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(Rate Your Students)
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except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Sunday, March 07, 2004

TO: ALL A TEAM MEMBERS

FROM: Janice

SUBJECT: For Your Attention

I've been asked by many A-Positive friends and colleagues to comment on the University of Georgia course titled "Coaching Principles and Strategies of Basketball" (Fall 2001), in which all enrolled students received As. In the course of an investigation into recruitment irregularities, officials at the university released to the public that course's twenty question multiple choice final exam - its only requirement. A few questions from the exam follow:

5. How many halves are in a college basketball game?
a. 1
b. 2
c. 3
d. 4

6. How many quarters are in a high school basketball game?
a. 1
b. 2
c. 3
d. 4

8. How many points does a 3-point field goal account for in a Basketball Game?
a. 1
b. 2
c. 3
d. 4

11. What is the name of the exam which all high school seniors in the State of Georgia must pass?
a. Eye Exam
b. How Do The Grits Taste Exam
c. Bug Control Exam
d. Georgia Exit Exam


Although this is a fairly easy exam, several students in the class did not take it and still received As.

This is a real test case for us.

It represents, if you will, an absolutely "pure" instance of the A-offering (see post below, The Way of A). Students report that the course's instructor (a coach at the university) made clear to them that there was no conceivable way in which they could fail to receive an A for Coaching Principles and Strategies of Basketball. Few students attended; the instructor, toward the end of the semester, also routinely skipped. The course was without content. The instructor appears to have written the exam mainly for purposes of self-amusement. The publication of the exam has exposed the University of Georgia to national and international derision.

So - a number of you have asked - what are we to do? What are we to say? How are we to defend to a taunting world this instance of grade inflation?

Well, I was wringing my hands about this last night when I came across an opinion piece by Stanley Fish in the most recent Chronicle of Higher Education that made me ashamed of the fact that I'd been wringing my hands. Faced with an uncomprehending, non-academic world, Fish argues, professors and administrators should stop defending academia's practices in terms that they think non-academics will understand. Our activities in universities will never be intelligible to people outside of universities unless those people agree to go back and attend the modern university for awhile in order to understand it from within. Here's Fish - he says what I'm trying to say much better than I can:

[We must begin] embracing the fact that few nonacademics understand what we do and why we do it, and turning [this fact] into a weapon. Instead of saying, "Let me tell you what we do so that you'll love us," or "Let me explain how your values are our values too," say, "We do what we do, we've been doing it for a long time, it has its own history, and until you learn it or join it, your opinions are not worth listening to."

Instead of defending classics or French literature or sociology, ask those who think they need defending what they know about them, and if the answer is "not much" (on the model of "don't know much about the Middle Ages"), suggest, ever so politely, that they might want to go back to school. Instead of trying to justify your values (always a weak position), assume them and assume too your right to define and protect them. And when you are invited to explain, defend, or justify, just say no.

I'm perfectly willing to concede that I don't know the first thing about basketball - its strategies, its principles - just as I'll bet my local congressperson doesn't know anything about the Middle Ages. And although this particular basketball theory course seems to me to have been rather loosely taught, I'm sure the field, to quote Fish "has its own history," and until I learn it my opinion isn't really worth listening to. More broadly, rather than "trying to justify [my] values" relative to things like academic freedom and grading policies, I should simply "assume them," and when asked to "explain, defend, or justify them, just say no."

And so my friends: No! in thunder. Just as Tom Buchanan said to Jay Gatsby that "there are things between Daisy and me that you'll never know," so I say to you that there are things between a professor of basketball and his students that you and I will never understand. It is not our place to. We stand outside. Our worlds are incompatible. Leave it alone. Let it go.