Schenectady Synecdoche

This strikes me as a perfect example of failure to communication - or more properly, failure to assume responsibility and accountability for communication - between professor and student resulting in the "push for law" rhetoric that distances everyone from individual (forgive the repetition) responsibility.

I don't know any professor who openly acknowledges grading students down for the ideology of their writing. I know several who grade it down on the basis of "unsupported" or "unsupportable" claims, lack of evidence, weak reasoning, or similar terms. I don't know any student who is willing to challenge a professor directly on the suspicion of being graded down for ideology. I know several who are perfectly willing to complain to the administration or the DO about their belief.

I seems to me that if we are going to be teachers of language usage, at whatever level of education, that we need to be able to engage in meaningful, constructive dialogue with our students about their writing even when we don't agree with their beliefs. But more importantly, I think a big part of our job is to teach students how to approach a professor (or other individual with superior power in the relationship) with questions about grading fairness, role of ideology, etc., and how to engage in that conversation with both firmness and respect.

I'm sympathetic to conservatives who feel silenced in a liberal college classroom. I'm one of them. But that doesn't mean in any way that I think the law is the right answer. Learning to discuss and even debate across ideological and power lines is what I hope for all my students. And for me, for that matter.

Interesting that Ward Churchill and Hamilton are dragged into the article, though in no way related to grading.

In all seriousness, Chris, I agree with you. Though I don't believe an apolitical class exists and I don't believe it's possible to teach ideology-free, I do believe in the need for a classroom that welcomes diversity of all kinds. I suspect most of us have had the experience of being discriminated against in the classroom—for me, on the basis of my gender and regional origins. Classroom discrimination is wrong, and people who do it should be stopped. That said, I'm afraid I don't take very seriously this Congressional grandstanding. I regard it as just another political land grab, targeting a political group in the professoriate and trying to criminalize their politics. I am thinking about assigning the Globe article as a first reading in 105 this fall.