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Friday, February 27, 2004
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27 February 04
To: A Team Members From: Janice Subject: Alas and Alack Hi again guys: Sorry to bombard you with emails. The shit’s hitting the fan. Excuse my French, but I can’t mince words anymore and we’ve got to get our asses in gear now. We are officially under siege. Even as Harvard remains a beacon of reinflationary hope (see my email below), lesser institutions, as I anticipated, are just climbing on board the U.S.S. Grade Deflation. Point Park University in Pittsburgh just docked grade inflating faculty merit pay! I quote from the Brown Daily Herald, February 11: “Six professors at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, Pa., saw their merit-based bonuses cut in half because of alleged grade inflation this year, a move that caused faculty to pursue unionization.” Let us pause to consider the confusion and demoralization going on at just this one American university. For years, its faculty has understood that the basic classroom transaction was the following: A. Give all students As. B. Receive in return high teaching evaluations. C. Receive merit pay based upon high teaching evaluations. Now merit pay is being withdrawn because of all-As and high teaching evaluations! Bait and switch doesn’t begin to cover the case here. William Breslove, professor of business and president of the faculty assembly at Point Park, is quoted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: ‘ "I'm outraged," Breslove said yesterday. "Frankly, I'm less outraged about the financial aspects of this than the intrusion by the administration on academic freedom. How to grade students is, frankly, something that any competent faculty member should be able to decide. This has never happened here before," he said.’ Fuckin A! This is an academic freedom issue, and I can’t wait until Point Park’s faculty is unionized, and mandatory As across the board are in the effing by-laws! Okay, let me catch my breath. I’m know my rhetoric’s over the top here, but I feel strongly about this. Some of us are going to suffer bigtime in terms of our psychological well-being if we have to start grading according to merit (which would also, I remind you, involve reading final papers and exams). As Noah Davis, student reporter for the Yeshiva University newspaper Commentator wisely notes, “It is widely believed that the faculty tends to dispense inflated grades to avert stress.” There are of course many things we teachers do to avert stress: we listen to Gregorian chants, we feng shui our bedrooms, we take bubble baths. But I have found - and others have found - that nothing takes the pressure off quite as effectively as typing in a long solid line of As each semester for our happy students. Take that away, and I can assure you you’ve got a costly degree of psychological disturbance among the professoriate. So what can we do? First, we’re picketing. We’ve already (with the union’s help) printed up signs that say Boycott Point Dark, A Thousand Points of Krap, and Point Park Loses its AAA Rating. We’ll be setting a date soon for a bus trip to Pittsburgh and an all-day gathering at the campus where we’ll make our opinion known! Watch this space for further information. Yours in Alliance for As... Janice |