Oberlin College refused to dismiss protesting students’ failing grades
A hefty dose of reality does the youngster good
Kids these days.
Students who neglected their studies to protest the Michael Brown grand jury decision were disappointed when their appeal to the administration for special accommodations during finals was rejected.
According to Fox News Cleveland:
Over 1,300 Oberlin students signed a petition for college administrators asking for understanding and “alternative modes of learning” as they continue to cope with what’s happening across the country.
They asked for the normal grading system to be “replaced with a no-fail mercy period,” and said “basically no student …especially students of color should be failing a class this semester.”
In response, Oberlin President Marvin Krislov said that he understands their concerns and that he and the Academic Deans took the request seriously, however “we are in firm agreement that suspending grading protocols is not the way to achieve our shared goal of ensuring that students have every opportunity and resource to succeed,” he said in a statement.
Administrators did offer students some assistance in the form of counseling and other support services. They also added increased flexibility in terms of students making “incomplete requests.”
They also extended the deadline for students to change from “a grade to the pass/no pass” option.
You may remember that Harvard law students pleaded for the cancellation of finals unsuccessfully. Students at Columbia’s law school received their holiday wish when the administration agreed to cancel finals.
Good on Oberlin College for standing strong.
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Comments
Grading is micro-aggression. But then, that federal aid is even available for student loans to attend Oberlin College may be micro-aggression. Let’s do away with the second one and let them work out the first one on their own.
Next.
Why are federal taxpayers subsidizing any colleges, faculties, or students? They keep saying a college education adds so much to lifetime earnings, why wouldn’t those getting the benefit be able to pay for it, or arrange private financing if they are good risks?
Get us out of the education business before we ruin it completely.
Estrogen – we are so much in agreement.
Frankly – since these college hype and stand by their assertions that the lifetime earnings are so enhanced and upgraded (“we pinky swear”) – then let the colleges co-sign or guarentee the loans.
Bet the prices of tuition drop then …
Agreed!
ALL FED money needs to be totally out of ALL education – K through Graduate School and beyond.
“The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education”
http://www.amazon.com/Nearly-Free-University-Emerging-Economy-ebook/dp/B00EZCR9S0/ref=sr_1_1/182-1105584-5666730?ie=UTF8&qid=1419975229&sr=8-1&keywords=Nearly+Free+University
It doesn’t surprise me that these college students would request such a thing when you look at how coddled high school students are these days. I once attended a student-parent-teacher conference at a public high school and the teacher actually wanted to give the student extra credit for getting her parent to show up to the meeting. The meeting had everything to do with the fact that the student was not doing her work to begin with.
Lots of students left behind! 🙂
“no students of color should be failing a class this semester.””
OMFG.
Let’s just mail them their freaking Oberlin Diploma. No charge, jut ask for one. And let’s print it in Spanish, too, just in case they need that to read it.
The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations. I’d wager that request was added by some non-minority Liberal busybody who, while incapable of arranging a desk drawer, will gladly arrange your entire life for you.
Maybe, but people aren’t as shy about putting their hand out for special treatment as they once were.
Old times, good times.
How true, I still have a stark memory of the one time when I was in my early teens that my mother had no choice but to get food stamps to feed her and the three of us. This was back when they were actual pieces of paper. The reason the memory is so vivid is because I remember how embarrassed and ashamed she was when she pulled those pieces of paper out of her billfold. I will never forget seeing the strongest woman I know looking down in shame for the first time in my life.
I must have been 13, almost 14, because it was soon after that I got a job myself working cleaning up job sites with a local general contractor and I have worked ever since.
Yep.
You’d be correct. The original request was made by a pasty-pink-skin colored woman who presumed that people “of color” were too traumatized to make the request themselves. She, being so smart as to “know” what people of color needed, decided that she was the appropriate spokes-twerp to speak on their behalf.
If I were a person “of color” I might wonder why Princess Snowflake arrogated to herself my right to speak, but liberal progressive minds apparently don’t work that way.
Assuaging her inherent white guilt.
Who would hire any of them?
Con Agra ???
And this is the type of garbage that eventually happens when your goal is for everyone to have a college diploma.
The dumbing down of America.
The first demand of any protest is the lack of consequences for what you while protesting.
Every now and then, someone at work will try to tell me that “civil disobedience” should not be subject to consequences.
I point out that Thoreau, the author of Civil Disobedience, went to jail for his beliefs, so I believe that should be the standard for calling it such.
Recoil in shock and horror, and express surprise they haven’t read the “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Going to jail was the whole point of civil disobedience, the only point.
I understand that most stupid people are Democrats. I don’t understand why we let them vote.
And the idiots’ response would be, “Consequences? That is SO yesterday!”
How many “no pass” grades do you figure will be handed out? Allowing students to switch to pass/no pass at the end of the semester is like amnesty, no?
Not like they flunk out very many anyway, as long as the student can get financing.
The ones they kick out stop paying them.
“especially students of color should be failing a class this semester.”
Somebody wanna remind me again how that’s not racist?
Wouldn’t allowing something like this be some sort of accreditation violation?
What is wrong with Oberlin? This sort of thing should be their bread and butter.
And no, it wouldn’t hurt the accreditation. The only thing that would deny you accreditation would be allowing male students due process.
PS – Why don’t I have a reply option?
Being white, you don’t get one on Oberlin threads.
Rimshot!
“The ones they kick out stop paying them.” Oberlin has an acceptance rate of about 30%. They don’t have trouble filling seats.
“And no, it wouldn’t hurt the accreditation.” Agreed, but it would have to be explained very carefully in their accreditation review.
“How many “no pass” grades do you figure will be handed out?” Very few. More likely, the grade would be B, rather than A. (Such high grades aren’t inappropriate, given incoming SAT scores of about 700.)
I think the academic administration at Oberlin said, “What’s the policy handbook say? OK. We’ll do that.”
If they fail, they fail. It’s a good life lesson. That part about people of color needing special privileges is condescending and racist.
You live with the consequences of your actions. Even before I grew up, I had learned that.
Sure, admittedly this is ancient history and I have grown much more conservative over the past decades, but…
my college days stretched from LBJ’s first big escalation of the Viet Nam war (fall ’65) till a few months after Dick Nixon first took office (Jan ’69, which we all thought would be the end of the world). Until I got into a major and got serious about it, my mediocre grades reflected my preoccupation with anti-war and draft protests. Thus, my GPA was relatively low. Did anyone suggest a do-over or to be excused? Of course not. Hope these kids will learn at least one lesson from this: actions have consequences.
Yes, but you have to remember that progressives don’t believe in individual responsibility, because if you are individually responsible and free then most of their arguments don’t work. There is no individual “poor person” that they say are being oppressed, its just “the poor”. There is no individual “person of color” that is being oppressed, it is “people of color”.
Think they’ll learn something….HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Sorry. Couldn’t resist.
My ex was a new professor (at a university that shall remain unnamed) and two of her students had not been attending classes and had not completed assignments. She flunked them. The parents complained to the dean. The dean backed the students/parents. The administration was more concerned with having warm bodies in seats (=money) than in assuring that academic standards were maintained. She quit on them two weeks before the next year’s classes were about to begin (during which they were expecting her to teach three or four classes). My ex didn’t play dat. They screwed with her, she screwed them back.