the work records of
perspective employees in industry finds its parallel in the tightening of
admission requirements in schools. It's easier to keep the slackers out to
start with, than to get rid of them once they cause trouble.
Traditionally, waged workers and students are thought to occupy worlds
apart --especially at an institution such as Stanford where students are
expected to graduate into professional and managerial jobs. However, not
only are such positions only the upper ranges of of the wage hierarchy, but
in today's increasingly informational society the intellectual work of
students, especially graduate students, differs little from the work they will
soon be doing for a wage. Business management of the labor force today
includes, more than ever, the management of the unwaged, school labor
force. We professors are supposed to work in two ways: research and
publish (or perish!) and oversee/manage the work of students. No wonder
the problems and the conflicts are so much alike in the academy and in "the
real world".
Abolish Grades!
The implications of all this for students should be clear. If they can do
nothing more, they must fight against the conservative backlash to preserve
what freedom they have. If they can get organized they should take the
offensive and fight for greater freedom, in part through the abolition of
grades.
Abolishing grades would not only liberate more time and energy for student
self-activity, it would throw the burden and cost of evaluating a persons'
willingness and ability to do a waged job back where it belongs, on the
would-be employer. Grades and degrees are the historical result of shifting
such costs from business to the taxpayer and future employee. Why not
force business to pay for what it wants! As some small liberal arts colleges
(e.g., Evergreen State College) have demonstrated, the abolition of grades
does not result in less learning, but more learning as students are motivated
to pursue their own paths to understanding. Imagine how much fun it
would be to extend those experiences to a larger institution like Stanford.
Unfortunately, it should also be clear that success at any one institution will
be limited by the broader context. Even places like Evergreen include
evaluations in their transcripts for the benefit of employers. Battles can be
won on individual campuses, but the war can only be won at the level of
society as a whole.
Can Allies Be Found in the Professoriat?
And what of the faculty in all this? Some clearly want a restoration, even an
extension, of their authority. They want the power to judge, to impose
grades, utlimately to fail students, to throw the disobedient ones out of
school/factory. Those are guards on The Wall Pink Floyd understood so
well!
Others are clearly afraid of the consequences of a public perception that the
Stanford degree is being devalued by grade inflation. They are afraid for
their own status, their own job market prospects and, perhaps more
generously (though rather paternalistically), for those of their students.
They include those who embrace the university as factory and training
ground and those who simply believe there is no alternative. Such faculty
are likely to embrace the conservative backlash and resist further steps
toward greater freedom.
But there are probably many others who have come to understand how
grades (and the power relations they embody) stand between professors and
students. There are bound to be many who realize how the most onerous
part of a professor's work is imposing tests and grades. Many, either
consciously or subconsciously, know that easy grading means easy work:
less anxiety in the classroom, less worry about attendance, less work of
supervision during tests, fewer confrontations in the office, less guilt for
having destroyed the life of someone you barely know.
They also know that easier grading creates more time for them as well as for
students: more time to read, to talk with colleagues or students, to
reinvigorate their professional research by exploring ourside their own
fields, to play with their kids, to spend time with their lovers. Professors
too, at least most of them, are also human and the power structures of the
university weigh down their lives just as they do those of students.
Some have discovered, and rebel against, the way some university
adminstrations pit professors against students by using a professor's
grading record in deciding promotion: rewarding hard graders and
penalizing easy ones. Does Stanford do this? It might be useful to find out.
Students are also pitted against professors when student evaluations of
courses and profs are used not to improve teaching but to impose more
discipline.
Some professors, I guarantee, can be found who dream of teaching with no
grades, of a world where the only people who come to class or lab are those
who are there because they want to be, who are eager to learn and curious
and questioning with an enthusiasm that only comes with self-motivation.
As you know, some professors shun undergraduate teaching and prefer
their research and interaction with graduate students. One positive reason
(there are many negative ones) behind such behavior is that they thus avoid
all the hassles of grading and the imposition of discipline and enjoy the
greater stimulation of being engaged with students in a joint endeavor.
These kinds of feelings can be appealed to by students fighting grades who
want essentially the same thing: a chance to work with professors in a
common search for understanding.
I don't know what will be the outcome of the Stanford Faculty Senate vote
on Thursday, but one thing is certain: the struggle over grades will
continue. The battle over grades is over the soul of the university. Those
who cry "Fight grade inflation!" and campaign for tougher grading are
choosing discipline over the freedom to choose. Those who fight against
such increased discipline are choosing greater freedom for students and
faculty alike.
________________
*Harry Cleaver was a graduate student in economics at Stanford from 1967
to 1971 and heavily involved in the antiwar movement. He was one of the
authors of the Student Minority Report of the President's Committee on the
Stanford Research Institute (1969) that challenged its role linking the
university with business and the Vietnam war. He was also one of the
founders of the Pacific Studies Center, a radical think-tank still operating on
the peninsula. His e-mail address is [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The full text of this article is available from gopher mundo.eco.utexas.edu
(faculty/Cleaver/"Cleaver Papers").
