Prof Calls for Abolition of Grades Because They’re ‘Capitalism in Action’
He said the “practice of grading is one that has served to prop up America’s capitalist economic system and its ‘major failures,’ including ‘socially divisive inequalities’….”
How would this professor react if we applied the same principle to academic salaries?
Campus Reform reports:
Prof calls to get rid of grades because they are ‘capitalism in action’
A New York professor is calling for the abolition of grades. He claims they are not only unfair to students, but that they are a means of propping up capitalism, and as such, academia would be better off doing away with grading entirely.
“Grading takes up much of my time that could be better spent on teaching or otherwise directly interacting with students,” New School professor Richard Wolff wrote in a Monday op-ed entitled “Grades Are Capitalism in Action. Let’s Get Them Out of Our Schools.” He claims the practice of administering grades to students has “little educational payoff” and “disrespects [students] as thinking people.”
Wolff has been known to promote Marxism and condemn capitalism, even going so far as to blame capitalism for American homelessness. More recently, he made headlines by comparing President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler on Twitter.
According to Wolff, the practice of grading is one that has served to prop up America’s capitalist economic system and its “major failures,” including “socially divisive inequalities” and the creation of “boring, dangerous, and/or mind-numbing” jobs. He asserts that capitalism’s survival can be attributed only to flawed human ideologies, one of which is the concept of “meritocracy.” Grades, he says, are one of many “mechanisms” used to “anchor” the concept of meritocracy in society.
“From primary school through the completion of my doctorate, I suffered the imposition of grades (A, B, C, etc.),” Wolff writes. “Since becoming a professor, I have constantly been required to assign grades to my students for matters such as papers, exams, and class performance.”
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Comments
Heaven forbid that you should have to earn a grade or a living in the Left’s brave new world where if you think you are smart then you are.
Abolish tenure.
A further irony here is that while in the beginning of the Soviet era, those with working class origins had a leg up in university admissions and “bourgeois” origins were a detriment, standards in Soviet universites- especially in STEM- were quite rigorous.
Richard Wolff, the professor who doesn’t like grades, is a Marxist. Which I should have pointed out in my previous comment.
Grades prop up capitalism and meritocracy, it’s true. They allow employers to see who are the competent graduates (and ensure the worst don’t make it to the finish line at all) so they can hire good employees.
I fully support upholding capitalism. Without capitalism the graduates would not have jobs. If your school doesn’t uphold capitalism, and you don’t want a lifetime of being unable to pay back your student loans, I’d advise transferring to a school that does uphold capitalism.