As promised, here is the next installment of my series on Frederick Lang, the Brooklyn College English professor who has been forcibly removed from the classroom because he refused to inflate his grades.

Brooklyn College has a proud tradition of serving economically disadvantaged young adults. It has, over the years, earned a strong reputation for offering a rigorous, high-quality education to a largely working-class student population. Many of those students are the first in their families to go to college. Many have not had access to the best schools, and many arrive at BC with educational deficits that need remediation. It has been the mission of the college to make it possible for those students to improve their lot in life by providing them with a first-class education. Frederick Lang--who is himself from a background very like those of his students--believes that the best way to open doors for these students is to train them as well as it is possible to train them: even if it means hurting their feelings by giving them honest assessments, even if it means being the first person ever to tell them that their writing isn't up to snuff, even if it means slowing their time to degree by making them repeat a writing course that they should not pass. Brooklyn College administrators disagree with Lang: They say he is too harsh, too exacting, and that he harms his students' self-esteem. They cite as examples the fact that he counts off for poor spelling (instead of giving credit for spellings that get the general idea across), that he covers students' papers with red ink (instead of just pointing out one or two problems so that students won't get overwhelmed), and that he compels students who can't do the coursework to repeat the class (instead of just passing them on to the next level if they complete all the assignments and appear to try hard).

Brooklyn College policy allows students to take freshman composition three times with no damage to their transcripts: a grade of NC (no credit) compels the student to repeat the course while making no impact on the student's overall GPA. During his brief tenure teaching composition in the Brooklyn College English department, Lang doled out a lot of NCs, believing that it is better in the long run for a student to repeat a course than to receive an inflated passing grade. The only students who received actual grades of F were those who failed to complete the work for the course. So Lang wasn't actually harming his students' prospects by making them repeat composition. He was instead attempting to improve their prospects by making sure they had every opportunity to learn the essential reading and writing skills they needed for college and beyond. The college policy is an acknowledgement that many Brooklyn College students do not arrive at the school with adequate writing skills. It is also an acknowledgement that in the absence of a formal remedial writing program, the college must offer some way for underprepared students to acquire the skills they lack.

Before he was relieved of his teaching duties, Lang was using college policy in precisely the way it is meant to be used: and yet the chair of his department and the provost of the college are holding his conscientiousness against him. It is the considered opinion of Lang's departmental chair that in holding so many students back, Lang was showing not a principled attention to the truly dire underpreparation of many of his students, but a rank incompetence of his own. As English department chair Ellen Tremper explained during the recent arbitration hearings, this is the logic she employed when she decided to remove Lang from the classroom. While Lang was doing a great deal to damage students' egos, she argued, he was not doing much at all to teach them to write. To her mind, his extensive, detailed feedback and his willingness both to read drafts of student papers and to allow students to revise papers in light of that feedback are not themselves signs of committed, constructive teaching, but evidence of his inability to convey the skills his students need to learn. Presumably, Lang would, in Tremper's eyes, be a much finer teacher if he did a lot less substantive commenting on student writing and a lot more vacuous congratulating. Presumably, he would have done better to pass incompetent students along with a nod and a wink and an artificially inflated grade than to try to make them into competent writers with the traditional tools of rigorous writing pedagogy: extensive feedback; intensive, guided revision; and honest evaluation.

Lang's efforts to ensure that Brooklyn College students learn to write have thus been wilfully misinterpreted as proof of his own failure to teach writing. Anyone who has ever taught writing at any level will recognize immediately just how deeply disingenuous this rationale is: no one "learns to write" in a mere fifteen weeks; no teacher can turn functional illiterates into able college writers in the space of a semester. These things take time: twelve years of educational neglect are not going to be undone overnight. Provost Roberta Matthews herself acknowledged during Lang's recent arbitration hearings that many Brooklyn College students arrive at the school completely untutored in writing; that many have never received even the most basic guidance about how to express themselves clearly on paper or how to craft a written argument. It should come as no surprise then that many of these underprepared students need to spend longer than a semester learning the skills they should already have been learning and practising for years. This is not an indictment of the teacher who refuses to pass underqualified college writers. It is an indictment of the public school system that failed those students beforehand. That Lang has been punished for insisting that Brooklyn College do right by students that have for so many years been wronged speaks ugly volumes for the misplaced priorities of the administrators who have decided Lang's commitment, dedication, and principled expertise are problems to be solved rather than the rare blessings they are.

The paradoxical and intellectually dishonest rationale used to remove Lang from the classroom gets us to the heart of the matter. The issue, ultimately, is not whether Lang is a good teacher or even whether his students are capable of doing the work in his class. The issue is that in refusing to simply pass them through with the obligatory A's, B's, and very occasional C's, Lang is pointing to a problem so huge that Brooklyn College cannot acknowledge it without also acknowledging that it has knowingly and even deliberately failed the students it claims to serve.

What Brooklyn College has not done in response to Lang's grading is as telling as what it has done. There has been no acknowledgement that maybe, just maybe, students who are not prepared for college writing are being shuttled into college writing courses that are beyond their capabilities. There has been no acknowledgement that maybe, just maybe, a well-meaning but misguided faculty has passed these students on to the next level instead of insisting that they stay put until they acquire the skills they need. There has been no acknowledgement that maybe, just maybe, this abdication of responsibility at the introductory level has massive negative effects down the road, virtually ensuring that students across the college, in every major and every course, are not prepared for the written components of their coursework and ensuring, too, that many graduate without the solid writing skills they will need in order to succeed professionally. There has been no acknowledgement that maybe, just maybe, in putting students' self-esteem and professors' convenience ahead of truthful assessment and the hard work of reclamation that would come with it, Brooklyn College has committed a deplorable crime against the very community it prides itself on serving.

As I mentioned above, Brooklyn College has a long and honorable tradition of educating students who come from working-class and underprivileged backgrounds; many of its students are the first in their family to go to college; many of them do not have the strongest educational grounding, as they have not had access to the best schools. What such students need is access to education, not to amelioration. What will serve them best in life is rigorous training and honest feedback, not low standards and ego-enhancing eduspeak. Lang is a problem at Brooklyn College because he is a whistle-blower. In casting him as a troublemaker, Ellen Tremper and her administrative cronies have merely added another layer of dishonesty to the already considerable mess they have made of the BC curriculum. Theirs amounts to a sort of class-based affirmative action grading program: Since students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds don't have the same preparation as more privileged students at other schools, the reasoning appears to go, they can't be held to the same standards; implicit in this logic is the dreadful insinuation that the reason Brooklyn College students can't be held to high standards is that they could never measure up to them.

More soon on Provost Matthews' elaborately anti-intellectual plan for curricular reform at Brooklyn College.

What is Brooklyn College's placement record? How well do their graduates do compared to the national average? To other urban public colleges? To high school graduates?

Lang works hard and believes in good writing -- I'm not going to disagree with this. I've posted in the comments several times that I disagree with the academic philosophy that has Lang doing this work exactly as it has been done for maybe 100 years, in light of the advances in computer technology.

But let's apply other standards of the ordinary workplace here. Lang's manager and VP (in a corporate environment), misguided or not, are telling Lang "do it this way". Lang has two choices, do it their way or get another job. Given good economic times (not currently the case, sadly), the market will work efficiently to place Lang in a more friendly workplace, simple as that.

One of the market distortions applying in academia is tenure. Lang is likely working for less than the average computer programmer; one reason he hangs on to his job (he is apparently tenured) is this sense of security tenure appears to give him. Tenure also makes it very difficult for him to move to a department that might be more friendly -- he likely wouldn't voluntarily shift to a non-tenured teaching job elsewhere, and it's not likely that many departments would offer him a tenured job teaching remedial comp -- there are too many people out there willing to do it as part-timers.

Much we may admire Lang's dedication, and much as we may feel contempt for the short-sighted heavy-handedness of the BC powers that be, I'm still concerned that teaching remedial comp the way Lang is doing it is a very inefficient process. This is probably why, as mentioned in an earlier post, BC had already "outsourced" remedial comp to local junior colleges, and Lang was making do in the English department, where he doesn't seem to have fit in.

So I have a hard time seeing Lang as a hero. In my lifetime I've seen unpleasant jobs like garbage collector made somewhat more pleasant by machinery. In the process, fewer garbage collectors were needed. Teaching remedial comp, let's face it, is the garbage collection of the English Department. Good sense and market forces should be driving people to move beyond these unpleasant jobs, or find better ways to do them. Much as I might find the character of a garbage collector who insists on collecting garbage the old way in spite of better machinery interesting, I've still got to say it's time for the field to move on and find better ways to do this unpleasant task. Lang is not helping the profession here.

John, I guess the question is: is anyone "collecting the garbage" at all?

Learning how to write in a semester is an inefficient process, but if the alternative is being coddled into thinking you know how to write when you don't, then how valid a choice is it really?

There are two issues in Lang's story as I see them. Issue 1 is that the English Department chair and the Provost at BC are shortsighted and heavy-handed, and probably don't have a good understanding of what ought to be BC's mission.

Given this, no professor, no matter what his tenure status or his overall reputation, can fix this problem. The problem lies higher up in the organization. If Lang chooses to sacrifice his health and peace of mind on this fool's errand, so be it -- but he is not a hero.

The second issue is that BC's students, and many students elsewhere, are not learning to write. Having someone like Lang cover papers with red ink is not, in fact, working. The discussion seems to be saying that many, many semesters of red ink will be needed to get these folks into literacy. I'm sorry, this reminds me of the idea that many, many years of psychoanalysis are needed to get a neurotic into healthy functioning. This idea prevailed until health insurers refused to fund it, rightly in my thinking.

Lang's situation is a symptom of a bigger problem -- covering papers with red ink has never been a very effective way of teaching people to write. I tried it for four years and decided life didn't need to be that way. BC's muckety-mucks, likely for all the wrong reasons, are nevertheless coming to the right conclusion.

A relative of mine discovered that heaters in highway truck trailers were completely ineffective in the winter time at keeping cargo from freezing. He found that you had the same number of damage claims from frozen merchandise if the trailer had a heater or if it didn't -- so why not save big bucks and leave out the heater? I think we are at a similar decision point with traditional remedial writing courses. People are going through college and not learning to write, no matter what writing courses they take. Why not save the aggravation and eliminate remedial comp, at least as it's now taught?

First, thanks to Bruce for having the courage to condemn psychoanalysis. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, etc.

Regarding Prof. Lang: are any of us fully aware of the situation at Brooklyn College? I have the utmost sympathy for any professor who actually grades papers instead of using the "I'm okay; you're an A" model. From the students' perspective, however, it is disconcerting to have one professor in the Department who grades completely differently than everyone else. Though the ideal solution is for everyone to start grading realistically, there is no way this is going to happen.

On the student customer-satisfaction surveys, there is a direct correlation between anticipated grade and teacher evaluation. If a teacher, especially an untenured one, is in a position where these forms will have an impact on her career, she is obligated to grade as easily as her conscience allows.

If you deplore groupthink in the academia, as I suspect many of you do, you must also deplore the consumer-model of education. Eliminate numerical student teaching evaluations, and you will eliminate grade inflation and possibly poor achievement as well.

Couple raises a good issue. If the Chair or the Dean wants a specific grading curve, then it ought to be specified. In retrospect, a major feature of my experience in the academic world was that so little was made clear. You always heard, in class, on the carpet with the committee chair, or wherever, "that's not what I wanted" -- but seldom what IS wanted.

This is one reason why it's such a bad idea to put so much one-on-one time into remedial writing courses. Since computers will do spell checks, let the computer make the first pass on the paper, and let the instructor check that pass for stuff the computer got wrong for context. Then you would have an unexceptionable, consistent score on spelling, student to student, class to class -- the only variation would be a much smaller one on instuctors missing context spelling errors.

At that point the chair or the Dean could decide on a policy bases (1) ignore all spelling errors, or (2) make the curve look like this. Indeed, since the university has the affirmative action data on each student, the Dean can say "add 20 points to each student who is in a preferred category."

What interests me is how little interest there seems to be in any university or ed school on experimenting with anything like this.

Again, as a former freshman comp instructor who was reality-oriented enough to decide it wasn't for me, I would think that anyone doing this kind of work would much prefer to have a computer make the simple calls, including knocking out any paper that was plagiarized.

This is a tough one. I've been an English professor for many years, and the people reading and writing these comments ought to be reminded, I think, of the general nature of most of the OTHER people teaching and administering these comp courses at places like Brooklyn College. They are typically semi-literate lefties (think De Genova) who assign semi-literate agitprop. The class is about ideology-correction, not writing - and indeed how could it be about writing, since the very idea that some writing is better than other writing is elitist? Given this scandalous background, I'd argue that old-fashioned red-penners like this fellow probably ought to be kept on board, if only as a kind of "shock and awe" manifestation...

Well, some railroads keep around a steam locomotive or two for whatever PR they feel it gains them. But this is neither a solution to the factors in the system that hire and promote incompetents, nor a solution to the specific problem of why remedial comp courses are here alleged to require many semesters to achieve results. I do agree that Lang is as relevant to the academic mission as a steam locomotive is relevant to the mission of the Union Pacific in 2003.

Surely Lang is correcting more than just spelling errors. If this is all he's doing, than even if he does it well, he's not teaching students how to write. Word processors cannot really teach students the basic components of a sentence and grammar, moreover how to construct an argument.

Latrec--whatever you may think of Degenova's politics, I believe you have to admit that he's a bit more than "semi-literate." I recognize the impulse to think that someone who believes the kinds of thing that, say William F. Buckley, does implies subnormal intelligence; but it's generally not the case.

For Berkeley, it's entirely possible that Lang is doing things besides correcting spelling, but in the posts here and apparently in the Provost's complaints about Lang, one of the major issues is that he IS correcting spelling. When I taught English comp, there were no spellchecks and no computer word processing, so I had no choice but to correct spelling. One big problem I see in Lang's apologists' arguments is that Lang ought to be correcting spelling, because now there are ways for Lang to avoid wasting his time and class time on this issue.

Word processors, or modifications of them specifically to meet composition class requirments, ought to be correcing spelling, comma errors, run-ons, etc. etc. Lang and his colleagues can then address how to construct an argument, diction, style, and so forth.

For that matter, I know many universities require students to bring a computer with them when they matriculate (or presumably provide one as part of financial aid). I get the impression that many professors now require papers to be submitted via e-mail, which suggests the great majority are written using MS Word or equivalent. MS Word will flag a misspelled word the moment I type it. It will flag a run-on sentence as soon as I write it. What is wrong with the students who are not using what is right in front of them???? What is wrong with the instructors who are not pointing these advantages out?????

Actually, the possibilities here are enough to make the head spin. Once I worked for a manager who had a corner office and a secretary, and although he had a computer on his desk, he never turned it on. Instead, his secretary read and screened his e-mail, and she printed it out and brought it to him. He would then read the printed out e-mails, and when he was ready, he would call his secretary in and dictate his replies, which she would type into her computer and send. This man was allowed to retire honorably, showing incompetence is not limited to academia (though he had been a professor before moving on to business).

What does Lang do here? Does he get papers via e-mail, print them out, and write with red ink on them? Do his students handwrite or type their papers, so as to avoid word processing?

Something is missing here. There should be no need for "red ink" in a college or university in 2003. Is the term a metaphor, or are instructors still killing trees? Have no innovations been made in pedagogical technique since the advent of PCs, word processors, and e-mail?

Is red ink really the issue, JB? Would you feel better if he made the same comments, but used track changes and only exchanged documents via email?

As for the students, I would be shocked if they were writing or typing their papers. But if they are turning in work done in, say MS Word, then their lazy alone justifies marking up spelling errors.

Finally, if the students are as ill-prepared as Erin's post implies, then it may be difficult to rely on MS Word flagging a sentence for "run on," "comma use," "passive voice," etc. as a teching device. Perhaps what the students really need is to do some good, old-fashioned sentence diagrams.

What about the student who knows he or she had a wretched high school English experience, and honestly wants to learn how to write like an educated person?

Also, Word does check spelling (although it will let you use a word that makes no sense whatever as long as it spells right) and it flags sentence structure it doesn't like, such as passive voice (although the structure may actually be OK) but what it does not do is make sure that the ideas are grouped correctly, that they are expressed clearly, and that the arguments put forth are backed up.

As a side issue, I remember when Word Perfect first came out with spell check and autocorrect, and I thought it was great until I found it wouldn't let me type "pH". It kept correcting it to "Ph". I tried and tried and it was danged if it would not correct it. One of the secretaries had to help me turn the auto-correct off; and it wasn't as easy to do that as it is with Word.

Am I the only person who ever finds herself in a position to have to actually write a note? (wonder if Word would have caught my split infinitive.)

If all Lang did was reproduce electronically the pedagogical techniques of 30 or 60 years ago, no, I wouldn't feel better. But I continue to say that MS Word or equivalent will repeat the advice you would get in a freshman English textbook. It will tell you about passive voice. It will tell you the sentence is too long. It will catch various other errors. Not to pay attention to this FOR A FRESHMAN COMPOSITION CLASS is, it seems to me, evidence of terminal something or other. Clearly sometimes you can split infinitives or do various other things, but you are in part doing certain things to show the instructor you know about them. I hated this about school, but there it is.

One point is clearly that a word processor won't distinguish between "through" and "threw" as long as they're spelled right -- but this is where an instructor can intervene, and where time can be effectively spent in class.

Some years ago I read a book called "Write Well With a PC" giving excellent advice on how to take advantage or word processors' spelling and grammar checks. Wouldn't it be reasonable, and practical life information, for the instructor in fact to spend class time showing how MS Word flags a run-on sentence and what to do about it?

Diagramming sentences is a pedagogical technique. It was out of date even when I was in grammar school, though it is now being revived here and there -- I think we may be looking at a Hawthorne Effect, in which there is a perception of improved performance, but it arises largely because attention has been focused on the study, not due to effectiveness of the technique being studied. Or it may be the case that a dedicated instructor can find diagramming sentences productive, but could find other techniques just as productive, where a less capable instructor would not.

What continues to bother me about the Lang case is that I'm hearing pedagogical techniques that are clearly outdated being used, and not enough questions being raised about why. If the department chair or the Provost were more clear on what techniques they would prefer Lang to use, it would be more helpful.

John Bruce...you say that, using an analogy to a corporate environment, Lang's manager and VP are telling Lang to "do it their way" or get a new job, with the implication that this might be okay.

But carry the analogy one step further. Assume Lang is a first-line sales manager--and that his manager and VP are telling him to go ahead and give 100% (or at least 80%) quota credit to salesmen who are in fact at 40% of quota.

There are very few corporate environments where Lang's manager and VP would keep their jobs for long if they did this. And, assuming that the situation continued, wouldn't the Board of Directors have certain responsibilities? Wouldn't the shareholders, if they became aware of the situation?

We're talking about a public institution here. We are the shareholders.

I guess I'm a luddite.

I started doing chromatography in 1982, before computers were in use. My chromatograms appeared on strip charts, and I used a 6-inch plastic ruler to measure retention times and peak heights. I had a calculator that would do linear regression, but if I wanted to use a nonlinear curve I had to plot my points on graph paper and draw it. Well, nowadays there are all kinds of software products that will collect the data from the gas chromatograph, label it any way I want, draw any kind of curve I want, and calculate all my data for me. Guess what - for various reasons sometimes numbers are printed out that don't make sense. My colleagues who came along after the computer revolution have no idea how to even spot such problems, let alone how to calculate the old-fashioned way. It's kind of nerve-wracking to tell someone - "Look at this! Can't you see this number can't possibly be right?" and they say, "It's what the computer printed out."

Also, I love spreadsheets, but I hate it when people use them to generate numbers that they will report to a regulator, and when you ask them how a certain number was calculated, all they can say is that the spreadsheet did it. While the person who designed the spreadsheet is long gone.

My point is, there are some things the computer can do for you very conveniently, but you're better off at least knowing how to do them without the computer's help.

John: I am not aware of any software that can properly "correct" English grammar.

Or, rather, I am aware of software that can do so only to the most bland and godawful standards of grammar (this is why I turn grammar checking off when using Word).

Software can't tell the difference between a correctly long sentence and a run-on, as the difference is, really, "is the length of the sentence appropriate or not?"; likewise software can't make any number of other calls about where commas are appopriate or not (some calls it can make, while in others it cannot, in my experience, tell "improper" from "slightly florid").

Spelling is nearly the only thing computers can currently (and, I think, in the forseeable future) correct with any semblance of reliability.

English grading isn't like garbage collection. Garbage collection involves putting stuff in a container. English grading involves having to understand and critically assess, well, English - and English grammar (in what it allows, more than what it requires) is far more complex (and less rule bound, less logical) than easily adapts to automatic grading.

For example, should that have been "less rule-bound, and less logical" above? I suggest either that or my usage above are perfectly correct... but software that could accept both those AND still catch "less, rule bound and less, logical" is a devil of a detail. For, of course, not only do we have to worry about grammar, but the sense of the sentence itself. Since all works must be read for sense, I see no point in a failure-prone computerised grammar-check.

To Sigivald, you're applying standards well beyond freshman English to the MS Word grammar checker. I don't know how much experience you have with remedial comp, but I remember a review of an academic novel that compared the part-timers and others who teach such classes to people in hell. I find this fully appropriate, and I would say that comparing this work to garbage collection may be unfair to the sanitation workers involved. In general, although some writers may find the standards suggested by grammar checkers rigid or basic, they are entirely appropriate for freshman or remedial comp. They are based on the reasonable advice you find in textbooks for such classes. I won't disagree that more advanced writers may wish to turn these off -- though I find their editorial suggestions extremely useful, and I have advanced degrees in English. I see absolutely no reason why they might not save time and serve a useful pedagogical purpose in a freshman English course, especially if they can deflect any sense that the editorial comments of the instructor are personally demeaning.

To David Foster, I've certainly been in situations where my superiors were ordering me to do something improper, and my options continued to be do it or leave the company. My superiors sometimes lost their jobs afterward and sometimes didn't; it wasn't under my control. As others have said, though, there's a basic concern that we may not have enough information. Rereading Erin's post on this today, I am not sure if I have enough information to disagree with the department chair who is saying Lang is creating a lot of wear and tear on the students but not really getting results. This is sort of my independent conclusion here, an overall uncomfortable feeling from set of facts even before I fully absorbed that statement from the chair. I may disagree with the specifics.

To Laura, I don't disagree that it helps to know the underlying data and what's happening. But calculators and computers still save a lot of time in a lot of functions, as do spelling and grammar checkers. On balance we're better off with them.

"School is not easy and it is not for the most part very much fun, but then, if you are very lucky, you may find a teacher." John Steinbeck

I think Professor Lang is one of those teachers. Brookyln College just doesn't GET it!

"To Laura, I don't disagree that it helps to know the underlying data and what's happening. But calculators and computers still save a lot of time in a lot of functions, as do spelling and grammar checkers. On balance we're better off with them."

I agree that they save time and we're better off with them. I think we can't expect them to do our thinking for us. I'd rather the students learned to compose by hand, so to speak, and then learned about the time-savers.

Once I proofread an essay that a co-worker wrote for a college course. It was a review of a concert he went to. The spelling was OK and there were no run-ons, but his thoughts were scattered throughout with no organization whatever. He went back and forth between subjects and it looked like he divided his work into paragraphs by counting sentences. Unsurprisingly, this person had the reputation of being nice but a bit airheaded. I think that sloppy language leads to sloppy thinking, and vice-versa, and part of the point of teaching composition is to help the student learn to organize his thoughts. That's probably old-fashioned too.

I think it's a shame that BC is treating Lang so harshly. The thing is, if a student in his class is a bad writer who is motivated to become a good writer, whether Lang grades in an "old-fashioned" way or more superficially ought to help the student. I would say in many cases, students do not care deeply about freshman English composition classes. Maybe they shouldn't be in college in the first place, then?

To John Bruce: Though I disagree with much of what you say, I admire the way you say it. You are literate, you are articulate. A word-processor could not write what you have written. Yes, a calculator is a wonderful tool. But it is no substitute for mastering the basics of addition and subtraction, of multiplication and division.

Does Professor O'Connor have links or citations to sources dealing with Lang and Brooklyn College? I can't help wondering if there isn't another side to the story. And yet the narrative she offers rings too true. Having taught at a school very like Brooklyn College, I find this account all too believable.

Laura, the coworker whose essay you reviewed might have deserved a B or C in freshman comp. Possibly an instructor worked through the semester to get him to spell and write complete sentences. One of the big points of my argument is the sooner you can get past spelling and basic grammar, the sooner you can get to eliminating airheadedness insofar as this can be done. The computer, if used correctly, it seems to me, can help do this. But I don't see the point in doing things "by hand" any more than people should need to learn to drive using a stick shift. That's just a preference, and we're free to disagree.

But on other posts, I still don't think we have enough information to know if Lang is a great teacher. The facts as I see them are:

Lang has apparently been a specialist in remedial comp, and attained tenure at BC in this field.

BC discontinued its own remedial comp program and farmed it out to local junior colleges. This might have been a bad decision, but it was made at a level above Lang's pay grade.

Lang, having tenure at BC, was apparently able to transfer to the English Department.

One question I have is, if BC discontinued remedial comp, and Lang was apparently specialized in this field, what courses was Lang teaching in the English Department? This isn't made clear in the background I've seen.

Was he, for instance, supposed to be teaching sophomore surveys but actually teaching remedial comp, the field he knew? This is one conjecture I might make, without knowing all the facts.

The thing that keeps bothering me is that BC, for good or ill, said earlier that it was getting out of the remedial comp business, and apparently did so. To that extent, if Lang disagrees and feels his purpose in life is to continue teaching remedial comp, he's fighting above his pay grade at BC. So my sympathy continues to be limited until I hear more.

I have been a tenured physics professor at a major school for about 30 years and have had considerable experience in teaching the type of courses ( eg physics to pre-meds, very much analogous to remedial English! Should this be called Garbage?) being discussed here. The underlying problem is not easy to solve because it relates to the mission given education at all levels in an society having egalitarian ideals. This is not the format in which to discuss such issues.

What I do want to point out is that in the face of problems similar to that of Prof. Lang (but thankfully not as severe), I came up with a trivial fix that I thought I would pass on. Of course, it does not fix the underlying problem. It simply reduces an completely unnecessary source of friction between teachers, students, and administrators, related to marking.

Nowadays at least, the meaning of final marks (A, B, C,...?) and their relation to numerical marks are notoriously obscure. This friction this causes can be reduced by clear and objective standardization. With the agreement of relevant colleagues, I decided that B should mean average and should correspond to the numerical mark of 85%. There is then a simplest reasonable formula that can be applied to the marks given by each instructor to accomplish this.

Take the difference between a students mark M and 100% and scale it (multiply it by a factor common to all the students in the same class) so that the average difference for all students is 15=100-85. The actual formula is M'=100-15*(100-M)/(100-) where M' is the 'renormalized' mark on the basis of which the letter grade is computed. ( is the original class average)

The average mark of all students becomes 85%. A renormalized mark M' remains 100 if M was 100 (best students are not penalized). The relative order of students--who is better than whom--about which we feel more sure in any case, is preserved.

A variety of other criteria can be used as appropriate to assign letter marks to the parts of the distribution depending on its shape and/or agreed upon policy.

Simple-minded as all this is, it did help somewhat. Administrators got the curves they wanted and students did not worry about differences in marking standards between instructors. An instructor could mark rigorously without student worries that they were being treated unfairly.

It is still the educated human mind, not the computer, which has the more advanced ìprogramî for checking spelling, grammar, etc. A spell-checking program can be used as a tool to aid in proofreading, but the students need to also be aware of its limitations (as outlined in posts above).

Surely the reason the students are complaining is that they are being held accountable for not properly proofreading their writing, not that it is a human rather than a computer that is correcting them? Am I wrong to assume that proofreading of your writing is a skill that is being taught in the course and thus should be part of the grading?

The students already possess the tools to correct their most basic mistakes in spelling and grammar whether that is through the use of dictionaries or spell-checking programs, etc. They have no real excuse for making these errors other than that they have been lazy or careless in their proofreading. For more complicated mistakes which they donít yet have the knowledge to correct themselves, it is precisely the feedback from the teacher that can help them learn to identify and correct such mistakes in the future.

It is fairly safe to assume that the reason these students are making so many errors in the first place is that they werenít held to a high standard in their previous schooling, during the period when they were supposed to be learning these skills. How is more of the same going to help them now?

It's not very likely that a person would find him or herself in the position of having to drive a car with a stick shift. In an emergency I suppose I could figure it out, but it wouldn't be pretty.

It's fairly likely, though, that anybody might find him or herself in the position of having to answer questions on a job application, without Word or any other spell and grammar check. Some of those questions could run into several sentences. I would be pretty ticked off if I had paid for a college English course and gotten a good grade in it, then found that I couldn't get a job because on paper I couldn't express myself in a literate manner.

If these students cannot pass basic English skills, then they should be taking remedial classes. What kind of college entrance exam did they have to pass in order to get in?
People need to take responsibility for their mistakes, learn from them, and correct them. Teachers are there to teach by using constructive criticism. So what if the students had red marks all over their papers? Are they so immature that a blue mark would make them feel better?
I had some difficulties in college, too, but I did what I could to get through it and passed. It's really a shame that people in our country expect everything to be handed over to them without them really trying. I guess that's why our whole state and government systems/programs are so messed up - incompetence breeds.

Sagredo is suggesting the type of grading scale I saw in my undergraduate science classes, and indeed I remember at another university a Dean using a similar formula to reallocate money after a budget cut, so this is a time tested academic strategy. The main difference with English is the difficulty of tying a numerical grade to an essay. It's much harder for a student to argue if you've pointed out an error in math, whereas a student argue tautologically forever if you've pointed out a tautology in his or her paper.

Let's assume, though, that Lang is a complete victim here, the heroic boy with the finger in the dike of Philistinism. It seems as if the consensus reaction will be to shake our heads and say, somewhat like Shannon, oh, dear, dear, dear, everything is messed up.

My own opinion is that Lang, given so little information, is a bad hook on which to hang this position -- but what's the strategy? I can think of several strategic points on which to wage a campaign against educational fecklessness, but they would involve things like rejiggering the job market to eliminate or reduce tenure, a more graduated set of professional and ethical standards that could increase day-to-day accountability, and innovations in pedagogical technique such as those I've outlined.

I'll bet even many of the folks who want to say oh, dear, dear, dear, would object strenuously to any of the above. So what's the strategy, folks?

John Bruce said:
But I don't see the point in doing things "by hand" any more than people should need to learn to drive using a stick shift.

This is the essence of the disagreement. I believe that drivers who learned to drive using a stick shift are better drivers than those who didn't. They can talk on cell phones (not that I think they should, because I don't) and still drive straight in their automatic transmission cars because they learned to drive having to do more than push on the gas pedal. They had to develop coordination.

Likewise, those who learned to do math by hand, learned to compose by hand, and learned to think for themselves can use the calculator, the computer and other technological devices more effectively. They can use the technology and recognize when the output "looks" wrong meaning there is a human input error. Numbers were multiplied instead of added. Those who never learned by hand will not recognize that it "looks" wrong.

I think all would agree that entering freshmen should have basic math, writing and analytical skills, but they don't. The real question is whether those without the necessary skills should be in college at all and perhaps Lang's class provides the nudge for some students that they are not college material and that is the rub -- the administration sees students as dollar signs.

John Bruce asks for the strategy. As I indicated in my post, there can be no strategy without a better definition of educational goals which in turn is tied up with all the basic norms of a society. This cannot but evolve with society. Use of computers where possible can help, but only marginally.

The one thing that is definitely counterproductive is the reduction in tenure that Bruce seems to favor. Without tenure, the teacher who stands up to student outrage at being criticized, and administrators outrage at truth vis a vis educational standards being known, stands defenseless.

Blaming teachers is always the easy way out and almost always wrong. If we all had students coming from homes with traditional reverence for learning, almost all these problems would disappear.

I taught freshman rhetoric many years ago (longer ago than I care to remember). It was a grueling job that didn't pay enough.

Teaching freshman rhetoric was a kind of payback for me. The TAs who taught me when I was a freshman opened up a world that I hadn't known existed -- real literature. The sanitized, insanely boring reading material that we read in high school almost made me think that there was nothing in the world that was fit to read. My TAs were politicized (this was true even in the 1960s), but they were trying to introduce me to literature that might stimulate my interest and serve my needs. I remember to this day the excitment of first encountering Kafka and this was in my freshman rhetoric class.

I doubt that the job has really changed, and the job does serve a purpose. I think that the real purpose is to help young people to find a literature that really means something to them. If the instructor can succeed at this, then the student will begin to find something to write about. Honesty is at the core of this process. If we kid the student about the viability of his/her work, we are really exposing ourselves to the kid as a fraud.

Freshman rhetoric was widely regarding as the "flunk-out" course when I attended the University of Illinois. Grading was harsh, and I appreciated that. But, then, back in 1967 the idea that human character should be forged in fire was still the common wisdom of my home state of Illinois.

These comments and the Lang situation are taking me in an interesting direction I didn't expect at the start. First, nobody has clarified exactly what Lang's class or classes is or are about. They are presumably NOT remedial composition, as we know that BC has discontinued these courses, from the statements of facts in the original posts. Lang has remained at BC teaching outside this speciality, having transferred to the English Department. We haven't heard what specific courses he taught there, and this would certainly make a difference. So for those who've said they feel students should have a course like Lang's, I would have to ask seriously, which course is that? Until we know which course it is, we won't know if a guy who comes down hard on spelling is necessarily the right instructor.

Also, while I continue to sympathize with anyone who's going through administrative procedures that could result in the loss of his job, the fact of the matter is that he's getting the due process that was apparently specified in his employment circumstances. His case has been submitted to arbitration, for example, and presumably BC will need to make a credible showing that Lang hasn't lived up to his employment agreement. If BC succeeds, it will in fact have played by the rules. We don't always like certain outcomes, but it appears that due process is being granted here.

This is probably one reason why FIRE isn't involved.

Now next, commentators from Glenn Reynolds (today, regarding FIRE's new campaign to eliminate speech codes) to David Brooks to Victor Davis Hanson have said that the outcome of the Iraq war, which has been at extreme variance with predictions from the academy, as well as behavior in the academy related to the war, are likely to increase public scrutiny and pressure on universities. I would guess that this pressure will include public examination of tenure's benefits. If we can say anything about the university system, Lang pro or con, it's that something's broken here; the ability of universities to self-regulate has resulted in the professoriate acting like spoiled children, and in students not receiving good educations. I would guess that as a practical matter, things like tenure and vague or non-existent codes of ethics will receive considerable interest.

So for posters to say in effect, well, Lang's position is just terrible, but to remediate what's broken with academia, we mustn't (a) touch tenure; (b) tighten up ethical or professional standards or demand accountability, or (c) innovate in teaching methods -- well, folks, these are, shall we say, fin-de-siecle attitudes at best.

So I'm finding myself increasingly on the side of the BC adminsitrators, much to my surprise.

JB - I agree that (a) and (b) need to be addressed. But I'm not so sure what you mean by "innovate in teaching methods." Too often that means "professional" educators getting grants to talk about new ways to teach, without actually teaching a single student. It also often means implementing "technology in the classroom," which translates into taxpayer money being spent on computers instead of increased salaries to attract better teachers (though I don't see this as a huge problems for universities like it is for K-12).

So what are the areas that need innovation (I won't put you on the spot and ask for actual innovations)? I think the only innovation that ever needs to take place is for an individual teacher to take the time to effectively communicate with his or her students. I found in law school that great scholars often made awful teachers, and they made no effort to improve. I suspect they thought one of two things: "my students are too inferior in intelligence to understand me," or they didn't mind being bad teachers, or some combination of the two.

P.S. I love to drive a stick. While the increased responsibility of the driver arguably adds safety concerns, it also makes the driver more attentive and gives the driver better control in situations when quick acceleration and decceleration are needed. Also, sticks get better gas mileage.

Bruce--no one will ever describe your reading tastes as less than catholic; I mean who really runs the range from David Brooks all the way to Victor Davis Hansen nowadays?

So many members of the leftist professoriate only read themselves, with the predictable results.

A point of clarification for JB and others who have asked:

Brooklyn College eliminated its remedial writing program several years ago, but it still runs a year-long freshman composition program through the English department. Lang taught sections of both the first and second semester of this comp program, along with standard literature courses (the teaching load at BC is 3/3). What Lang found in those freshman writing courses was that the students taking them were writing either at or below the level of the students who once took his remedial writing course. Standards at BC have been grievously lowered in order to cut costs and keep students moving through. Lang refused to go along with this and has suffered the consequences.

Thanks for the clarification. I will still be very interested to see what might be available of the guidelines the English Department and/or the Provost may have issued regarding whether to pass students along. Stephen's point regarding the position of freshman comp as a "flunk-out" course at Illinois in 1967 is interesting, since at that time it would have been in U of I's interest to screen out students in an enrollment swollen by the draft, the baby boom, and cheap (or free) in-state tuition. 36 years later, life isn't so easy for universities. A department chair or dean, it seems to me, is justified in setting overall guidelines that will, given realistic estimates of what the public wants, prevent catastrophic loss of enrollment. Particularly if the chair and the Provost articulated these goals and policies with clarity and consistency, I would think Lang has little on his side. The more vague or uncommunicative they were, the worse their side will be.

I can also remember a job I had in graduate school as a grader for English comp papers at a local JC. (A reader or grader read and marked up the papers for the instructor.) The instructor in this case (1969 or 70 or so) passed on to me that the students had problems with the way I was doing the marking and made suggestions to reduce the problem. This worked. It may well be that there are ways to handle these situations other than saying you're with Lang or you're against any standards at all.

I'm also interested in Stephen's comment, echoed in various ways in other posts, that one's character should be forged in fire, presumably with the heat provided by a freshman comp course. As a TA, I sometimes thought it was my position in life, but never with full confidence, that at age 23 or 24 I should be forging the characters of 18 year olds in fire. In retrospect, I'm sorry for some of the days in which I took this too seriously. I hope I remember this on Sunday as I say I am heartily sorry and humbly repent.

We should not be ascribing too much to the objectives of a freshman comp course. I agree with Sagredo when he calls for a better definition of educational goals, especially in this matter. You can only start to address the problem of teaching someone to write or think in freshman comp. A person in his or her mid-20s without much teaching experience, working for subsistence pay, and only partway along to a Ph.D. is not the best conveyor of a cultural tradition, and should not be expected to be.

Off-topic.

JB, you write: ...this reminds me of the idea that many, many years of psychoanalysis are needed to get a neurotic into healthy functioning. This idea prevailed until health insurers refused to fund it, rightly in my thinking.

Personally, I've found long-term psychotherapy to be very helpful, although medication is what allowed me to make the best use of it.

Though I realize that there's no free lunch and medical treatments have to be paid for somehow, I'm not really sympathetic to the insurers. I had a manic-depressive friend who was kicked out of a psychiatric ward while still very unstable because her insurance ran out. She killed herself.

I've also had friends with purely physical ailments who had to fight to get their insurer (*cough*Aetna*cough*) to pay even the bills that their literature promised to pay. But it's worse for those of us who have suffered from psychological ailments because the insurance industry's attitudes toward such ailments hasn't caught up with society's in general. It's more profitable for them to tell us it's all in our pretty little heads.

[/rant_mode]

Sheesh.

Much of this sounds like a meeting of the flat earth society.

Earth to John Bruce. Try going over the research relating to spell checkers and computerized writing aids. Sorry, it doesn't do squat, and it particularly doesn't do squat at the lower levels. What a spell checker does fairly well is catch typos made by educated people who already know how to write. But even there, it's not very good.

In actual fact, the most recent research suggests that use of grammar checking tools actually lowers the quality of writing. This isn't an opinion, it's what the research shows, and it's what actual composition specialists say.

Take a look at the backgrounds of the BC faculty involved, and I'll bet you several million dinars that none of them have any competence in this field. Neitehr does Lang, probably, but it sounds like he's doing more or less the same sort of job that passes for competence in the real world.

On the other hand, I've enjoyed reading through the minutes of a meeting of the Flat Earth Society.

I never post; but here goes.

As an English teacher of 20 years' standing, I find that you NEVER are done teaching writing, whether it's in a freshman comp course, sophomore survey, what have you.

I certainly agree that a page bleeding with red ink isn't likely to be effective as a teaching tool. Lots of teachers mark the error twice or so, then ask the student to find more of the same. Another effective technique is to ask the student to read the paper aloud, in a one-on-one conference. I wonder if the BC prof's students could even read their papers after the ink barrage.

A big topic (call it the latest fad if you like) in post-secondary education is for assessment based on competencies, not on grades per se. Freshman-comp competencies could be, for example, Can write a clear declarative sentence; Can write a complex sentence clearly; Can construct a paragraph; Can construct an argument; Can use mechanics (punctuation, etc.) correctly.

One other competency-based idea: The student stays in comp class (or whatever class) until he or she reaches a level of ability. It could take a few weeks, a few months, a few semesters. No grades are given, and there's no shame in it - you're learning until you've learned it.

Thanks to you posters for giving me some things to think about.

The "trial by fire" comments really interested me. In liberal western society, we now seem to view people as if they were made out of glass. Any severe shaking is likely to break them. So, people must be coddled, made safe, psychoanalyzed, etc., else they'll turn into basket cases.

This was not always our view of the character of people. I think we're marching backwards.

Was watching a History channel documentary on the developer of the Soviet heavy bomber, Andrei Tupolev. The circumstances under which this man developed one of the most successful aircraft in military history made me shudder. Tupolev had to work with a slave labor force that fabricated his raw materials, and his enterprise was watched over by Stalinís goons. Stalin, although he was completely ignorant of any scientific knowledge, wanted to be in on the design process. In the middle of the project, Stalin suffered one of his bouts of paranoia and decided that Tupolev could not be trusted. The entire production crew was arrested and removed to a factory that housed a permanent residence for KGB agents. They kept an eye on him 24 hours a day. Tupolev faced a death sentence if his aircraft failed.

And, still, Tupolev succeeded spectacularly! How is this possible? Don't people have to be offered perfect conditions, sympathy and a guidance counselor to accomplish such things?

In our desire to make life soft, easy and safe, have we forgotten something essential about the development of human character?

There's an interesting divide here, with some folks -- Stephen and Laura seem to be of somewhat similar minds -- suggesting things should be done the "hard" way, or that characters should be formed in a crucible of fire. Others like Sue and some of my posts are saying you don't have to treat people mean to get them to learn things.

One of my concerns is the part of human nature that wants to haze people, whether as plebes, pledges, freshmen, Ph.D. candidates, medical interns, etc. etc. etc. The philosophy behind it is basically "I had to suffer; so by god will they!!" Or the theory proven in psychological experiments that many folks will think that if an experience was unpleasant, it had to be "important". A typical experiment has subjects memorizing nonsense syllables with one group having a "TA" type cracking the whip over them to make them do it, the other group doing it without "help". The group with the TA typically reports that the experience was "meaningful" and "important", while the group that just memorized the nonsense syllables was simply happy to get the two dollars or whatever the experimenters paid them to come in.

My views have mellowed over time, but I believe increasingly that many aspects of education are a "hazing" experience that has little to do with actually communicating knowledge. One reason (among many others) I left teaching was the sense that I was being hazed in the Ph.D. program, and I was being given opportunities to haze people as a TA. If that's flatland, so be it!

I'm in full agreement that a page of red ink is not an educational inducement.

Re John Bruce's comments.

I wasn't really suggesting that we should deliberately confront people with terrible conditions. I'm only suggesting that people are far more durable than current fashion would suggest.

Feminism is responsible for this shift in our thinking, and I don't know whether this is good or bad.

Although feminists have insisted that what they want is equality with men, that is not what they actually demanded in terms of policy. Prior to the massive entry of women into the work force and public life, men operated under an entirely different set of assumptions about the nature of work and the entitlement to safety and security. Men assumed that work was meant to be dirty and dangerous, that bosses were likely to be abusive and arbitrary, and that one's safety in public spaces was ultimately the responsibility of the individual.

It says a lot about how we view women that feminism changed all that. Women didn't really ask for equality. They asked for a new deal. Work was supposed to be meaningful, clean and safe. The boss was supposed to be fair and sensitive. Where men once assumed that defending oneself in the public sphere was an individual responsibility, women argued that the public sphere should be made squeaky clean and absolutely safe.

And in the academic world, we became obsessed with safeguarding people's feelings.

Were these changes good or bad? I don't know. The jury is still out.

Jdrax mentions "the most recent research suggests that use of grammar checking tools actually lowers the quality of writing. This isn't an opinion, it's what the research shows, and it's what actual composition specialists say."

I was interested to see this research, for which jdrax doesn't provide a citation, but I did a google on the separate words "spellcheck effectiveness research". I didn't find a link to any type of academic research on the effectiveness of spellcheck, but I did find several links to course syllabi like the following at Seattle Central Community College, covering an English course: "I expect your work to reflect college level composition skills. . . . I expect you to spellcheck and proofread your work."

The English instructor here appears to regard spellchecking as corresponding to mature composition skills, and by his construction appears to regard spellchecking as something both important and separate from proofreading. This instance was not unique in the results of my quick google search.

Why couldn't Lang make an equivalent expectation of his students? This would save time, red ink, and wear and tear. It interests me that the research assignment Lang was given after he was removed from class, appears to have involved investigation of issues somewhat similar to these. Again, try as I might -- nobody likes heavy-handed administrators -- I am having a hard time disagreeing with what BC is doing in Lang's case.

On re-reading, I note jdrax's main concern is with grammar checks, so I did a google search on the whole phrase "computer grammar check". I found the results of the search gave a roughly 5-50 pro or con ratio. However, several of the cons were clearly from sites advertising editorial services, claiming naturally that since the grammar check was insufficient, you needed to pay the guy to edit your work. So SOME of the anti-grammar check opinion is clearly "interested".

Typical, though, was what was in this teaching guide:

Insist that students use the computer spell check for papers written outside of class. Amazingly, some students will be so careless or in such a hurry that they will not even use the computer's spell check program. This is the height of carelessness. Feel comfortable in punishing this behavior with lower grades AFTER you make clear your rationale for insisting on spell-checked papers. . . . Many students understand that the computer grammar check is very unreliable but all should be reminded because students generally know so little about what constitutes correct grammar.

Teaching guides typically understand the limits of both spell check and grammar check, but many advocate the use of spell check -- and appear not to discourage the use of grammar check, as long as students understand the limits.

What I've been suggesting is that these are tools that can be used to save instructor, student, and class time, when used in context. I don't see these views as representing "flat earth". Both tools can be an extremely effective first pass on anyone's writing, and in particular I am puzzled that the objections to Lang seem to stress the amount of red ink he wastes on spelling, when it is clearly common teaching technique to require college students to use the spellcheck.

Where have I said that I wanted people to be treated mean? Isn't there some middle ground between cracking the whip and refraining from marking spelling and grammar errors in college English? Is it too much to ask that college students take the trouble to learn to use a dictionary? Are we talking soft bigotry here?

If they're just supposed to use Word, why is BC taking their tuition money?

I went into college thinking I was a pretty good writer, having gone to a good high school that emphasized writing skills. My first paper got killed; it bled red ink. My professor told me that this was not at all unusual for freshman. She told me that writing is the most important skill that I would learn that year, and that I would continue to learn how to do it better throughout my life, should I keep at it. Yes, my ego was bruised. I was convinced I would fail everything. But I got better with her guidance. Ten years later, I'm still trying to get better. Had she merely praised my effort and given me a "B," I wouldn't have tried so hard to improve.

The BC administration and students need to realize that professors are there to improve their students' skills. They are not there to prop up their delusions about those skills. That's dishonest and ultimately harms the students irreparably.

Thought everyone might be interested in this story from CNN on the writing (in)abilities of junior and high school kids:

http://www.cnn.com/2003/EDUCATION/04/25/student.writing.ap/index.html

My own take on the "red ink experience" can be found at http://www.dartreview.com/archives/000096.php

I have always been highly ambivalent about it. As some have observed here, I did in fact learn to write complete sentences and coherent paragraphs (I deeply wish for a comment facility with a spellcheck, though), but having an abusive or incompetent instructor was not the essential ingredient. This may color my view of Lang, but I'm certainly not someone who wanted, or wants, to be flattered or comforted.

For Laura, nobody is saying the students are just supposed to use Word. However, it's clear that the policies of many institutions like BC in fact strongly urge or require the teachers to make use of the spellcheck facilities available in the product as part of their teaching. The evidence I see suggests that Lang doesn't do this, and in fact is making students do things the "hard way" when it's not necessary.

I guess we read this differently. I read it that no one was preventing the students from using any spell check or grammar check they wanted to, and they either did not bother or did not understand the importance of doing so. I suspect the latter. I'm thinking about the students who think they are getting an education, and are being cheated of their time and money, and I'm thinking of the devaluing of the diploma from BC when employers start seeing graduates of BC who can't compose a paragraph without Word. It appeared to me, since Lang would allow students to retake the class without their grades affecting their transcript until they had learned enough to get decent grades, that he was being merciful. Without seeing those marked-up pages it's impossible to tell.

I'll tell you that they aren't doing students any favors if they let the students think employers are going to worry about their self-esteem like they want Lang to. In my line of work, some seemingly minor details mean a lot. Go through one audit of your lab documentation with a representative of EPA and you are forever cured of the temptation to pass over a technician's sloppy documentation because you don't want to hurt his feelings.

The single biggest objection to Lang's teaching style that I read over and over is that he marks out (presumably with red ink) individual spelling errors. As the discussion has evolved here, I've started looking at real-world composition teaching guides and syllabi, and many of them seem specifically to be telling instructors and students to use the spellcheck. One teaching guide that I quoted specifically gives the instructor the guidance to mark students down for not using the spellcheck once the instructor has told them to use it and explained why.

I don't know if BC's teaching guide says this, though perhaps it should. The objection to Lang's style is that he is using excessive red ink, doing things like marking out specific spelling errors. Sue, the English teacher who posted above, says her approach would be to mark out, say, the first two misspellings. An instructor who followed the teaching guide quoted here would be fully justified in marking two misspellings and grading the student down for not following the instructions to use the spellcheck.

I continue to be skeptical of Lang's case simply because I am seeing reasonable real-world alternatives that don't waste everyone's time as marking specific spelling errors does. If Lang had been repeatedly counseled about alternatives, as it appears reasonable alternatives are available, I see no reason why BC would not be justified in its course of action.

If BC did not give Lang clear guidelines, the issue would be more confused. If Erin has other pertinent info that would clarify this, it would be most helpful.

I doubt it's the red ink that is the single biggest objection to Lang's teaching style. I suspect it's his handing out of the grade of NC (no credit) that has done him in. Here he has broken an unwritten rule which professors are expected to tacitly obey: you pass everyone who shows up with a pulse and turns in most of the assignments.

John Bruce, I think you are missing the point about the spelling/technology issue. One can try to make an analogous point from mathematics: why are we teaching addition, multiplication, etc., when students have calculators that can do that kind of work? In math, the reasons are that 1)the ideas of addition and multiplication (etc.) get generalized (in algebra and later), and 2)if you take the numbers away from the students, students never become familiar with them, and so cannot recognize patterns, which is at the heart of math. In English, the situation is not exactly analogous (there is no "generalization" of spelling, although you could make the case that grammar and paper organization are the same thing at different scales); however, in this situation, spelling and grammar substitute for a measure of how much reading and writing the students have done (much like the beloved analogies in the SATs measure (ideally) bredth and depth of reading and writing). Those students who get critiqued for their spelling and grammar, and who want to learn how to improve, will take the critique as a stimulus to improve; those who could care less about their writing (and, by consequence, the precision and organization of their thinking), will redirect the critique at the professor. The fact that they do not use spellcheck already says worlds about how they view their writing; writing a campus policy will not change that.

Cheers,
Edison

Edison is making a parallel between calculators and spellcheck. However, in this case we are seeing English instructors adopting as a teaching guideline having students use spellcheck, and saying they will mark a student down for not using it. A big reason for this is that if there is no spellcheck, the alternate tool for students to use is the dictionary. If there is no calculator, as presumably is not allowed in many match tests, the alternate tool is the student's internalization of the rules of addition, multiplication, etc., which is expected. But I am not expected in my teens to internalize the rules that would lead me to spell a word like "schadenfreude" correctly. Clearly the standard is emerging that the use of spellcheck is the mark of a mature writer, and its use appears, on the basis of my quick review, to be endorsed by English instructors. I am no longer one, and have not been one since spellcheck came on the scene, but this is my observation. If I were one, I would insist on its use -- it would save everyone's time and temper.

Invisible Adjunct may be making a useful point -- in general, when I was in college and when I taught, I think it was expected that if you came to class and turned in all your assignments, you got a passing grade. My memory from the early 1970s was that the only students I failed were those who flagrantly did not complete assignments, or who flagrantly plagiarized. I would say that one thing that made this easy was that the students who were hopeless at spelling or sentence construction were also unlikely to complete all their assignments. There was no equivalent of an NC where I taught. It was not uncommon, though, for students to drop a course within the deadline if they felt they would not get the grade they expected.

Certainly the "gentleman's C" was an institution of long standing when I was in college. So I am inclined to say that absence of rigor in awarding some kind of credit for keeping the seat warm is not a new feature of higher education. Nor, for that matter, is anti-intellectualism in the higher reaches of the academy -- Richard Hofstadter wrote a book about this in the early 1960s, as did Jacques Barzun in The House of Intellect. These are not new problems, so I'm not "shocked -- shocked" to see them here.

John Bruce, I don't know if this has been addressed earlier, but many students may not have access to computers or word processing programs such as MS word. I know of at least one college like that.

Whew. This comment list is already much too long, but just for the sake of completeness: I'll respond to the poster who takes me to task for calling some people "semi-literate" when he/she learns how to spell Toulouse-Lautrec. And I don't get John Bruce's thing on steam engines and pr in English departments at all. Lang isn't a throwback of any kind, and I hope I didn't imply that - he's perceived that way, of course, and that's why he provokes "shock." From what I can tell, and certainly from his elegantly written note to this site, he's a highly literate, highly motivated, and probably very good teacher of writing.

I just want to mention to everyone who is protesting the use of red ink, you cannot know what you are doing wrong unless someone points it out to you. Yes, if you have been applauded and praised for inferior work, it might come as a shock the first time that someone paid attention to the quality and content of your work. Personally, there is nothing as satisfying as the first paper that you turn in that doesn't have red ink on it. Please remember that there is greater satisfaction in success that is earned than in simply passing by benefit of having a pulse. It is hard to realize that you might not know as much as you had thought, but having an instructor who is willing to teach you rather than work on your self esteem is of greater benefit in the long run. For every person out there who is thinking of that "hard ass" who covered your papers in red ink, is there not a bit of corresponding satisfaction in knowing that you eventually wrote a paper that passed their standards? Oh and for spell check to work, you have to be able to get close to the word in the first place. If you are unable to guess how to spell a word, spell check is useless.

I am amazed at how readily it seems people are willing to criticize someone that sounds as if they are trying to actually teach kids something. Writing is difficult, pretending it's ok not to be able to write at all is ridiculous.

The teachers I remember most are those who actually called me on my weakenesses and tried to help me fix them - this includes a college professor that flat out told me I couldn't write and needed practice - with plenty of red-ink as proof. He then suggested drafts and proof-reading, which improved my writing geatly.

Without knowing the entire story it is not easy to judge the merits of both sides, but to criticize Prof Lang for doing too much correcting of his students work seems a bit odd to me. Spell check does nothing for context and grammar check doesn't tell you that you have no lead sentence, or make no points to back up what you are trying to say. It fixes problems for those who already know what they are doing, nothing more.

For John Bruce: I'm a medical transcriptionist, and if I turned in a document that had only been spellchecked, I'd get fired. Luckily, my high school had teachers who graded like Mr. Lang, and I am capable of doing this job with only a high school diploma because of it.

More on topic, though, I think the faculty at BC who believe in feel-goody education are doing a disservice to the students at the college using the methods they do to move students ahead.

My dad was a high school teacher for 30 years. He was a tough old nut as a teacher. He's probably turning purple reading about this.

The lesson I take from this is as follows:
When my daughter is selecting a college, I should check out the attitudes and priorities of the English department. If a trace of of the Brooklyn College ideology is detected that college will be removed from our consideration. My girl will attend a school that encourages and demands scholastic rigor. Then in the open market she'll leave the Brooklyn College grads eating her dust.

So quiet lately. Any more comment please.