3 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(06/15/20 10:00am)
The most recent time I was stopped and harassed by police was shortly after I moved into the house that my wife and I bought in Middlebury. Perhaps a month after we moved in, I decided to finally go check out that adorable little library a short ways down the street, right near the alpaca farm, the playground and across from the residents who make and sell maple syrup from their house. I remember walking down Main Street and — right before entering the library — seeing the cop car drive past and do a U-turn. And, sure enough, a few moments after I sat down in the library, after I greeted the charming, elderly librarian, after I picked up whichever graphic novel caught my eye, the cop followed me in. Then came the usual: “I need to see your ID sir, we’ve had reports of suspicious behavior,” and various other rationalizations.
As usual, I gave the cop my ID. As usual, he called it in. As usual, there was a moment of panic, where I wondered if this was the time there would be a case of mistaken identity, and I would get hauled off to jail, something which also very nearly happened to Clarence Evans. Fortunately, luck was on my side this time, and the cop left. The librarian, who witnessed all this, was almost as angry as I was. On the walk back home, I passed another neighbor, a white woman, standing outside a home. We started chatting, and I told her about what had just happened. This dark look came in her eyes, and she said, “Yeah, they’ve been doing that a lot to the Black guys who live in this house too.” I’ll bet.
That incident meant that I’ve been harassed, stopped and questioned by cops in every single state that I’ve lived in for more than four months. A part of me wondered, “What constitutes suspicious behavior in walking to the library?” But not really. After all, the things I’ve done that have warranted being stopped and questioned (besides a neighborhood reading stroll) include:
Waiting for a pizza delivery.
Standing beside my friend as she took money out of the ATM.
Taking my own money out of the ATM.
Riding as a passenger in the car of a white woman.
Jumping rope outside.
My experience could certainly have been worse. That same month I was harassed while waiting for pizza, a friend of mine called to report a prowler outside his window — and when the cops showed up, they maced, tackled and handcuffed him. Perspective is important. But the reality is that to be Black is to exist under a perpetual cloud of suspicion.
Our bodies are suspect, which means we can’t do certain mundane things without risk. Can’t purchase a BB gun from a store that sells BB guns. Can’t sell loose leaf cigarettes. Can’t go to the window if you hear a suspicious noise outside. All of those things could be a death sentence. Our minds and intellects are also suspect. Can’t work your ass off, scrape together funding and scholarships and go to one of the best colleges in America without having some white students, white administrators and white professors treat “Blacks and Latinos are genetically stupider than white people” as Legitimate Scholarly Inquiry™.
In my first draft of this essay, I started with “The last time I got stopped and harassed by police…” but I only hope it’s the last time. As Tamir Rice (if he wasn’t already killed) or Marvia Gray (assuming she’s not still traumatized) could have told you, as long as you’re Black in America, you’re never too old or too young to be under suspicion. George Floyd was killed at 46, which is only a few years older than me. With any luck, I’ll keep going for decades more yet.
But George Floyd will forever be 46. When I think about it, I can’t breathe.
Kemi Fuentes-George is a professor of political science at Middlebury.
(05/07/20 9:58am)
I have always hated grading. The debate over grades in regard to our truncated semester has reinforced this immensely. To be clear, I don’t hate reading and evaluating student assignments— although reading and evaluating can be tremendously time-consuming (and often repetitive), it’s exceptionally worthwhile. Evaluations are not only an important part of student progress, but also provide the professor another way beyond class discussions and office hours to get to know students. Grading, however, is different.
Let’s be real. Grades are reductive. Weeks of work boiled down to a single letter that, absent a narrative, provides almost no information to an outside reader about a student’s actual trajectory during the semester. Grades depress risk-taking. Students are encouraged to avoid interesting but potentially challenging classes out of fear that it will tank their GPAs (and on the flip side, they are encouraged to take classes that they’re not interested in to raise their GPAs). Grades encourage focusing on the wrong things. Any conversation about whether a criticism merits a 3 point deduction or a 3.25 point deduction is one conversation on grade reductions too many. Grades are not the only possible indicators of improvement. As professors, we regularly submit articles for publication, get feedback on them and then respond to these critiques, all without getting grades. Grades create perverse incentives. As reported in this paper, cheating on assignments is widespread enough, leading to periodic attempts to rethink the Honor Code and its enforcement.
All of this has come into even sharper focus recently, as we debated (seemingly forever) what to do about grading for this semester. This was particularly distressing, given how the Covid-19 crisis has exacerbated the already wide disparity among students with and without privilege. I understand that the college is working on making high-speed internet accessible to those who otherwise would not have it, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that high-speed internet is far from the only difference between the haves and have-nots. For the past several weeks, I have spoken to students (some in my class, some not) dealing with all manners of challenges. One was sick for almost two weeks, with a high fever, respiratory distress and other symptoms of Covid-19, but could not get tested and had to gut it out. One is working 25 hours a week to help provide for their family given the economic upheaval. One is in a two-bedroom apartment, sharing a room with a parent with little to no privacy, no separate workspace and added familial burdens. Giving those students letter grades with anything resembling the same criteria as those who have a separate workspace, their own room, economic security and a stable family situation seems shambolic.
Of course, the recent letter by Quinn Boyle ’21.5, Jack Brown ’22 and Rati Saini ’22 raises an important point: some students — including those from less privileged backgrounds — were hoping to use this semester to raise their GPAs. However, this underlines the problem with grading en masse: This objection about GPAs is not that students are going to learn, or fail to learn, and is in fact divorced from the actual content of classes and the purpose of taking them. To be fair to Quinn, Jack, Rati and the supporters of their petition, their opt-in position is entirely understandable given the structure of incentives set up by grading. They’ve got good points!
But so does the platform of mandatory Pass/D/Fail —and mandatory credit/no-credit. But it has become clear to me that none of these proposals address the underlying problem of grading and its structure of incentives. It’s like arguing over what the best color scheme is for a house on fire. It misses the problem.
Are there other options to the current system? Of course there are. Reed, Brown, Hampshire and Sarah Lawrence use a variety of approaches to evaluate student progress that either supplement, modify or abandon the traditional grading system entirely. Surely we can recognize that those colleges are all capable of educating and engaging students.
I don’t know what our options are, but we do not have to be stuck with this system indefinitely. This crisis is exposing the problem of grading, but Covid-19 hasn’t caused it, and these underlying issues will persist after we learn to manage the coronavirus. Students: Imagine what life would be like if you could take the classes you were genuinely interested in, without being hung up about your GPAs. Think about how creative you could be with your classes and assignments. Professors: Imagine if all you had to worry about was making sure your feedback was clear and useful, rather than having to quibble over whether you should have taken off a fraction of a percent for an assignment or not. Keep in mind that, as multiple studies have shown, giving students higher grades leads systematically to more favorable student evaluations, which has been one of the primary drivers of grade inflation. Administrators: Imagine if you didn’t have to think about dealing with grade inflation, because we didn’t have to address student concerns over grades, and could focus instead on student learning (see again: the Reed College system).
None of this is going to fix the current problem of what to do about this semester. But it’s well past time to think seriously about how we grade and assess students. There are many things wrong with the current grading system, and in my ideal world, we would use this opportunity to think about reform, rather than only patching the crisis and returning to business as usual when it’s over. Students and families: I promise you, you are not actually paying for grades. You are paying for an education. Grades are only incidentally related.
Kemi Fuentes-George is a professor of political science at Middlebury.
(11/01/18 9:50am)
Dear Campus Editorial Staff,
As a faculty member, I would like to respond to some mischaracterizations of campus life, and faculty relations in particular, that I noticed in last week’s Campus story on the talk Professors Allison Stanger and Keegan Callanan gave at Princeton University last month. I have worked with and/or am friends with colleagues in several departments/programs, including (but not limited to): Economics, ENAM, Biology, Film and Media Studies, Chemistry, Computer Science, Environmental Studies, GSFS, Sociology/Anthropology, Religion, Writing and Rhetoric, IGST, Spanish/Portuguese and Dance. The most cursory, but fair minded, glance at the faculty body will show that we are not, in fact, “ideologically homogeneous,” in sharp contrast to statements in the recent article “Stanger and Callanan Talk Murray at Princeton.” Attending even one faculty meeting should make that clear. We run the ideological gamut in my department as much as in the body as a whole. Second, as frustrated as we all sometimes get with the fact that there are (sometimes sharp) political, theoretical and intellectual disagreements within the body, we overwhelmingly do not dismiss each other’s scholarship as intellectually fraudulent, as that would be contrary to the goal of modesty with respect to our own intellectual powers and opinions as well as openness to considering contrary views.
Signed,
Kemi Fuentes-George
Editor’s Note: This piece is a response to remarks made by Political Science Professors Allison Stanger and Keegan Callanan in the Oct. 25 article “Stanger and Callanan Talk Murray at Princeton,” which ran in last week’s issue of The Campus. Kemi Fuentes-George is an associate professor of Political Science at the college.