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(10/07/21 9:59am)
Dear President Patton,
We are writing about an epidemic raging on our campus, directly impacting hundreds of students, faculty, staff and community members. It is not a virus nor a physical malady, but rather a sense of exhaustion, resignation and confusion that we see and feel each day. A year and a half of a pandemic has left many of us burnt out from a combination of overwork, grief, isolation and despair. While we looked to the return to an approximation of a “normal campus” this fall to provide respite and rejuvenation, instead this malaise seems to have deepened for many of us.
Most of the factors leading to these feelings are far beyond the control of a small college in Vermont, but one key ingredient is clearly a byproduct of choices made by our administration and Covid-19 leadership team: our shared confusion. After last academic year offered a notable success story that stood out amongst our peer institutions, achieved through a combination of diligence, planning and very good fortune, Middlebury has opted to forgo much of what made last year so successful despite the continued prevalence of Covid-19 in Vermont. And we simply do not understand why.
Unlike last year, and in contradiction to every other peer institution we know of, Middlebury has forgone comprehensive student testing this fall. It has also eliminated all on-site employee testing despite a scarcity of local testing availability (and has pushed a mail-order testing alternative that would take many days to process). We have no limits on indoor occupancy, and instead have stuffed our campus beyond the capacities of both our physical plant and the bandwidth of our overworked, under-resourced staff. We have imposed an indoor mask mandate that features major exceptions — visit any dining hall at mealtime — and seems to be unenforced beyond the immediate supervision of a classroom or work setting.
Instead, we have put all of our faith in universal vaccination to both reduce the number and severity of cases. While certainly this is the single most important action to protect both individuals and our community, it is insufficient. Many employees live with unvaccinated children, care for vulnerable elders, and/or have underlying health conditions that place them at higher risk for severe breakthrough cases. This is true for some of our students as well, as eloquently argued in a recent Campus op-ed. In short, it is quite rational to be concerned about breakthrough cases even on a fully vaccinated campus.
The best way to counter such concerns is through more information. Thus, as professionals who have dedicated our careers to expanding knowledge and deepening understanding, we are truly mystified why the college has actively chosen to know less about the status of Covid-19 on campus than we did last year. The choice to restrict testing has been justified as complying with the Vermont Department of Health (which itself is minimizing mitigations over the objections of many experts and its own staff members). A recent email has shrugged off comparisons with our peer schools as irrelevant due to different contexts in other states — despite the fact that Vermont case counts are currently higher than nearly all other states with NESCAC schools.
Thus we write to advocate that Middlebury takes simple actions to combat our lack of knowledge, all of which worked last year. Expanding broad surveillance testing would give us a true sense of Covid-19 prevalence on campus, rather than our current state where we imagine each cough or sneeze as our first glimpse of an emerging outbreak. Including employees in on-campus testing would ensure consistent access and faster results, demonstrating a concern for many of us in the community who bear the most risk. Strengthening communications to regularly present case counts and testing rates would help us know where we stand now, rather than a week ago. Promoting honesty with the community when exposures have occurred would build trust, rather than telling faculty to hide news of exposure, as recently suggested in an email and told to individual faculty members.
Would implementing these measures reduce the spread of Covid-19 on campus this fall? We honestly don’t know. But would it help combat the epidemic of confusion, frustration and distrust that is currently raging across campus? Without a doubt.
Sent by Jason Mittell, on behalf of the AAUP Executive Committee and Working Conditions Committee, comprised of 20 Middlebury employees.
Editor’s Note: Jason Mittell is the faculty advisor to The Middlebury Campus.
(04/01/20 2:06pm)
As the academic semester resumes in our calendars, albeit not on our campus, I have been gratified to see students actively and thoughtfully discussing grading as part of our academic practices. As a member of a faculty group that has been working to rethink grading at Middlebury since 2016, I am happy to see the topic thrust into the public eye, even under perilous circumstances. I hope that this conversation yields not only short-term agreement on how to cope with this disrupted semester, but longer term reflections and actions about how grades work — or don’t work— at Middlebury.
While I find good arguments about all the various proposals being advocated for, I am concerned about the assumptions which appear to underlie much of the conversation. Hence, I want to lay out some potentially provocative but important ideas for students and faculty to consider within these debates:
Grades evaluate assignments, not students. For the past few years, my syllabuses have included the following statement: “A letter grade is not an assessment of your intelligence, your abilities, or your value as a person — in fact, Professor Mittell never will grade “you” directly, and grading is never a reflection of who you are as a person. Rather, a grade reflects what you demonstrated that you learned in the course: no more, no less.”
This assertion goes against much of the educational climate students (and faculty) have internalized. Much of the world does and will continue to use grades to evaluate people — they’re what got you into Middlebury, they might be used to keep you here (as with some scholarship requirements) and they may launch your path onward into graduate school or careers. Still, I hope students truly consider detaching grades from their personhood. You aren’t your GPA. You aren’t “an A student,” but rather somebody who has produced work that has received A’s. If you receive a B, P, or an F in a course this — or any — semester, it won’t change who you are. We will all (hopefully) emerge from this pandemic as changed people, but not because of the grades we get or give.
Even at the best of times, traditional grades are not meritocratic. Any grading policy for this semester must grapple with the massive, moment-specific inequities students are currently facing, including widely varying technological access, personal health, financial precarity and support systems. But these inequities didn’t suddenly appear with COVID-19; even in normal semesters, many of these same inequities structure and shape students’ experiences. While faculty may strive to grade “objectively” (whatever that might mean in a given field), the disparate realities of students’ lives guarantees that their ability to meet course expectations will always be unequal, shaped by differences in educational and cultural backgrounds, access to technology, disability status and work obligations (to name but a few). These factors shape both what students know going into a class, as well as how their time and attention can be applied throughout the term. Acknowledging these inequities isn’t an excuse for any student receiving poor grades on an assignment, nor does it belittle the accomplishments of students who receive high grades. Rather, it reminds us that any revisions to policies we make this semester shouldn’t pretend that the status quo is an ideal way to evaluate student work.
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]Any revisions to policies we make this semester shouldn’t pretend that the status quo is an ideal way to evaluate student work.[/pullquote]
I have changed how I grade over the past few years to develop approaches that don’t reward students simply for coming to class better prepared to succeed. I try to focus instead on learning outcomes, calibrating assignments and grading systems to measure how students accomplish the course’s learning goals, rather than just writing “good papers.” While these approaches haven’t eliminated structural inequities by any means, they strive to emphasize all students’ learning in my class, rather than offering undue credit for some students' abilities to write a “good paper” before they arrived.
Increasing transparency and student agency improves learning. My teaching aims to create opportunities for students to learn by actively engaging in material and pursuing their interests, rather than simply assessing them on how they meet my expectations. Not only does this increased agency deepen the quality of the student work, but it also gives them options for how to balance my course with their other obligations on their own terms, such as opting-out of assignments with clear grade consequences as a trade-off with other courses and obligations. (I make it clear that I will fully respect students who opt-out, and tell them truthfully that some of my very best students have made similar choices in previous years.)
Such agency seems even more essential in the unpredictable and unprecedented contexts of this semester. For the course I’m teaching now, I have laid out specific ways that students might choose to engage throughout the rest of the semester to best accommodate whatever situation they find themselves in. For each choice, I have made explicit what the grade outcome would be. Thus if they complete the semester-long project they’d already started working on with a good faith effort, they know they will receive an A or A–. If they feel they cannot or do not want to pursue that choice, they have an alternative assignment requiring less time and ongoing participation that will result in a C for the course, with the encouragement to opt into P/D/F. By the time the deadline for declaring P/D/F arrives on May 1, they will know exactly what grade they are on track to receive and thus can make their own informed choices. I’ve also tried to make it clear that I will respect students for their decisions, not considering a P or C any less admirable than an A.
For me and (hopefully) my students, such an opt-in system seems to work well, because it maximizes agency and removes any stigma for choosing to get a P instead of a traditional grade. Regardless of whether our Spring 2020 grading system changes again in response to current conversations, I hope we all change the way we all talk about grades. As faculty, we need to work to maximize agency and depersonalize grades during this semester and beyond. In that way, one positive legacy of this uprooted semester can be a healthier approach to grading at Middlebury for years to come.
Jason Mittell is a professor of Film and Media Culture and a member of the Rethinking Grading Community of Practice. He is The Campus’s faculty adviser.
(05/09/19 9:58am)
Please take a moment to consider and appreciate what you are reading — not this specific op-ed, but the larger newspaper or website of The Middlebury Campus. This is the product of student journalism, created by a team of unpaid reporters, editors, photographers, and managers who spend hours each week working exceptionally hard to produce quality journalism on top of their regular academic obligations, activities, jobs, and personal lives.
We live in a historical moment where journalists are regularly disparaged and slandered as “the enemy of the people” by some political leaders, and even those of us who appreciate journalism are less apt to praise and pay for this work. So why would Middlebury students spend their scant free time doing journalism? We do not have a journalism major here, so working on The Campus is always going to be in addition to, and rarely integrated into, academic studies. While every student journalist has their own particular motivations, they are all committed to the shared mission of informing and engaging the Middlebury community around the issues that matter to us. They are working for us—and we should not take that for granted.
I serve as the faculty adviser for the The Campus, which is even more of a hands-off role than you could imagine — I only “advise” on the rare instance where a question of institutional policy emerges and I never engage in editorial decisions or priorities, functioning primarily as a required name on MiddLink. The Campus is one of Middlebury’s most robust sites of peer education and leadership, where cohorts of students learn from each other, passing along wisdom by training the next generation who will take their place on the masthead. For us faculty who often struggle to devise group projects where students can successfully collaborate independently and reconcile their differences to create a product better than the sum of individual contributions, The Campus is a model to emulate.
Longtime members of the Middlebury community should recognize that The Campus has recently embraced a different attitude toward its own journalism and relationship to the institution. Especially over the past three years, the paper has tackled some of the most difficult moments in Middlebury’s modern history with a dogged commitment to accurate reporting and investigation, and at times an adversarial attitude toward the powers that be. This year the paper has taken on big projects, producing exceptional special issues on the November election, staff anxiety in the wake of workforce planning, and last week’s Zeitgeist survey on student attitudes. They have covered controversies that have reverberated far beyond Vermont, always with a firm commitment to ensuring that no matter what our differences in opinion and perspective might be, we must have a shared understanding of relevant facts and contexts. In many instances, they have greatly outperformed the work of professional journalists.
For these many reasons, I urge you to take a moment to read the bylines and the masthead, identifying the people behind the words and images you’ve consumed this year. If you know any of these student journalists, let them know that you appreciate their efforts (and feel free to offer constructive critique too!) — I want to particularly acknowledge and give thanks to the graduating seniors who have led The Campus this academic year: Will DiGravio, Nick Garber, and Rebecca Walker. And if you’re a student with years left at Middlebury, consider joining this fine roster of journalists working to keep our community informed and engaged.