August 11, 2014--A for Effort

Nowadays when kids get trophies and certificates for just participating--as opposed to winning or coming in first--is it any wonder that students at highly selective colleges such as Princeton feel entitled to straight A's.

This is an old debate. For decades, since at least the 1960s, academic traditionalists (count me in on this issue) have felt that grade inflation (where everyone does in fact get A's or minimally A-'s) distorts any attempts to draw distinctions between outstanding work, good work, barely acceptable performance, and inadequate (D or F) work. We/I feel that C's are acceptable even in the Ivy League and there are situations where students actually earn D's and even F's.

The counter argument is that it's fiercely competitive out there, especially when it comes to getting into graduate and professional schools, and since places such as Princeton admit only the very best high school graduates, where even those at the bottom of their academic barrel are much better than even the highest-rated students at, which place to mention, say, Acorn State how fair it is to give "authentic" grades at Dartmouth which will result in someone graduating from there not, by comparison, appearing to be academically distinguished, even though he or she is much the better student than an Acorn's 4.0 GPA grad?

But, Yale students and their families say, if the Dean of Admission at Harvard Medical School sees an application from a Bulldog grad who has a 3.20 GPA and another from a Wayne State graduate whose GPA is 3.90, won't the latter be admitted and the one from Yale rejected? All right, be placed on the waiting list.

Absolutely not.

Medical school admissions people look at much more than GPAs. They care about letters of recommendation and especially about applicants' scores on the MCATs. And when it comes to GPAs they know more than you or I about the differences between Ivy League and less-selective college students. They would know, even if grades were given more honestly, that a B from Harvard is at least the equal of an A from Drexel. In fact, they have formula that enable them to make those comparisons.

Having said this, in an era of over-praising, where kids from privileged backgrounds from a very early age hear nothing but how wonderful they are--from their potty behavior to how they perform at age three at dance recitals--getting anything but A's is more than they can handle. Ironically, their self-esteem, because of over-praising and receiving awards for every little thing, is fragile, not what one might expect of children who are so hovered-over and cuddled. These children are smart and know on some level that even they can't be this perfect!

This is not an abstract conversation. The New York Times reported that the Princeton faculty recently voted to overturn a policy they set in 2004 to limit the total number of A's awarded to 35 percent. They did this as grades had inflated to the point that about 50 percent of grades were A's and nearly two-thirds of Princeton students at graduation were earning Latin honors.

The new policy will allow departments to set their own standards. And, it is assumed, since students have been moaning about the 35-percent rule since it was imposed, calling that grading policy their least-favorite thing about the Princeton experience, A grades will again proliferate.

Some are claiming that students have been sabotaging each other's work, refusing to work collaboratively, because there is so little room at the top of the grading curve.

According to Princeton University president Christopher Eisgruber, the old numerical targets "add an element of stress to students' lives, making them feel they are competing for a limited resource."

Indeed, they are.

And one might wonder, isn't this what life is all about and don't grades help prepare one for that reality? Not everyone has an A-career, an A-family, an A-bank account, A-health, or A-happiness. Some of us wind up in life with a lot of B's and C's, no matter where we went to college nor the grades we received.

July 22, 2013--"No Jews. No Dogs"

When I applied to Columbia University, I had no idea. When I became a faulty member at the City University of New York, I had no idea. And years later when I became a dean at New York University, I had no idea.

I did know that by some NYU was called New York Jew, but I naively had no idea what that fully meant. Just that during the 1970s it felt as if there was a disproportionate percentage of Jewish students enrolled. But NYU, after all, is in New York City and at the time there were more Jews living in New York than in all of Israel.

But later I began to understand why NYU was very Jewish at its downtown location but more gentile at its University Heights campus and why Columbia College on its application required a passport-style photograph. When I asked my parents about this they said it was probably to see if I was a Negro. Having lived through the Holocaust and having seen No Jews. No Dogs signs at hotels in upstate New York, they knew discrimination when they saw it.

Once I arrived on campus on Morningside Heights I saw that by requiring a headshot Columbia was doing a pretty good job of screening some of us in and keeping others out--in my undergraduate class of about 600 there was only one Negro. And he was the star of our otherwise pathetic football team.

I was beginning to figure things out. But I thought these practices were all about people of color, not that Columbia's screening policy also very much pertained to me.

Then some years later, reading Thomas Bender's University and the City, I began to see the extent of the quota system colleges and universities were implementing to keep the number of Jewish students down to as bare a minimum as they could get away with.

And just this week, reading Leonard Dinnerstein's definitive Antisemitism In America many more details of this virulent system became even clearer.

As with so much in regard to higher education, in this too Harvard took the lead.

In the 1920s, Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell (a Lawrence and a Lowell), declared that his college had a "Jewish problem." He noted that Jewish enrollments had more than tripled from 6 percent in 1908 to 22 percent in 1922. To assure that students developed into "true Christians" (to Lowell, this was at the heart of Harvard's mission) one had to limit the number of Jewish students for fear that the institution would lose its "character."

The Board of Overseers agreed. One member, Jack Morgan (of J.P. Morgan) wrote to his colleagues--

I think I ought to say that I believe there is a strong feeling that [a potential new member of the Board] . . . should by no means be a Jew or a Roman Catholic, although, naturally, the feeling in regard to the latter is less than in regard to the former. I'm afraid you will think we are a narrow-minded lot, but I would base my personal objection to each of these two . . . on the fact that in both cases there is acknowledgement of interests of political control beyond, and in the minds of these people, superior to the Government of this country--a Jew is always a Jew first and an American second . . .

Other colleges seeking elite status rushed to follow Harvard's lead. In addition to establishing strict admission quotas for those Jewish students they felt compelled to admit, they established rules to socially restrict and even segregate "Hebrew" undergraduates.

At Syracuse University, where a Ku Klux Klan chapter existed, Jews were excluded from almost all campus organizations, including fraternities. Their Jewish students were also housed separately from Christians. At the Universities of Michigan and Nebraska, gentile students were advised against associating with Jewish males. And Harvard cleverly came up with the idea of geographic diversity in order not to have to handle too many Jewish applicants since most lived in a few big cities and states.

Ernest Hopkins, president of Dartmouth, summed up the reasons for these application procedures and quotas--

Any college which is going to base its admissions wholly on scholastic standing will find itself with an infinitesimal proportion of anything else than Jews eventually.

Beside the illiteracy of President Hopkins' statement (if he were a high school senior and had included it in his application to Dartmouth, if he had been accepted, he would have been placed in remedial English), in his statement he was unfortunately telling it like it was.