American University has brought in an academic from the University of Washington-Tacoma with a curious mission for an academic institution: to teach academics not to grade on the writing ability of students as opposed to their “labor.” Professor Asao Inoue believes that writing ability should not be assessed to achieve “antiracist” objectives.
Inoue is the director of the UW-Tacoma Writing Center and has explained that “White language supremacy is perpetuated in college classrooms despite the better intentions of faculty, particularly through the practices of grading writing.” It appears that grading on writing ability is one of those acts of white supremacy. He has insisted that professors who use a single neutral standard for all students are perpetuating racism: “[using] single standard to grade your students’ languaging, you engage in racism. You actively promote white language supremacy, which is the handmaiden to white bias in the world.”
In the few years I taught as an adjunct at George Mason, I based part of my grades on writing quality. The white students did not demonstrate any advantage.
Pointer from Rod Dreher, who also located this gem, by Donna Riley, who is an academic administrator in the school of engineering at Purdue..
‘Rigorous engineering education research’ and the related ‘evidence-based’ research and practice movement in STEM education have resulted in a proliferation of boundary drawing exercises that mimic those in engineering disciplines, shaping the development of new knowledge and ‘improved’ practice in engineering education. Rigor accomplishes dirty deeds, however, serving three primary ends across engineering, engineering education, and engineering education research: disciplining, demarcating boundaries, and demonstrating white male heterosexual privilege. Understanding how rigor reproduces inequality, we cannot reinvent it but rather must relinquish it, looking to alternative conceptualizations for evaluating knowledge, welcoming diverse ways of knowing, doing, and being, and moving from compliance to engagement, from rigor to vigor.
So. . .we have university administrators arguing that good writing and rigor are aligned with white supremacy. These sorts of arguments might work to convince people. . .to become white supremacists.
And then there is this story about a special physics course at Stanford for minority students, because they have “less preparation.” I mean, why not offer a special physics course for students who have less preparation, rather than designate the race of the students?
It appears to me that these institutions are behaving as if they do not believe that their minority students can handle high-level work. Maybe some can’t. My guess is that a lot of white student’s can’t, either. But I think it’s clearly degrading to the students who can do high-level work, especially minority students who can do high-level work, to try to disparage such work with racialist boo-words.
I can guarantee you that when a white, affluent, leader of one of our higher ed institutions is in need of legal representation, he or she will hire legal counsel whose writing skills could be described as racist. And if he or she has to fly to meet this lawyer, it will surely be in a plane designed and built with such rigor that it could only be the product of misogyny.
There appears to be a field in the higher ed which Progressive intellectuals seem to believe is failing students, and which may be deemed not be sufficiently rigorous.
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2019/08/abolish-the-business-major-anti-intellectual-degree-programs-have-no-place-in-colleges.html
(Any suggestion that this belief could be motivated by the 2016 election could be deemed uncharitable.)
That’s interesting. When I was an electrical engineering undergrad at Purdue some 20 years ago, the majority of the professors and students were either from India or China. I didn’t realize that when I was given “rigorous” work that it was actually white supremacy, especially since whites were a minority. Also, I am now even less inclined to donate…
Reading about the Purdue engineering professor gave me pause as well. The following is from Kling’s second link:
I’ve never really thought about how universities hire faculty heads. This is troubling because the oppression angle detracts from understanding why more women and young people in general are not flocking to the STEM programs. I’m not sure that a peak of 20% of women engineering undergraduates is the natural level but if it is artificially low I suspect that the answer lies with understanding the choices/preferences of 8 year-old girls or perhaps 15 year-old young women.
I did my undergrad at Purdue in the early 90s, and as I recall the low-division technical courses had a number of options for varying levels of ability and preparation. My department offered courses that could reasonably be described as Honors Intro Chem (aka Chem for People Who Should Know Better), Intro Chem for Majors, Intro Chem for Nonmajors, Intro Chem for Poets, and Intro Chem for Miscellaneous Vertebrates. Plus there was the option of testing out of intro chem entirely if your preparation made it completely unnecessary, which I did.
OTOH, the physics department mostly just offered Physics 152, a course famous for converting aspiring engineers into humanities majors.
And then there is this story about a special physics course at Stanford for minority students
It was my impression that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination on the basis of race. Perhaps the Department of Education should try to enforce it.
How are conservative intellectuals supposed to concentrate on insisting upon rigor in academia when (1) rigor obviously will always have disparate impact and the progressives already identify rigor with racism, i.e., only white supremacists would insist upon it, and (2) they are not to use state policy or condition public money as a form of countervailing power to reign in the progressive ideological excesses of academia?
It’s clear that the state of higher education is becoming an increasingly partisan issue, and perhaps in the budget-constrained / fiscal-crisis future, the funds will just get cut off entirely.
In logic there is the principle of explosion, “ex falso quodlibet” – which expresses the fatal issue of inconsistency and the idea that any falsehood or contradiciton in a system allows one to ‘prove’ anything about anything. (Proof: If both A and ~A, then (A or B) is true for any B, but since ~A, then B is true, and likewise ~B, so everything is both true and false.)
In our society, the false assumption is that statistical disparities between identity groups (that is, between ‘privileged’ and ‘protected’ classes) are unnatural and thus evidence of systematic injustice. The biggest mistake conservative and libertarian intellectuals ever made was to fail to hold the line against this falsehood and to acquiesce to the princple of Disparate Impact.
What we are living through is the principle of explosion applied with increasing generality on the basis of this falsehood, from which it can be ‘proven’ that literally everything is racist white supremacy, combined with the democratic logic of “agitprop the vote” by stirring passions and endlessly provoking racial resentments by serial arsonists of our social capital. The reason is because the assumption of disparate impact implies that removing the social injustice should level the outcomes. When that doesn’t work (because it cannot work, because the assumption is false), then the social injustice must be located yet elsewhere, yet deeper, must be extirpated and rooted out with increased intensity, severity, and subtlety. And it never ends, so literally everything is potentially the source of the ‘problem’and thus up for the chopping block.
After all, how does one push back or argue against any of this stuff without pointing at the fundamental flaw at the root of the argumentation? If you accept the assumptions of Disparate Impact, then these maniac progressives torching the whole Amazon of our inherited institutions must somehow be right in some deep sense. If you recognize that what they are doing and saying is dangerous nonsense, then there is no avoiding the implication that the fundamental assumption is simply false.
In non-progressive intellectuals aren’t willing to take this on, then there is no point trying to do anything else, because, eventually, those matters too will come under the destructive gaze of those who have made themselves irredeemably insatiable.
Perhaps, but I’m not sure what the solution should have been or at what point in time “the line” should have been held. There is no doubt that systemic racism and sexism were very real and damaging at some point in recent history and its extent is now vastly reduced. The question is how close are we to being done on the racism/sexism front and how damaging to society the current level social justice activism is.
I’m not even sure this is a battle for conservatives and libertarians alone. Big government progressives and neoliberals were pointing out the social justice craziness for quite some time too. Steven Pinker wrote the Blank Slate in 2002 and its message did not spread. Judith Rich Harris pulled the rug out from under social psychology with “The Nurture Assumption” in 1998 but the Nature vs. Nurture debate continues as if her work doesn’t exist.
That’s actually an easy answer. The legal line should have been held at the point where for liability for unlawful discrimination to arise it would be necessary and sufficient to demonstrate, by at least clear and convincing evidence – but never merely typical statistical disparity – the existence of intentional, knowing, active, and conscious discrimination on a prohibited basis.
Under this standard, things like the EEOC’s (originally California’s, naturally) “80% rule” for presuming unlawfully adverse impact would have impossible from the start.
The alternative – allowing inferences of intentionally systematic discrimination from mere statistical disparities with no practical method of proving oneself innocent and even from facially neutral meritocratic selectrion methods – has led to every slide down the slippery slope we are on today.
Yes, a higher burden of proof always means a few more rascals are going to get away with doing bad things. We can try to subsidize people who fall on hard times, out of the belief that some of them didn’t deserve their bad breaks.
But if the alternative is what we’re getting now, and incinerating every valuable institution with flamethrowers (i.e., let’s just get rid of all gifted programs or speciality schools, because, “racist white supremacy” despite being majoriy Asian), then that is a lot worse and much more difficult damage to mitigate or reverse.
One day the right is going to get tired of funding its enemies and campuses that are little more than progressive madrassas and antifa terrorist training camps, and it is going to throw a lot of babies out with that dirty bathwater. My crazy appeal, “To save babies, stop people from taking a dump in the bath!”
University education is highly unfair in ways that cannot be promptly and easily fixed.
EXAMPLE #1. People who didn’t learn their pre-calculus topics are likely to fall behind in calculus and then flunk calculus.
EXAMPLE #2. People who in high school didn’t read books and newspapers / magazines / something / anything-but-a-lot-of-it–they often can’t write well. What they write in college can seem “babyish” and in the wrong “register,” in addition to being riddled with grammatical defects.
What is unfair about #2 is their writing should often get a C or D–independently of the course material. Some people can improve quickly under duress, but for others it just takes some years to improve. Probably this is what generates the demand for software services like “Grammarly.”
I spent some years as a T.A. and sometimes Instructor at a flagship state university in the Upper Midwest. My impression is that some students could write and some couldn’t. There were few “Black Americans” or “recently-arrived-in-the-USA-Hispanics” in my classes–one big challenge was trying to improve the writing of recently arrived refugees / asylees, or foreign students spending a few years here who were motivated and diligent but had trouble producing grammatically standard written output. Often international students were good at memorizing mundane specifics and had good stamina and diligence, but their written output was grammatically poor.
The best writers seemed to me students who seemed to be (1) middle class (I’m guessing since never saw income statements), (2) native speakers, who (3) just read a lot and (4) could read without effort. Being able to read without effort enables you to read a lot–when prompted you can often write moderately well. Also, you are more likely to have actually read the thing that you are now writing about.
This is consistent with the work of Stephen Krashen. A student brought Krashen’s work by my attention, and some of his research makes sense to me. Some people suspect he’s often off-base, but I believe he’s correct about some things.
Proceeding from Krashen, my hunch (there’s some research to support this) is that students can’t produce near-perfect written output unless they read a lot of material in the same general “sociolinguistic register” as what they are expected to produce. Therefore, students who read the newspaper can write something that sounds like a newspaper article.
Students who don’t read the newspaper don’t learn low frequency vocabulary words and can’t use them, I suspect. They also can’t reproduce newspaper register because they don’t really know what it is.
Students who mostly watch sports and sports talk shows on TV may be intelligent enough, but their written output comes across as overly colloquial and chatty–it actually sounds a bit like “sports chat.” It may be grammatically almost acceptable, but it’s oddly chatty. Often it’s oddly empty of content except for unsubstantiated opinions.
Newly arrived foreign students sometimes “wrote like foreigners.” Sometimes by the end of the second sentence I could tell they weren’t native speakers. They made mistakes in things like “countables” that were different from what uneducated natives would make. When to use articles in noun phrases, for example. Arabs spontaneously omit verbs. Russians also, I think. .
What I’m trying to get at is that I hate the idea of spontaneously lowering standards. I understand the impulse in the sense that life is unfair and many students are penalized in college because they never learned to write in high school.
There seem to be two obvious options.
1. lower standards and grade students leniently on grammatical standards just to keep them passing through the system. This is done implicitly by default–I’ve done it myself. It’s the path of least resistance.
2. Come down hard on their deficiencies, which might lead them to getting C’s or D’s in (for example) social science coursework just because they can’t write standard English.
(Being unable to produce a standard output may be more pronounced for African Americans who have habits such as “zero copula” and their vernacular use of verb tense, e.g., “He be doing that.” But it’s far greater than any issue of Black Vernacular English. Black Americans may also write poorly because they don’t read enough. The psychologist Robert Sternberg has asserted that in most African American cultures only social misfits go out of their way to read a lot. )
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Jordan Peterson in a video somewhere says “Ok, so you don’t know how to write. Of course not. I mean, where were you going to learn–in school?!?!?” The charm is in the delivery, but he seems to assert that it’s not really what automatically happens in school.
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P.S.: I saw somewhere a 2d hand summary of research that asserted that at least 1/2 of reading proficiency may be polygenic. It’s like being tall, there are a 100 or so genes each one of which has a small impact. I don’t recall where I saw it–my guess would be either Steve Sailer or James Thompson or West Hunter or Isegoria
“The best writers seemed to me students who seemed to be…” What you mean is the writers who’s output most closely matched the sociolinguistic register they were expected to produce. In your view these are the best writers, yet you have no knowledge of their abilities in non-english languages or judged by a different sociolinguistic register.
“students can’t produce near-perfect written output unless they read a lot of material in the same general “sociolinguistic register” as what they are expected to produce.”
So you basically agree with Inoue (just noticed most of the vowels are in that short name). Students exposed to white mainstream “sociolinguistic register” are at an advantage in communicating in the manner expected. By and large these are white students.
You see only two solutions. One of which is to ‘lower the standards.” By which you mean not marking according to the same sociolinguistic register.
The other is to come down hard to ensure students with a different sociolinguistic register do badly.
There is another way – adjust the assessment to allow for the content of the writing, not whether it fits a particular sociolinguistic register which has been arbitrarily assigned “the best.”
In practice this may look very much like your first solution but does not require any lowering of standards.
Your learning will not be nearly as useful if you can’t communicate with others about it. And being able to communicate in a “sociolinguistic register” that represents only a small fraction of the population is not that useful either. Clearly, there are other issues for foreign students who plan to go back to their countries after graduation, but I don’t think that is the main issue here.
Dear Harold,
I don’t think it’s just socio-linguistic register, which certainly can be largely dependent on class and ethnicity. Sociolinguistic register is easy for me to notice, but where I was teaching it seemed to be an epiphenomenon (?) below which I was looking for core aspects of effective diction, adequate domain-specific vocabulary, and a tendency to support assertions with evidence.
My most common experience was that students wrote essays as if they were cohosting a discussion on ESPN of an upcoming game.
I hypothesize that people who don’t read the newspaper by the time they finish high school are less likely to have learned low frequency ” newspaper words” that are uncommon to informal conversation. They can try memorizing word lists from English class, but it’s different from seeing the word used repeatedly.
Newspaper words: examples might be attrition, subpoena, invoice, parameter, perogative. What’s the colloquial synonym for attrition? Offhand I can’t suggest one.
For further reading on the issue I’m getting at, maybe try Charles Murray’s _Real Education_ starting around p. 70.
Which at the moment seems to be online as a PDF (google found it for me)
or
E. D. Hirsch’s essay here:
https://www.city-journal.org/html/wealth-words-13523.html
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I didn’t get many foreign students, and rarely did I have the sense that a particular student was much more articulate in a foreign language. My concern was that they weren’t articulate in English, which was generally the only language they could speak.
I am in agreement with just about everything you say, but I would reduce it to one basic point. You mention those who can “read without effort.” This is the sine qua non of a college education. Anyone who cannot read without effort should not be in college: it’s as simple as that. I also completely agree with the idea that the best way to master basic writing is to read a lot. My conclusion? Those who haven’t read a lot (and therefore cannot express themselves properly in writing) should not be in college.
And quite frankly, my experience with STEM students is that they are generally smarter than the average college student and have probably read more, if only in their field of interest. Those students often could be motivated to write clearly if they were given a proper incentive to put in the work.
The title of this blog is “taking the most charitable view of those who disagree”
There are reasonable ways to view labor based marking, given a bit of charity. There are surely some benefits and some costs. It may be that the costs outweigh the benefits. This post has failed to consider or discuss the benefits, which would be required for a charitable approach.
I’m really not surprised when an economist’s blog gives short shrift to labor theories of value. The economic profession has comprehensively considered and thoroughly rejected them, to the point where this is rather like complaining that NASA does not respond charitably to flat-earthers.
NASA should not respond charitably to flat Earthers. Nobody should take the most charitable of those who disagree. The whole concept leads to nonsense. The title should be changed to reflect reality.
But in this case we don’t need the most charitable interpretation. We need to think abut what the purpose of education is. Since we all accept that people respond to incentives and practice makes people better at stuff, why would rewarding effort not make most people better at he subjects being taught?
Harold — I’m really not sure what point you are making. Yes, practice makes people better at stuff. But what does that have to do with saying that rigor in engineering is racist? And also, I would say that practice won’t necessarily make you better if you are practicing the wrong thing. The point of grades is to tell you if you are doing it right. If you’re not doing it right, you’re not helping yourself.
Is there anything uncharitable in what I said? My general feeling is that those who reject all the traditional standards of expression and argumentation on the basis of “divesity” are well-intentioned but wrong. Charity does not require me to say their arguments have merit, does it?
Charles Murray told us that we should “Learn to love rigor.” Offhand I tend to think he’s correct. Here’s a sample of what he wrote, with some commentary. I know nothing about the blog I’m providing the link to. It just came up in a search for “Charles Murray learn to love rigor” .
https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2014/09/09/learning-to-love-rigor/
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I believe one of the Murray’s examples of rigor was the way the Founding Fathers of the USA approached their plan to establish a republic. They investigated the history of republics and noted that they tended to have short lives, degenerating into dictatorships or monarchies. The best way to wreck them was through war, it seemed.
This reminds me…the excitable blogger Mike Scheuer of “Kill bin Laden” fame wrote in his first book, _Imperial Hubris_, that the first thing his boss taught him in the CIA was to “do the checkables.”
He’s rather excitable these days, but often worth reading even if we aren’t going to follow his advice.
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I’m just free associating here–the difficult thing about rigor is that it’s hard work, and frequently involves failure. Either failing ourselves, investigating the failures of others, or succeeding while the people next to us fail. In the short term, life is easier with less rigor. Thus we need to learn to love it, and in the short term it’s just hard, unpleasant, bruising to the ego
Arnold, what makes this two-year-old article with zero success or notability worth describing? How is this not picking the weakest possible construction of your opponents’ arguments to take down?
The three articles that Kling links to are all recent. I’m assuming that you are talking about the 2017 paper by Donna Riley that both Kling and one of the articles reference.
For me, this is important evidence since it demonstrates that Social Justice ideology has spread from the humanities and social sciences into the STEM disciplines. Two year old academic papers are not old and if you search Donna Riley on Google Scholar you will see many papers (including more recent ones) most dealing with the same theme of Social Justice applied to engineering. Riley is head of engineering at Purdue.
Quite honestly, I’m not sure how to view this charitably.
I’ll take that back, Donna Riley is head of something called “Engineering Education”. That is certainly not the same as being the head of engineering and probably much much less cause for alarm.
Indeed, very different. Doesn’t seem like she’s ever actually educated an engineer. I appreciate the proactive retraction.
That second quoted block is copy pasted twice.
Do note that this description is being reported by the opponent of the professor advocating the changes, possibly misquoting or selectively quoting him. It’s possible to imagine that what is meant here is more accurately described as something like “the standards according to which writing is judged “good” are based on white cultural norms”. After all the “goodness” of writing is pretty subjective, assuming you aren’t talking about typos or basic grammatical errors. In technical fields, you can get marked down for things like using passive voice, which is really a matter of conventional taste. Some people might prefer passive voice in other cultures.
In my own experience proof reading fellow students’ essays (I went to a reasonably prestigious private college), to be ‘good’ (better than average certainly) would only require one to use correct grammar and unambiguous sentence structures. I’m sure many professors appreciate what they see as good style, but I doubt that’s relevant here: for possibly more than half of students, the marginal improvement on the table is just following the rules; most students even at the college level seem to struggle enough with that; and no, linguistic rules aren’t imposed by white supremacy; they’re necessary for mutual intelligibility. Each of us knowing our own private language with its own grammar defeats the purpose of language.
Even in terms of stylistic norms, the contention is ridiculous. Most white people in this country are descended mainly from non-English speakers. The idea that the norms of the language were contrived for racial reasons is the kind of thing someone could only believe if they were oblivious to the history of this country before a few decades ago, and thought of white people as some homogeneous mass that came into existence as it stepped off the Mayflower. Perhaps one could argue that stylistic norms reflect ‘English/Anglo-saxon supremacy,’ but then is it really remarkable that the people who’s ancestors have been speaking the language longest tend to be the most culturally attached to it? Should I be indignant that not enough German has made its way into English to accommodate my heritage?
This is such an important point. Thank you for making it.
Well, I wouldn’t say “contrived” for racial reasons. More like the dominant group has a particular writing style, the dominant group thinks it’s own writing style is “better”, and therefore judges the writing styles common in non-dominant groups as inferior, even though there’s really nothing objectively “better” about the dominant group’s preferred style. There doesn’t need to be a conscious plot in order for there to be standards that favor the dominant group.
As Mark Z also said, the purpose of language (and writing) is for communication. Grading of writing should be for the purpose of improving communication. Poor spelling and grammar (and other things, such as poor logic) make it harder to understand the point a person is trying to make. This is important.
To continue with this — who is the audience that the writing is directed toward? If your audience is solely urban blacks (for example), then you would be justified in writing quite differently than if your intended audience is the public at large (or the dominant group, as you put it). However, even in that case it’s going to be harder for anyone to understand if it’s full of misspellings and poor logic.
Are you as skeptical about charges of racism? Like when Oberlin charged a local bakery with being racist?
You can see Professor Asao Inoue actual words in his presentation
How Do We Language So People Stop Killing Each Other, Or What Do We Do About White Language Supremacy?
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11ACklcUmqGvTzCMPlETChBwS-Ic3t2BOLi13u8IUEp4/edit
It’s 25 pages of how white people dominate language and set standards, and if you can find 2 consecutive paragraphs that actually talks about how alternative methods might help students write better then I’ll donate $25 to the charity of your choice.
you can also look at the mission statement page of the writing center with a large section on
STATEMENT ON ANTIRACIST AND SOCIAL JUSTICE WORK IN THE WRITING CENTER
including
Just avoiding racism is not enough because it means we are doing nothing to stop racism at large, and it amounts to allowing racism to continue.
challenge conventional word choices and writing explanations;
I found a lot of his dialogue incomprehensible and overwrought, but he does eventually get around to some sort of explanation to the effect that black people tends to grow up in segregated black communities and therefore don’t learn the language norms common in white society, so they have a different manner of speaking and of writing, which might not be judged as “good” according to conventional academic standards. I don’t think this is totally implausible, even if the way it is presented is overwrought.
Yeah, because there are no books or television sets in black neighborhoods.
These problems had afflicted most immigrant groups, then eventually they assimilate; black Americans have remained largely unassimilated. Assimilation is probably the only way this changes. Of course, a cost of assimilation is that the distinctive culture and identity of the assimilating people gradually disappears or becomes irrelevant (e.g. most polish or Irish Americans are pretty close to indifferent to their ethnic identity except in st. Patrick’s day).
If anything, her position is decidedly counterproductive. She seems to take anti-assimilation position; rather, we should be encouraging black people to assimilate into the ‘dominant’ language norms, just as every non-English speaking group has done (mostly quite successfully). What exactly is the point of resisting? Just to spite ‘white people’ (really, English people)?
Perhaps black people should challenge the dominant white norm of driving on the right side of the road? Most social conventions, including language, derive their usefulness from the fact that everyone follows them, and where all possible conventions are intrinsically equal makes the most sense to follow the most common (or ‘dominant’) one. In certain respects, pluralism is decidedly harmful: in what side of the road we drive on; in property law; and in grammar. Going your own way and bucking the prevailing convention only cuts oneself off from everyone else. Do the extent that black communities choose to persist in their own grammars rather than adopt the standard one, it’s to their own detriment, and they should stop.
Are you still going to suggest that Inoue was misquoting or selectively quoted by the article quoting him
“[using] single standard to grade your students’ languaging, you engage in racism. You actively promote white language supremacy, which is the handmaiden to white bias in the world.”
or are you saying that you agree with that position, because black people have a different language norms, that are just as objectively good as the white standard so their languaging shouldn’t be graded to the white standard.
I’m saying it’s possible to construct a rational interpretation of the argument Inoue is making. It is to some extent a thought-exercise in being charitable to people I would otherwise disagree with.
“I’m saying it’s possible to construct a rational interpretation of the argument Inoue is making”
Its not just possible, it is really easy. That fact that most people here seem to have a huge problem with this makes me wonder if the idea of “taking the most charitable view of those who disagree” is actually meaningless drivel. Some sort of virtue signalling without a shred of reality. It is not “taking a somewhat charitable view” but “the most charitable view.” That sentiment is sorely lacking here.
I mean, if you make this the actual title of your blog it seems incumbent on you to make at least a small effort to look for the positives in the thing you disparage. It is a perfectly reasonable argument that if you reward work, people will work more and more work leads to grater knowledge. Labor base marking rewards work.
One gets the impression that “anti-racist” is merely anti-white. One wonders how writing in Swahili is graded in Swahili taught classes? Is attention to formality merely a colonialist legacy? If so, is there any language that is allowed to have formal conventions? My impression is that for the most part racialist pedants have nothing of interest to offer other than heightened race hate. When an innocuous word like “mulato” is deemed “offensive” so that white ancestry can be extirpated from identity, you are well on your way to Manson’s race wars. When Obama, who had no US slave ancestors, can win plaudits for abusing his white grandmother , the woman who raised him, the way he did, one realizes there is no resolution. Engaging in hate of whites is a pleasant and profitable exercise for a lot of boring people with nothing else to offer. Other countries with much worse histories don’t have the US culture of hate. It will not end well.
Is it “engaging in hate of whites” or is it expressing thoughts that white people normally don’t get to hear – the secret stuff that black people think, but don’t usually feel “safe” saying?
I see now why college should be free.
I’m trying to figure how I might decipher these “directives” if I were a prof or TA looking at student papers. Lots of non-native English speaking students out there. I think, being reasonable, that if I got a paper from a non-native speaker — Chinese or Iranian or Norwegian or whatever — that I’d certainly NOTICE grammatic and spelling errors and probably flag some of them — big red circles around the errors with corrections shown. Likely, especially early in the term, that’d be extent of my White Supremacy posturing; if the equations were correct or the flow of logic was unexceptionable, I wouldn’t bother with marking down the paper — oh, maybe a point or two for “incorrect usage” but not enough to change a letter grade.
Likely, I’d treat papers by native English speakers much the same. Face it, a paper by a native English speaker making obnoxious usage errors probably has enough other flaws that a few points deducted isn’t going to lower the grade from A to D. Maybe, in private, I’d point to acceptable text in books or published papers and explain that this is the standard to be met, and that as native speaker he/she really ought to be closer to that level than foreigners.
I don’t think these would be unreasonable practices, and my suspicion is that my students and fellow academics would agree. I even suspect Drs. Inoue and Riley might agree, might even protest that my behavior was exactly what they wished to encourage, and that they couldn’t understand why other professors found their simple admonitions so hard to comprehend.
I.e., I think we’re looking at Academic Jargon, understandable by only a tiny minority of bureaucrats who have to speak to bureaucrats with language cast in stone in various well intentioned regulations.
I agree with your first point: when I graded papers with serious writing errors, I always took into account possible explanations. Take a student who was not a native speaker of English. If he understood the material and had tried to make a decent argument about it, I rarely held poor writing against him. He had a skills deficiency, not a knowledge deficiency. I would also invite the student to come see me to talk about how to work on his English expression. But consider another case: if the student’s grasp of the language was so bad that he did not understand the readings and could not write something coherent about them, I could not cut him the same slack. In the case of the first student, time (and greater exposure to English) will take care of his difficulties; in the second case, the student lacks the language skills necessary for college.
As to your second point, I think you are completely wrong. For most contemporary supporters of what might be called “critical writing theory,” these issues are ideological rather than pedagogical. The simple fact that college standards are founded on standards and practices that were established under a white “racist” regime delegitimizes them for these scholars. You have no idea how strong these ideas are in writing programs and English departments. I couldn’t put up with this stuff any longer, so I retired.
More on Donna Riley
Note her work was defended by the editors as meeting
the standards of review have n her field.
No one disagreed
http://flintwaterstudy.org/2018/01/bizarre-attack-on-flintwaterstudy-rigor-and-purdue-slide-rules-an-epic-failure-to-measure-up/
Yes, let us simply the laws of physics so even the simple minded can understand. Physics cannot be that complex, haw hard is it to figure out squashed vacuum?.
Much of science is actually composed of reducing complex systems to simple rules that can easily be understood, even by idiots.
Trouble is, same goes for pseudoscience.
1) Everybody more or less agrees that to get good at something you need to practice, or in other words you need to labor at it.
2) Most also agree that people respond to incentives; if you reward some behavior people tend to do more of it.
This marking scheme is designed to encourage work in specifically directed areas under the guidance of the teacher. Given the first two statements it is certainly plausible that this marking scheme could result in most or all students learning more than under the more usual marking scheme.
The downside is that employers would find it harder to distinguish their competence in some areas.
A question: if this scheme increased the amount students learned and increased understanding of their subjects, but made it harder for employers to distinguish that competence, would it be a good or bad thing?
Or another way, is the purpose of university to teach or to signal?
Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” was meant to be a satire; Inoue takes it as an instruction manual.
Not just rigor, but reason and civility is racist confederate white supremacy too.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/29/conservatives-say-weve-abandoned-reason-civility-old-south-said-that-too/
The joke meme is, “It Is Now Intolerable White Supremacism to Support (Spins Wheel / Pulls Card Out of Deck) X”.
What non-progressive position could possible be safe from this kind of smear-job? Surely some bad guy in the past called for applying the principle of charity and the principle of humanity. If you do it too, then you’re just as ‘bad’ as they were!
Like I said, this is the what happens when the the logic of the Principle of Explosion and Guilt By Association meets The Great Awokening. A never-ending stream of nonsensical claims repeatedly breaking the previous world record for brazen absurdity. “The Great Woke-splosion.”
they do not believe that their minority students can handle high-level work. Maybe some can’t. My guess is that a lot of white student’s can’t, either.
They are correct – most of their (low SAT) minority students can’t handle high-level work; neither can many, perhaps most whites. Especially the rich ones.
Yet for most high paying manager jobs, it’s not clear how much most college learning is needed. To get hired one needs the credential, plus the inside pull. The rich and famous know how to get the pull, and so only need the credential (so the pulling is not so obvious). C. Clinton at Stanford and after graduation is an obvious example; Ted Kennedy at Harvard (then expelled?) is another.
More signal than education, in practice.
And the dumbing down is to hide the low IQs of Blacks.
Reality is racist. We can’t handle the truth.