Mike Adams' satirical call for affirmative action grading policies is deliberately over the top. As a statement about racial and gender preferences, it's basically a pedagogical version of the affirmative action bake sales held this winter by college Republicans at UCLA and Berkeley (the sales priced cookies based on the buyer's race and gender: at UCLA, black, Latina and Indian women paid 25 cents for cookies that cost minority males 50 cents, white women one dollar, and two dollars for white men and Asian males). As such, Adams' provocative announcement has achieved its goal: to trigger debate and maybe even to jar proponents of preferences into re-thinking their position. There is, for example, quite a debate taking place in the comments to my post (scroll down and keep reading).

But Adams' point about how gerrymandering standards in college admissions leads--both logically and practically--to a gerrymandering of standards within college need not be seen as a satirical hypothetical, or even as a gross caricature. Colleges and universities across the country are feeling the pressure to graduate the students they admit--and when they are in the business of admitting students who either do not meet the institution's admissions requirements (but are admitted anyway, via preferences) or who arguably should not be in college at all (as is the case at schools that have lowered their admissions standards so drastically that they are virtually nonexistent), all hell breaks loose.

Recall Frederick Lang, the Brooklyn College English professor who has been "reassigned" to non-teaching duties for refusing to inflate his grades. Lang wasn't handing out the easy A's and B's. And he was handing out plenty of NC's (a "no credit" mark that compels students to repeat the course but does not harm the GPA the way an "F" would). The dispute between Lang and BC administrators boils down to a difference of opinion about whether, once admitted to college, students should receive honest feedback (even though that feedback may be painful to hear) or whether they should be "encouraged" with grades that may not assess their performance, but do stroke their egos and do keep them moving steadily along toward graduation. Lang's argument is that it is disrespectful to students--whatever their race, class, or gender--to refuse them the honest, thorough evaluations he gives them when they take his freshman composition courses. The College's argument is that Lang's approach to teaching is--in the words of the English department chair-- "spiritually damaging" to students who may not be very confident about their ability to succeed in college, and who are overwhelmed and humiliated by the thorough way he marks up their papers and by the honest grades he gives.

Lang and BC admins have been at an impasse for over a year now. He has not taught a class since last spring, and is not slated to return to the classroom next year. He has filed grievances and complaints, and has even taken his case to arbitration (a judgement is expected later this spring). Meanwhile, BC admins are escalating. It is no longer enough to have Lang safely removed from the classroom and assigned to various research projects that keep him far away from the fragile egos of BC students. Now he must be removed from the school itself. Last week, as Lang's arbitration hearings drew to a close, Provost Roberta Matthews informed Lang in writing that he would most likely be facing disciplinary charges for his failure to complete his research assignments in a timely manner (no matter that the fall project is now nearly completed, no matter that the project was make-work to begin with, no matter that the projects for both fall and spring were not suited to Lang and required him to learn new fields and acquire new technological skills). Lang feels that this notice is writing on the wall: It's hard to fire a tenured professor, but one way you can do it is to prove that he is not able to perform his duties in a timely and competent manner. By removing Lang from the classroom--where he wants to be, and where he has taught college writing effectively for twenty years--and assigning him to tasks he is not prepared to undertake, Brooklyn College administrators are creating the paper trail they will need to terminate him, if indeed they aspire to do so.

It's an awful mess, and it doesn't look like Lang is going to be getting any justice any time soon--not if the administrative scions of Brooklyn College have anything to say about it. And it is all ultimately owing to Lang's refusal to abandon his principles and his standards in the face of overwhelming institutional pressure.

More on Lang's case tomorrow, with special attention paid to how Brooklyn College is essentially attempting to impose an affirmative action grading policy on Lang, and how his refusal to countenance such an imposition may cost him his career.

The word "reactionary" means: relating to, marked by, or favoring reaction; especially ultraconservative in politics.

This word is so often used as a sort of curse thatI wanted to know what it meant. The word seems to simply be a means of characterizing another's politics as objectionable. This site hardly seems "ultraconservative" to me, unless you are a die-hard Marxist.

Don't know too much about the history of the word, but I'd venture to guess that the political curse is one used most often by "progressives," a word that means little to my mind except "Marxist."

And, now to display just how "reactionary" I am. Couple of Thoughts, if you are so concerned about the status of black people, then give them your stuff and quit bitching at other people to give black people their stuff. More action, less talk. Give up you job, your education and your goods to improve the status of black people. Else, take off your halo. I'm already tired of admiring it.

However much we may sympathize with Lang's personal situation -- nobody likes to be railroaded out of a job -- I continue to be concerned about potential solutions to the grade inflation question that don't seem to be considered, that would solve Lang's problem by making the problem go away. Low-level drudge remedial composition teaching positions would also go away, but that's a feature, not a bug.

Take the issue of plagiarism. Now and then I google "academic plagiarism" and see sites and posts from professors like Lang and graduate assistants who say that when they do systematic searches, something between 40 and 60 percent of essays in basic composition courses are plagiarized. If university plagiarism policies were consistently applied, you would be failing and potentially expelling 40 to 60 percent of these composition students. Grade inflation would disappear in a twinkling. When I was a graduate assistant (without computers to help me research the case) I had a hunch that about the same percentage of papers was plagiarized. The tacit policy of the English department was to ignore the extent of plagiarism, because the problem was simply too big to deal with. You couldn't flunk or expel 60 percent of the freshman class.

But there is now software that can perform a preliminary screening (I think one site is called turnitin.com or turnmein.com, something like that). You catch Cliff's notes, anything published on the web, and after a while the contents of each fraternity's file of English papers. I always felt frustrated grading papers making grammatical and content based comments and grades when I had the sneaking suspicion it wasn't the student's work in the first place, and I was wasting my time. This way you go a long way toward eliminating the waste of time.

If the computer says it's plagiarized, you've got a better case against the student -- you've still got to find a way to avoid flunking 60 percent, though. This would be a first step for the Lang problem in any case. The second step would be software that not only checks for plagiarism but does a first pass for spelling and grammar. In both cases you're arguing with the computer, not the professor, and Lang's problem grows smaller. If the Dean wants to change the curve, she can go right ahead -- all she needs to do is sign on and do it, and it's fully her responsibility.

Lang, meanwhile, and many of his colleagues will need to find other, more rewarding work, not all that bad a thing.

Sorry, I'm not sympathetic to the plagiarism issue.

The reason plagiarism is such an issue (assuming it is) lies in the laziness of the teachers themselves, who give out the same essay topics year after year. This is simply inviting the student to cheat. So too with essay assignments that aren't integrated into what's going on in the classroom.

At the same time, cases keep boiling up into the national consciousness where professors are doing the same thing, which suggests yet another cause.

Over the years many techniques have been developed which reduce the chances of plagiarism to the bare minimum. But the majority of the professorate is unwilling to adopt any of them.

I remember taking English lit back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. For research papers, we had to take notes on actual note cards, and those cards had to be turned in with our rough and final drafts. Essays were assigned and completed during class time. I guess you could plagiarize note cards if you just had to, but no way could you plagiarize those essays. Looks like we've come a long way since then. : )

I remember learning to type back in the same era, wishing there was some way I could hit the back space key and have it automatically type over my error, instead of having to pull the page out and start over. Some years later along came the correcting typewriter, and some years after that the word processor, and my dream was realized. But imagine being the prof who had to look at all those note cards and rough drafts. I simply can't conceive of wanting a job like that.

I fought with a prof who wanted me to turn in rough drafts, saying you couldn't write a good essay by just composing at the typewriter. Maybe not then, but the word processor has revolutionized the writing process, and you no longer deal with rough drafts separate from final drafts -- unless you make interim backups, it's all the same file.

The way to control for plagiarism now, it seems to me, is with a software package that runs a check on the paper at the time it's submitted (via e-mail). It could very well just send a message back to the student saying, "hey, guy, this is actually from the website www.goodstuff.com, and if you submit it, you'll be in deep doo-doo. Click here to submit or click here to write a new paper."

Lots less wear and tear on the instructor, and gives the student a real second chance. Can't then say "but I didn't know it was against the rules. . ."

My daughter hit on the solution to the rough draft stupidity: She composes her final draft in Word, prints it out, then goes through and takes out sentences, reducing it almost to outline form, and prints it out again. You're right, if you are composing on a word processor, a rough draft is kind of silly. Unless you turn it in before you write your paper so your teacher can make comments and corrections.

They still use index cards to do research papers at her high school. It will be interesting to see what her college English will be like.