As I write, college instructors around the country are looking at their
grade books, and holding the following internal monologue: "Well, her
attendance is terrible, she hasn't done her assignments, and her test
average is a 'D,' but she's black, and she could get me fired, so I'll
give her a 'B.'... He's white, so I'll flunk him.... She's illiterate, but
she's Puerto Rican, so I'll give her a B....
Such internal monologues are typically held by instructors in what I
call the Asphalt League of public higher education, especially in the AL's
urban precincts.
Such monologues apparently occur much less often in the minds of
instructors at overpriced, private universities (OPUs) like Harvard,
Stanford, and Princeton. At such schools, money talks, and parents who are
paying over $30,000 per year per child for an "education," will not
tolerate instructors giving their children less than top grades. The good
folks teaching at OPUs have resolved their conflicts, by giving high
grades to almost everyone — half of all grades at Harvard are "A" or "A-";
some eighty percent of all grades at Stanford are "B" or higher; and at
Princeton the figure is over 83 percent.
To get an idea of the significance of such grading, consider that
according to a classic bell curve, the traditional criterion used for
grading the members of a class, only 15 percent of grades would attain the
lofty heights of A- or A, and that for the past thirty years, as scores on
standardized tests have gone down, average college grades have shot
up.
In February, Harvey Mansfield noted that grade inflation is
rampant at Harvard. Mansfield, a distinguished political philosopher who
has spent his entire, 39-year career at Harvard, observed that the
inflation had begun during the 1970s. He announced that he gives every
student two grades: The grade the student actually earned, and the grade
Mansfield is officially recording for him, so as not to harm the student
in an age of grade inflation.
As controversial as Mansfield's announcement was, that wasn't what got
him into trouble. It was his explanation: He believes that grade inflation
was initially a result of affirmative action, and was limited to black
students. Later, he says, instructors compensated for the unfair advantage
they were granting affirmative action admits, by inflating the grades of
white (and, presumably, Asian) students, too.
Mansfield has admitted that he has no scholarship to back up his
contention, just his long experience at Harvard.
Outraged black students complained publicly, and even trespassed in
Mansfield's class, sitting in silence before leaving. Harvard is obviously
a world apart from the University of California-Berkeley, where an
instructor who made the same statement would have to be identified via
dental records. Harvey Mansfield was immediately celebrated by
conservative academics and journalists. In National Review
Online, for example, Stanley Kurtz devoted his February 20
column to praising Mansfield.
Now, I have no personal beef with Harvey Mansfield. But as he himself
has admitted, he has no scholarship to support his claims. So, why would
conservative academics — who routinely pillory racial socialists for
making statements lacking any scholarly basis — celebrate a man who is
guilty of the same offense? And why did Mansfield's black student
antagonists fail to make an issue of his lack of scholarship?
The reason is, that things are much worse in academia than even its
brand-name critics are aware of. In a debate, opposing scholars come up
with conflicting data, and argue about why their respective data fail to
match, or give mutually irreconcilable interpretations to generally
accepted data. But no one is even providing data for a grade inflation
debate.
Mainstream conservatives like Stanley Kurtz praise Harvey Mansfield,
because he's one of them; racial socialists attack him, because he's one
of "the enemy."
Racial socialists know, in their hearts, that they seek to politically
cleanse the university of all who disagree with them. Many mainstream
conservatives, on the other hand, delude themselves that they stand for
"disinterested scholarship."
Although Mansfield spoke in February, I scooped him on this story ...
by three years. I have a special, albeit invisible role in this
non-debate. You see, there IS a body of scholarship on grade inflation:
My scholarship. In 1998, I published the longest article on the
topic I'm aware of, in the nation's most respected, conservative academic
journal, Academic Questions; a series in the New York Post;
another series in the New York Daily News; related articles
in Insight, The Weekly Standard, and
Chronicles magazines, respectively; and responding to a
request from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, I produced a
11,000-word report on reforming the City University of New York
system.
And I can assure you, that Harvey Mansfield and Stanley Kurtz read my
Academic Questions article. Both men are closely associated with the
National Association of Scholars, which publishes AQ.
I was on a one-man crusade. I would reform the City University system,
where I was then teaching, and my glorious campaign would result in a book
deal for the manuscript I was working on.
I believe the social work term for my problem is "reality
testing."
Things didn't exactly work out as I envisioned them: CUNY's
administrators have since pioneered new advances in the science of
academic fraud; my book remains unpublished; and my crates
full of thousands of pieces of evidence of academic corruption gather
dust, while "scholars" pay rapt attention to a man who admits that he has
no evidence to support his claims.
Maybe I'm not the only one who has a problem with reality testing.
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