A plan's pitfalls

The last faculty meeting was well on its way to establishing a new record for the triathlon of ennui (combined aggregate of paucity of attendance, brevity of duration, and vacuity of content) when it accidentally emerged that Dean Malkiel proposed to place before us, at our next meeting, a mystery agendum of weight. Asked what this might be, she would say only that we would learn soon enough.

Indeed, I did learn quite soon, though because of a snafu with the campus mail, I learned from a surprising source. A newspaper reporter in a distant city called me up in the hopes of an interview but had to content herself with giving me a cram tutorial. "What new proposals?" I asked. "Grade inflation," she said. "It's all about grade inflation."

In fact it seems to be all about grade deflation. Fight fire with fire, I suppose. What she described was the quota system of a command economy of academic reward. This new idea is hoary with age. In my youth I knew it as "the grading curve." For decades I've been in the vanguard of the large army of Dean Malkiel's faculty admirers, but this is one of those rare occasions when I must sulk by the tents.

Good intentions shine through the dean's proposals. At the abstract level they make the professorial heart swell with pride at the rigor of our "standards of absolute excellence." At a more concrete level they begin to address an inequity perceived by many students in differing grading standards among departments. They probably would also effect some good results — just not enough to outweigh the bad.

If the administration is serious about addressing inequities among departments, two better places to begin would be with the dramatic differentials in faculty salaries and teaching loads. That would, of course, involve admitting that they exist.

I somewhere read that in the nineteenth century the Belgian government, alarmed by a series of bad railway accidents, established a royal commission to look into rail safety. The commissioners discovered a pattern: The largest number of fatalities was generally in the last car of a wrecked train. So their report recommended that the last car be removed from all trains. The present proposal strikes me as falling into the same genre: more likely to relocate a problem than to resolve one.

The price of satisfying the intellectual machismo of the faculty is likely to be the exacerbation of an already unhealthy emphasis on grades among the students. I don't want Princeton to foster the competitive rat-race of a professional school, in which one student's weal may require another student's woe; nor do I want to see the "gentleman's C" returned to cultural respectability, let alone made the statistical necessity of the faculty's amour propre.

In Lake Wobegon all the children are above average; in Alice's Wonderland all shall have prizes. And that's without any admissions policy at all. I have long held the modest opinion that I could competently execute any job in this university, and have nursed a secret grievance at being passed over for the direction of the jet propulsion laboratory and the woodworking shop, to name but two memorable disappointments.

Yet before one Princeton aspiration my chutzpa shrivels and desiccates. I know that I could never, ever, gain admission to a freshman class. I have never backpacked through Burkina Faso, your see, nor created a proportionally exact model of Paris Metro in papier mâché. I never raced the Iditarod, failing to place only because of a forced stop at a Nome Internet cafe to send my email submission to the Astrophysics Olympiad and the corrected proofs of my poems to the editor of the "Kenyon Review." I am, in short, seriously wanting in that off-the-charts, Hargadonian well-roundedness characteristic of a Princeton "admit."

But now I learn that only 35 in 100 of the young geniuses chosen through a process so competitive that it spurns valedictorians by the battalion and enrages alumni parents by the division actually deserve, once they enter a Princeton classroom, to be judged academically "excellent."

"Grading reform" is to be sure an issue on which reasonable people can reasonably disagree. Its intellectual aims are admirable, but I am not persuaded that its adoption — likely, given the decanal full court press — will actually improve the climate of education at Princeton.

Q: What instrument becomes ever blunter the more you sharpen it?