Reflections on the Loss of Rigor in College Classes

I graduated from a small state teacher’s college in 1963, majoring in physical sciences and math. While I was not privy to overall grade distributions there, I know that Cs, Ds, and failure were not uncommon. This was simply a fact of life and was understood by all. I later became interested in spatial science, completing my graduate work in geography. Teaching Introduction to Physical Geography first in 1970, I taught it at least once every year until my retirement in 2011. By the early 1980s, it was clear to me that many students were no longer as knowledgeable and thus interested, nor were they willing to put forth the effort to learn the material. Of course, affirmative action played a big role in this. This impression of decline was reinforced by the fact that many available textbooks were being “dumbed down” to accommodate the growing component of weaker students and that various national surveys indicated that students were less prepared than formerly. Armed with only limited hard evidence, I published a short piece, “Declining Student Performance in College Physical Geography and the Down-Writing of Texts” (PROFESSIONAL GEOGRAPHER 38, 270-273, Aug. 1986). Perhaps deservedly, this piece did not elicit general approbation among my colleagues nor much attention in the discipline.

Why does this perceived problem matter? Many mistakenly think of a university education much as they would a sheep dip. That is, four years in the university, and one is ipso facto “educated.” But the hard fact is that learning is interactive: the students must be constructively involved and intellectually engaged. The ability to do this is not only a function of basic intelligence but also knowing and caring about science, art, history, music, and literature—knowledge that allows students to maintain interest and connect. One might argue that the more you know, the easier it is to learn. But we now see often-unprepared students get through courses with little effort, probably learning little, but with reasonable grades.

In time, it became clear that there was causation beyond student preparation. Among those were student evaluations of courses and faculty, a development I initially welcomed. It eventually became apparent that some teachers gamed the system, making classes easier and “fun” to get higher marks, and many students soon considered themselves entitled to this. Contemporary research suggests that students gave the highest ratings to professors from whom they learned the least.

A major problem with all these instructor evaluations was their misuse: colleges and universities often judged professors by these ratings when they were evaluated for promotions. Indeed, some administrators accepted high ratings with vacuous euphoria. It should be added that most evaluation forms were constructed to almost encourage such results.

With time, I read up on the published literature and wrote my dean a 10-page essay on the problems of the then-current evaluation with several easily implemented suggested modifications. His response, as I remember, was to thank me profusely and suggest that I be placed on a university committee that would evaluate and modify the form. But don’t call them; they would call me: I never heard a word.

All of the foregoing has helped to create well-documented grade inflation at universities so that there is little differentiation between the best and mediocre students. Not as well known is the quite significant difference among majors, with humanities and “studies” having much higher average grades than science, math, and engineering. Thus, we are often comparing apples and oranges.

I must say that I am not sure my comments apply to all universities: I was a guest professor at the University of Chicago (UC) in 1978, 1981, and 1990. My sense from that period was that most students there were still well prepared, many with a true hunger for knowledge and a willingness to pursue that both in class and out. My impression was, of course, limited, and a quite darker view was given by Professor Allan Bloom in his magisterial best-seller, Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987). While at UC in 1990, I was privileged to have a long, private conversation with Bloom, a towering intellect. Both my own experiences and my contact with Bloom suggested that matters would not improve for reasons he discusses at length in his book. Moreover, the virtual takeover by “critical studies” in the humanities nearly guaranteed that since equality of student outcome had become paramount, academic standards must and did drop. Even four decades later, Bloom’s book still requires reading.

Much of Bloom’s predicted university devolution was set into concrete by the mandatory addition of highly paid and authoritative “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) “specialists,” deans, and assistant chancellors. It is agonizing to see distinguished faculty have to buckle under these political commissars—many otherwise unemployable—and, therefore, embarrassing to realize that mature and well-meaning faculty members are implicitly not to be trusted with racial matters without strict oversight. Surely, they realize that. Elon Musk and others have suggested replacing DEI with MEI: Merit, Education, and Intelligence—let’s hope.

Long before I retired in 2011, I became cynical about the situation—too many students had a sense of entitlement to easy courses and good grades—and although I dearly loved teaching the content of introductory physical geography, I was frankly relieved not to teach it again. Moreover, I was glad to leave the often-oppressive leftist bias and prejudices of the university. Although some of our own children and grandchildren have matriculated at places such as Vanderbilt, Harvard, LSE, and Yale, I have not and would not encourage them to become college teachers. The profession is now just too liable to highly biased and authoritative political whims and pressures, nearly all from the left, that can, and have, wrecked the careers of many innocent people in recent years.

The most incredible aspect of all this is that, while it is by now well documented, the general public seems to be blissfully unaware and, even if aware, generally unresponsive. This clearly appears to be the fault of (1) university administrators who continually and deliberately misrepresent the situation and (2) the media, which not only are unwilling to criticize academe but rather tend to encourage the dark and destructive forces that have brought on this grave misfortune and now threaten the future of university education and our society.

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