That Gut Feeling

At Chronicle of Higher Ed, a child-prof explains his purpose.

I love giving A’s to students, maybe even more than they love receiving them. In my religion courses over the years, I’ve acquired a reputation as an “easy” teacher, and I love that, too.

In this age of grade inflation, student entitlements, skyrocketing tuitions, and rampant anti-intellectualism, my wallowing in the pleasures of giving out A’s as if they were $100 bills might seem like ammunition for the enemies of higher education and the professorial life. In the face of that charge, I have only one response: I’m tenured.

Apparently, Emory University gives out tenure like Gary Laderman gives out A’s. It’s not necessarily that he doesn’t know his subject, religion. It’s not that he isn’t a brilliant teacher, for all I know. It’s that he’s decided he doesn’t care for the method of assessing mastery in his courses, so he has chosen not to play the grade game, so A’s all around.

It’s not that he has any ill-will toward the letters B through F, per se, but that he’s taken account of the nature of the students.

But seriously, I do have a master plan, and there is a method to my mad generosity. Most of the students in my courses are in the wonderful age group of older children becoming young adults, 18 to 22 or so. They are mostly privileged and well off, though increasingly diverse on all fronts: class, race, ethnicity, gender, international, and so on.

Something else most all share: They are on drugs, either prescribed or not — and I’m including the legal drugs (alcohol, cigarettes, vapes, and so on). They are also in the midst of serious existential struggles — around identity, family, self-worth, purpose, direction, and so on. You remember that age, don’t you? I certainly remember my own troubled path at their stage. Some say it’s much worse these days, as rising suicide rates would suggest.

It’s nice to learn that he retains some long-term memory, but his observation, that his students today are pathetically fragile, drugged up and immature presents the normal condition of college students, even though he sees it trending downward. This isn’t a novel observation, but raises a couple questions: do you water down their education to meet the feelings of the most sensitive student, do you just teach your course because you’re being paid to teach, not hold their hands, or do you try to lead them to adulthood rather than coddle them as perpetual babies?

So part of my plan is to try to show love and empathy rather than contempt and derision, as some of my colleagues do. Hell, students already have enough stress and uncertainty in their lives as they adjust to living on their own, making new friends, feeding themselves, and taking crazy-making courses on “orgo” (that’s organic chemistry, I think), microeconomics, American politics, brain and behavior, marketing, and other preprofessional touchstones in the intellectual and practical training of young people who really have no idea what they are getting themselves into when they choose their majors.

Therein lies the fallacy, that one would hope would be obvious to some academic given the reins of the religion department at a big name university like Emory. But instead, the options presented are a false dichotomy between “love and empathy” and “contempt and derision.” Missing is “teach well and grade fairly.”

That Laderman doesn’t care about grades really isn’t a big deal. He’s neither the first prof to be an “easy” grader nor will he be the last. I remember taking course that held no interest for me because it was a tough semester and I needed a gut course to fill out my schedule. I was young. I get it.

But what’s troubling is this conflation of responsibility, not only within the Academy but infused in the malleable minds of the kids. A prof has a job to do. They actually pay him to do it. The students, or their parents, pay huge money in exchange for it, often taking out loans that will haunt them for decades. And that job is not to give hugs. The hubris of a prof believing that a students’ fragile self-esteem is dependent on his showing “love and empathy” is astounding.

If a student taking your course is contemplating suicide, the problem isn’t the anticipated grade. The solution isn’t a prof who shows “love and empathy.” But for all the other students, who went to college in the expectation that they would come out the back end with an education, will they leave your course knowing whatever it is you’re being paid to teach them?

The truth is, you really have to be an idiot to get a B in my courses, since a top priority for grading is that students show up. That might seem easy, but I assure you, even that is difficult to ensure in these big classes.

This may be the most valuable, and horrifying, part of Laderman’s explanation. Showing up is more than students can manage. Yet, Laderman’s aspiration is far deeper.

The goal, in fact, is much harder. It is to get these young individuals to think for themselves about the very things that their parents, previous schools, religious leaders, politicians, and others involved in their upbringing and shaping moral codes don’t want them to think about for themselves: religion, sexuality, death, health, drugs, what they can and can’t do to their bodies.

This all sounds quite deep and interesting, but rudderless. If students don’t know the basics, they have no foundation to discuss the deeper issues. And if they can’t manage to show up, and Laderman doesn’t bother teaching the basics, ” a silly notion that reduces knowledge about religion to being able to answer trivia questions,” then it’s nothing more than a room of ignoramuses spouting baseless beliefs while pretending to be engaged in critical thinking.

The use of grades as mechanisms of assessment have many flaws, but they are not without certain virtues as well. For one thing, they can show a student that they’re smarter than they think. For another, they can show a student that they’re not. But for all students, they serve as tool, an incentive and disincentive, to show up so that the burden they’ve undertaken to pay for the salary of Gary Laderman isn’t wasted.

As for the chair of Emory University’s religion department and Goodrich C. White Professor of religion, you can be empathetic, and not at all derisive, while teaching those unduly fragile students, even the privileged ones. But then, they might not like you. You like being liked, don’t you? Yes, you do.

Thankfully, other academics take their responsibility to their students more seriously, aren’t at all contemptuous and derisive, and instead teach them substantive course material while helping them to mature into adults by placing college level expectations on them. And they may succeed, provided some child-prof more concerned with being liked by his students doesn’t undermine their pedagogical efforts with his self-serving childish rationalizations.

That Gut Feeling curated from Simple Justice