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One of my colleagues, Jeff Gross (Asst Professor of American Literature and Culture), posted a really excellent essay entitled "Rethinking Grades" earlier today, which I want to recommend that everyone (especially educators in Tennessee) read post haste.  There, he raises a number of questions about how we think about the phenomenon, widespread in higher education today, even at its most "elite" levels, of "grade inflation."  (See here for lots of data and colorful charts about that.)  Gross argues that grade inflation is not, as is widely held, simply a consequence of faculty surrendering en masse to students' highly-cultivated attitudes of academic entitlement (though that may, Gross concedes, be part of it).  Rather, there are a host of complex academic, institutional, sociopolitical and economic forces which have colluded to produce this through-the-looking-glass condition in which we find ourselves, where (as Gross puts it) "satisfactory often means not good enough."

Not good enough for what?  For many students, "satisfactory" grades-- by which I mean a 2.0 GPA on a 4.0 grading scale (a "C" average)--  are definitely not good enough to get into grad school, probably not good enough to get a "good" job and, worst of all, very likely not good enough to keep their scholarships, which in real terms means not good enough to finish college. So, as Gross notes, it could be the case that grade-grubbing students are just indulging an unjustifiable sense of "entitlement," but there are many good reasons not to assume that very reductive story.

Here's the thing everyone needs to understand before s/he starts picking a fight: you can only back people into a corner so far before they come out swinging. UChicago law professor Brian Leiter has decided to pick a fight with me in a comment thread on his blog here. There, in a moderated thread allegedly addressing "issues in the profession," Leiter published a comment by one "AnonUntenured" who wanted an explanation of what he called "the Leigh Johnson mystery." Specifically, AnonUntenured wanted to know how in the world I could possibly have secured not one, but TWO, academic appointments in my time as a professional philosopher. Leiter almost immediately received pushback from his readers for posting AnonUntenured's comment, and subsequently defended his decision to do so by claiming that I was a "very public and rather noxious presence in philosophy cyberspace."  I should say for the benefit of the uninitiated that a lot of people in professional philosophy opt out of engaging Leiter when he starts in on these #DrunkUncle-ish tirades because Leiter has a tendency to hide behind his gigantic bully pulpit blog, refuse to engage his critics, cry "defamation!" and threaten lawsuits whenever he's called to account.

I am not one of those people.  I actually enjoy a good fight. Srsly, come at me, bros.

Yesterday afternoon, I saw the new film Fifty Shades of Grey, based on the erotic romance novel of the same name by E.L. James.  I hadn't read the books beforehand, which I expect I would have found insufferable if the general consensus about the quality of their prose is even half-true.  (Judging from the stilted, melodramatic, overwrought and thoroughly unbelievable dialogue in the screen adaptation, I suspect that the negative literary evaluation is dead-on correct.)  By way of a hand-waving "review," I'll just say that Fifty Shades of Grey was a far cry from a cinematic masterpiece, but it wasn't an awful film, either.  It fell squarely within my generic category of "Sunday matinee"-quality movies.  Not bad enough to walk out of, but not good enough to pay full price for.

My guess is that anyone who has been keeping up with pop-culture of late knows already that the FSoG phenomenon is to adult (over 30) women what the Twilight phenomenon was to younger (under 25) women a few years back.  Both tap into a host of so-called transgressive and unspoken desires that heterosexual women have heretofore refrained from sharing in polite company and, in so doing, both are as complicatedly liberatory for women as they are subtly re-normalizing,  Somehow, the accidents of Fate aligned two years ago to magically unveil these secrets in a manner that women of a certain age were ready to avow, even if reluctantly and still semi-secretly.  Those women began reading FSoG together in their book clubs, they sipped their wine and winked and nodded to one another in tacit affirmation, they made clandestine purse-to-purse exchanges of the novel in the cereal aisle of the grocery store.  Then, producers Michael De Luca and Dana Brunetti (who, not uncoincidentally, also produced The Social Network) let the Freaky Cat the rest of the way out of its bag with a blockbuster Hollywood movie.  And now there it is on the big screen, for God and everyone to see, at your neighborhood multiplex: bondage and discipline, sadism and masochism, dominance and submission, fetishism and pleasures whose names we did not speak.

This is the fourth installment of my series How It Will Go, documenting the regularity of students' responses to certain figures/texts and, in the occasional rare instance that it happens, noting whatever variations I witness.

Today's episode: Karl Marx on "Estranged Labor" from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Context in which I teach this figure/text:  I teach Marx in a number of different courses, The only course in which I have enough time to teach the entirety of the 1844 Manuscripts is my 19thC Philosophy course, so most of the time I'm only teaching a selection of that text, namely the section on "Estranged Labor."  Nevertheless, whether in whole or in part, I find that students' responses to Marx tend to follow the same pattern.  As I often say to them on the first day we take up Marx's text, I don't think there is any other philosopher that students come to with more grossly erroneous assumptions and/or prejudices than Marx.  (Nietzsche is a very close second.)  As a consequence, I generally aim to direct my students' attention, in the very short time we have with Marx, toward his careful critique of capitalism and its constitutive dependence upon estranged/alienated labor, rather than his speculations regarding whatever may follow capitalism's inevitable collapse.  That is to say, my primary (if not singular) aim in teaching Marx's essay on "Estranged Labor" is to provide students with the conceptual apparatus necessary to realize that they are, qua workers, necessarily dehumanized by capitalism.

This is the third installment of my series How It Will Go, documenting the regularity of students' responses to certain figures/texts and, in the occasional rare instance that it happens, noting whatever variations I witness.

Today's episode: Plato, "The Story of Gyges' Ring," (from The Republic)

Context in which I teach this figure/text:   I begin all of my survey courses with selections from Plato's Republic, which I find to be the very best way to introduce students to the practice of Philosophy.  (I mean "the practice of Philosophy" here in the very Platonic "formal" or "ideal" sense, which is decidedly not descriptive of the contemporary "profession of Philosophy," a horse of an entirely different color.) In my experience, the story of Gyges' ring, recounted by Glaucon in the course of an argument with Socrates et al regarding the alleged profitability of being just, generates as much genuinely interesting and morally reflective conversation among students as any other prompt offered up in the history of Philosophy, save the obvious exception of the Trolley Problem.  For those unfamiliar with Plato's story, the basic premise is that Gyges' ring allows its wearer the opportunity to become invisible.  As a consequence, even a "just" person, given access to Gyges' Ring, would not act justly, Glaucon argues, since the only reason we act justly is because we fear the consequences/punishment of acting unjustly.  Plato sets this argument up as a way of forcing Socrates to defend the claim that justice (and, correspondingly, "being just") is good for its own sake, and not in the service of some other end (i.e., gaining reward or avoiding punishment).  As I'm sure it must have seemed to Socrates, it is entirely unsurprising to me that students' responses to the story of Gyges' Ring, i.e., the possibility of acting without consequence, are entirely predictable.

This is the second installment in my How It Will Go series, documenting the regularity of students' responses to certain figures/texts and, in the occasional rare instance that it happens, noting whatever variations I witness.

Today's episode: W.E.B. Du Bois on "The Conservation of Races"

Context in which I teach this figure/text:  I usually teach "The Conservation of Races" in my Philosophy of Race course, somewhere around the fourth or fifth week of class.  Since the first half of that course is structured historically--beginning with François Bernier and working up to the 20th C. Nègritude movement and Frantz Fanon-- Du Bois' essay ends up immediately following Alain Locke and Ashley Montagu. To wit, students are fully primed to be not only skeptical about the value of the concept of race, but also inclined to do away with it altogether.  The Montagu/Du Bois sequence allows me to introduce the "eliminativist"/"conservationist" distinction vis-á-vis race theory. I follow Du Bois' "The Conservation of Races" with Anthony Appiah's "The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race" in order to further complicate the conservationist position and also to demonstrate-by-example for students how a close, critical, philosophical "reading" is done.

I'm starting a new series on this blog today, which I've named How It Will Go (hereafter, HIWG).  In each installment, I will anticipate how teaching a particular figure or text will go in my class, based on patterns that I've seen previously.  If something unusual or noteworthy happens, I'll report back on it, but I don't expect that to happen often.

First up:  Immanuel Kant's Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals. 

Context in which I teach this figure/text:  I include Kant's Groundwork, in whole or in part, in almost every one of my courses. Since most of what I teach falls under the general categories of moral or political philosophy, Kant's articulation of the Categorical Imperative is an indispensable element for all of my course content.  In an intro-level "survey" course, the Groundwork is particularly useful, as much for its brevity as for its clarity. Perhaps more than any other figure or text, I have found students' responses to Kant's Groundwork  to be incredibly regular and predictable.