Inflating Grades For Social Justice

At a party over the weekend I was introduced to a college professor, and fell into conversation with him about teaching and Covid. Then I asked about how wokeness affects his teaching. I had no idea of the man’s politics, but I would bet the farm that he is a liberal, given that his academic field skews heavily to the left.

He told me that there is a lot of stress on professors at his university regarding grading students of color. He said everyone is afraid of being accused of racism if a black student doesn’t like his grade. The anxiety around this is deep, he said.

I tweeted out something about it, and received this e-mail today from a reader who asks to be anonymous. I slightly changed a couple of things to make it harder to identify her husband:

My husband teaches philosophy at an American university, and while he likes the work, he misses our original home, ([European country]).  We moved to the United States [deleted] years ago.

My husband and I both never saw ourselves as “left” or “right” until his university experience started. The level of political correctness here is just out of control: special rules for “trans students,” an expectation that someone’s deviant sexual practices be not only tolerated, but CELEBRATED. And as far as fairness goes, forget about it. Last semester, my husband gave one of his black students a B on a writing assignment. The student reported him to the Dean, claiming racism, saying that she was an A student and didn’t deserve a B. She didn’t even specify why her paper was so good! She just essentially said everyone else gave her A’s. The Dean called my husband in, and essentially bullied him into changing the grade, reminding him of the students’ “legacy of being oppressed.”

I’m sorry, but this is all too much. My husband felt humiliated. He’s wondering if he should look for another job. We feel trapped. Please feel free to publish, as we both get tired of people claiming to you that this kind of political correctness is “fake.”.. (Excerpts from The American Conservative)