Historically in the Land of the Free, threats to academic freedom have come from outside the university (usually from the political right). Since the 1960’s those threats have tended to originate from within (typically from the left). Currently the greatest threats are coming from various self-appointed oversight bodies under the guise of assessing outcomes.
Various persons and committees operating outside the classroom are dictating to faculty how courses should be organized, what their syllabi must include, what goals and outcomes all courses must provide, which subjects should or shouldn’t be emphasized or taught, which approaches and methods are acceptable, and how students should be graded.
In short, faculty members are being required to resign their fundamental right to teach their courses and grade their students as they see fit. Whatever is judged to be at variance with the vision and judgment of persons not teaching the course is ruled inappropriate to the goals of a department, university, or oversight committee.
Take the example of grading. No respect is paid for student confidentiality. English majors, among others, are now being required to purchase Live Text and to post their work from various courses so that persons not familiar with the student or the course may assess the student’s progress. When one of my students said she didn’t want to have her work exposed, she was told to post it or she would not receive a grade in the course.
Nor is faculty judgment respected. English Department faculty were told by the person most involved in assessment – one who calls teaching “a group effort” – that even a student receiving A’s and B’s from her instructors, but who did not live up to the standards of assessment, would be advised to drop out of the program.
Instructors in the department were also given a sample paper to grade. Grades given by the instructors ranged from F to A. Now the instructors are being told that they have to see that their grades are somehow consistent, which means of course that the judgment of any teacher of record may be trumped by grading standards not established by the instructor.
We hear that this is happening nationwide, as if that were some excuse and not a need for more extensive concern, particularly since standardizing testing has already proven to be a disaster nationwide on the high school and grammar school levels. And much of it seems innocent enough, like, for example, our President’s call for teaching courses from a global perspective. But shouldn’t that be a faculty and not an administrative decision? In any event, it all leads us in one obvious direction: top down administration of instruction that violates basic faculty and student rights. Resistance is in order so that we might return to certain fundamentals that all universities ought to adher to:
First, all faculty who meet or exceed the minimum standard of competency and maintain at least acceptable student evaluations must be left free to organize and teach their subjects in their courses as they see fit.
Secondly, the teacher of record must remain the sole determiner of the student’s grade. Any deviation from fair grading standards can and should be initially addressed by the student affected. The student is the only aggrieved party in such cases.
Thirdly, each and every student’s course work must be held to be strictly confidential, a matter exclusively between the student and the teacher of record. No student is accountable for his or her performance in a class to anybody but the teacher of record.
No university system, dedicated as Northeastern claims to be to excellence and diversity, can afford to tolerate the kind of interference with the work of faculty and students that we are presently experiencing.