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.