But for an administrator to then change those final grades—behind my back—simply to appease them? How could that possibly be justified?
The response from my department chair, who has been at the college for 17 years, floored me: “This has been occurring ever since I started at Spelman.”
“That’s corrupt,” I blurted out. [In a statement emailed to The Free Press, a Spelman spokesperson wrote that “The College, its administrators, and faculty, exercise appropriate judgment in the delivery of our exceptional learning and living activities in order to maintain consistency across Spelman’s campus.” Spelman declined to comment on any of the specifics in this story.]
More here.
The poor guy got fired in the end, for naively believing that the commitment to excellence meant grading fairly according to long-accepted standards.
Exact same thing happened to me . . . in 1988, at a so-called world class institution of higher learning, where it's all wink wink.
The process got turbocharged in the 1960s by the draft dodgers. They fled to college, or to Canada. Liberal institutions gave them a pass on admissions, and once there relaxed standards to keep them enrolled to escape being drafted. These ne'er-do-wells stayed in school as the Vietnam war dragged on. Many went on to grad school as standards weakened some more. Rinse and repeat.
They are the ones who went on to educate today's hordes of complete lunatics now populating college campi.
Standards were lowered everywhere quite quickly from the 1960s, including at elite small religious colleges by the 1970s where stubborn professors with standards were already then not being renewed, the polite way of firing them.
We are reaping what we've sown.
The rot set in a long, long time ago, and it reflects why the country is in the sorry state it is.
It can't be fixed. The country as we know it will have to collapse first.
Three semesters of Latin used to be required to get into Harvard, let alone graduate from it. That standard was already under attack in 1917 in the name of "science". The widespread requirement of three semesters of college Latin was gone by the mid 1960s. Now you will be hard pressed to find any college requiring any foreign language at all to graduate. Princeton is now infamous for eliminating Latin and Greek for a degree in Classics, you know, the study of everything Greco-Roman.
The process has its own inertia producing this history. It's inherent in the thing we call America.
