The Brooklyn College Kingsman, a student-run weekly paper, has taken up the case of Frederick Lang, the BC English professor who is no longer permitted to teach because he refused to inflate student grades. In a gutsy article, student reporter Samuel Steinberg records Lang's account of how the English department chair, Ellen Tremper, sabotaged his career after he resisted pressure to raise student grades, and of how Tremper was assisted by BC Provost Roberta Matthews, who helped ruin Lang by lying under oath during last spring's arbitration hearings. It's strong stuff, damning and incriminating, and though the article also quotes Tremper as saying that Lang is misrepresenting the truth, the mere fact that the article was written at all asserts its author's conviction that the real story here is not that of a disgruntled teacher who does not grasp why he can't be trusted to teach.

In his freshman composition courses, Lang was failing--or, at least, not passing--the majority of his students (BC has a "no credit" grading option for intro-level composition that allows students to retake a course they would have failed, with no record of that retaking). His point was that it would be dishonest to do otherwise, that BC has an obligation to ensure that its students can write, and that it is reasonable for freshman composition to become a repeatable proving ground for BC students now that the college no longer maintains a remedial writing program. Tremper's point was that Lang's standards were way out of synch with the rest of the department and school, and that he could thus not be entrusted with students' fragile egos and vulnerable transcripts.

Reading between the lines, you can see competing ideas about professional standards and ethics coming into harsh, irreconcilable conflict in this case. The larger picture of the Lang debacle is one in which the goals of education have ceded to the pragmatics of expediency as state budget crunches and funding cuts hang punitively over schools that do not move their (often ill-prepared) students quickly and reliably toward their degrees. Within such a climate, standards have to change (specifically, to lower), and teachers and administrators have to collude in agreeing not to notice that they now pass work they once would have failed. Yes, Lang stood out from his colleagues as a teacher who was giving much lower grades than they were, failing many more students, and, consequently, upsetting students who were not used to being told that their writing was below par. But that doesn't mean Lang is the one who is in the wrong. It just means that he was alone.

Critical Mass has covered Lang's case at length, and has also published several pieces by Lang himself. You can access the Lang archive here.