Grading their Politics
It's grading season again, and since Emery has taken to posing questions in recent posts, I thought I'd turn to a query of more immediate practical import (for me) than golden tablets and magic rocks. When, if ever, is it OK to downgrade student papers for their politics?
As we all know, the good PC liberal position is "never." It's also the "professional" position. We're supposed to be grading skills--thinking, writing, research, etc., matters of process--not judging substance per se. Such a policy adheres well to the principles of "liberalism," generally, insofar as liberalism promotes open discussion, tolerance toward diverse views, and official "neutrality" on questions of "the good." The professor's immediate responsibility focuses on what is sometimes called "instrumental reasoning," but liberalism tends to assume that by cultivating reasoning as process, individuals become more capable, in a substantive sense, of participating in and contributing to a pluralistic society. One of the big up-sides of this practice is that it helps to depoliticize our judgments, at least to some extent, while still cultivating socially useful behaviors among our students.
But in practice, I'm not sure these distinctions always hold up. Conservatives, for example, commonly complain that academia's lefty tilt results in a persistent political bias. David Horowitz has been travelling the country railing against the persecution of conservative students by the academy, which discriminates against anyone to the right of Lenin. Poor little conservatives, fragile flowers, you are a beseiged and victimized majority in a society run by a "murderous" Marxist minority. (TMcD's sister, LoquaciousMcD, recently had the pleasure of attending one of DH's campus rants.) Most of this claim is silliness, of course: right-wing victim chic offered, paradoxically, in a society currently run almost exclusively by the far right. Sure, academics as a whole tend to be left of center, but the numbers vary by discipline, and who ever said that every segment of society had to be politically representative. Are the military, the corporations, or the evangelical churches politically balanced? Of course not.
Still, there's a kernel of truth in Horowitz's complaint. We can't always avoid political judgments in grading, especially for those of us who actually teach politics. I recently graded a paper where the student's argument could be summed up as follows: although I haven't read it (!), I believe that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress after 9/11 gave the president absolute powers to do whatever he wants in matters of war, because that's what the president says it says, and after 9/11 we have to trust that whatever our president says is true without questioning or else the terrorists will win. Now that's pretty common conservative reasoning these days, but it's also pretty clearly a case of bad reasoning, at least when presented with the rhetorical overkill and lack of practical evidence or legal precedent this paper offered. Sometimes the substance of a political position derives from faulty process, and in critiquing the latter we inevitably denigrate the former. Or, to quote Steven Colbert from yesterday's White House Press Association banquet, sometimes "reality has a liberal bias."
I'm sure that Horowitz would be apoplectic were he reading this. But does he really think professors should offer NO judgments? It seems unlikely. I can't imagine he'd want high grades given to well-written papers advocating far left positions. Which brings me to my second example. I read a paper yesterday with the following argument: Fidel Castro is not a "totalitarian"; he's a profoundly "modest" and benevolent man (why, he even says so himself!), a hero of his people who has created an "Eden" in Cuba, one where people ride bicycles because it is more environmentally friendly, and where they have a real "freedom" the West cannot appreciate. Hmmm. . . . OK. So what this student has shown me is a complete inability to distinguish between objective analysis and agitprop oblivious to factual reality. I gave that paper a bad grade too. But I won't deny that politics played a role.
Any thoughts from my comrades?