The cliché that liberal arts schools teach their students how to think has never made sense to me in the context of Whitman. Although official rhetoric about the school promotes “diversity,” diversity of thought among students seems strongly discouraged.

The process of grading is an integral component of this agenda.

Since the boom in the assessment movement, public schools across the country have become obsessed with presenting students with a certain kind of knowledge that they can apply to the SAT and other standardized tests.

Despite the heroic and thankless work of a small number of primary and secondary school educators who attempt to teach their students to think critically, the vast majority of the curricula across the country is concerned with imparting a certain “standardized” form of knowledge.

The way that the geniuses that came before us decided to track understanding was through a numeric scale running 0.0-4.0.   Certainly, there are some institutions that use a 0-10 scale, but this doesn’t address my fundamental concern, which is that grades are a reductive way to measure progress and evaluate knowledge.

Learning is a lifelong process.   We do not begin learning when we enter school and stop learning once we leave it. The way that we learn in school is not the same for everyone.   Different people have different styles of learning, and learn different things.   Professors too are not all alike.   Some prefer lectures to discussion, others don’t see either of these formats as desirable.   Some emphasize reading, others work on writing.

Getting a C in calculus class means different things to different people.   It can be a slap in the face or a cause for celebration.   Similarly, who’s to say that any professor alive has an objective knowledge about their discipline?   There’s no right way to conduct a literary analysis and there are no mathematical principles or scientific laws that are written in stone.

What is important is not only a students’ ability to parrot back information but their willingness to engage with the material, to challenge their own preconceptions and to push their discipline forward.

And while violently challenging the received wisdom of the academy is my pedagogical project, I recognize it’s not for everyone.   I’m not suggesting that there is no subversive potential in “classic” literature, for instance, but rather that our subjectivity makes them subversive, rather than their objective status.

Grades are not useful.   To the extent that they predict “future success” (whatever that is) they certainly can’t screen out douchebags, and I think that should be an important academic priority inside and outside of Whitman College.

There are dozens of colleges across the country who have transitioned to “evaluation” grading and don’t record numerical grades.   This kind of system is fairer to students, more informative to interested graduate programs and doesn’t lend itself as easily to ideological uniformity.

As things stand now, Whitman’s promotion of ideological, racial, sexual and cultural diversity gets a big, fat red F.