Did the university do me a favor by pink-slipping me?

In the second year of graduate school, I was a teaching assistant to Tridib Banerjee.  (It was through him that I got hooked on to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.  I am certain that he has no idea about this.) 

The midterms arrived, and we assistants met with him to get instructions on grading.  At one point during that meeting, Banerjee looked at me and said that grading in the US was a total contrast to how exams were graded in India.  Here in the US, Banerjee explained, it is almost as if grading begins with every paper having a 100% and then points are taken away for the mistakes made or the important issues that were not addressed.  On the other hand, in India, students earn points and the score starts with zero.

And there is always a bonus for simply having tried.  For the effort, he said.

All these were new to me.  But, he was the boss and I was in a new context, and I graded papers as per the instructions.

A few years and professional detours later, I returned to academia to teach economic geography.  Now, I was my own boss in the classroom.  I was also in a university where students were not as prepared for college as the undergraduate students in Banerjee's class were.  Many students couldn't compose even one grammatically correct paragraph, leave alone articulate their understanding of the content.  I knew that I had to loosen up the standards a lot, which is what I did.

Despite what I believed to be a highly relaxed grading system, students thought otherwise.  One student loudly complained in class that I was expecting students to think and behave as if they were at Berkeley and not in Bakersfield.

At a faculty gathering, a math professor (Lee Webb?) chatted with me and had a piece of advice that was weighty.  It was more of a warning.  He said that my high expectations were all good as long as students enrolled in my classes.  But, I would end up in trouble, he said, if students stayed away from my classes, especially when they are not mandatory but electives.

Of course, I laughed it off.

A winter term ended.  I submitted the grades.  I received an email from a student who was unhappy with her grade and asked to meet with me over the spring break.  She needed to sort it out before spring term began.  So, I did.

I went over the grade components--assignments and papers.  I explained again the grading criteria.  At the end of it all she asked me a question that was memorable: "I was in class everyday.  Doesn't that count?"

At the end of the academic year, I think it was then, there was a faculty gathering hosted by the president.  I narrated the student's question to a few colleagues.  A political scientist, a veteran of teaching, replied that she (Kaye Bragg?) had heard that line a lot, for which she always had a stock answer.  With a huge smile, she shared her response: "The chairs are in the classroom every day, but they don't get any grade either."

All those happened almost 25 years ago.  It was a different world, when college was supposed to be hard. Yet, year after year, I kept lowering the bar in order to deal with under-prepared students for whom I submitted inflated grades so that the numbers with "F" grades would not catch the attention of the university's money managers.  I reminded students that if they thought university classes and professors were demanding, they would be unprepared for the real world in which employers would not have the patience that professors have for poor performance.

Thankfully, unhappy students did not start petition drives urging the university president to fire me from teaching, which is what happened to a professor of organic chemistry at New York University:

In the field of organic chemistry, Maitland Jones Jr. has a storied reputation. He taught the subject for decades, first at Princeton and then at New York University, and wrote an influential textbook. He received awards for his teaching, as well as recognition as one of N.Y.U.’s coolest professors.

But last spring, as the campus emerged from pandemic restrictions, 82 of his 350 students signed a petition against him.

Students said the high-stakes course — notorious for ending many a dream of medical school — was too hard, blaming Dr. Jones for their poor test scores.

The professor defended his standards. But just before the start of the fall semester, university deans terminated Dr. Jones’s contract.

Customers are always right, especially when they pay exorbitant tuition and fees at a private university!  "The entire controversy seems to illustrate a sea change in teaching, from an era when professors set the bar and expected the class to meet it, to the current more supportive, student-centered approach."

I am relieved that my former employer laid me off before students called for my head!