I've been thinking about this for a while, but don't know enough about law to know if it's viable, or how to get it started. It might even involve unionizing (I know most of us have unions, but do we really use them? For anything other than a place to spend $20 per paycheck and get quarterly news letters that address anything but anything that affects us, that is).
A lot of us are paralyzed in the face of student misconduct. We get it from above that we don't want to be sued. Even when we can avoid a law suit so we go forward, we get trapped in months of bullshit with the administration and hearings and follow up hearings and mommies and daddies. How did the power get misplaced like that? I'm so impotent sometimes, I feel guilty that the majority of my students are being charged tuition. You used to be able to get something out of a college education, and that stopped when we stopped being allowed to take out the trash. The value of what we can give our students took a dive when we had to start letting the trash pile up around them.
The dean didn't look afraid of any crappy C student's lower-middle-class mommy in any of the boarding school genre films I grew up on. Sure, there was always the one kid whose family had more money than God who got away with hazing the scholarship kid, or groping the scholarship kid's girlfriend, or even cheating. But wtf happened to us where any piece of crap kid who matriculates is now that powerful villian of early '90's HS chick-flicks?
So my proposal is: Let's not wait around for these situations to crop up and then waffle and whine about how powerless we are. Let's pre-emptively arrange for lawyers in place. Let's pool our financial resources and get a good one (and by a good one, I mean hundreds of them everywhere). And let's start setting some precedents. Let's take back our schools. Let's fail cheaters. Let's turn off our e-mail and make them come to office hours. Let's use all of our lecture time to teach and test and tell them to remember deadlines and review on their own. Let's give 0s to lates and request corpses for dead grandmother proof. Let's put the power back where it belongs so students can go back to learning.
So why can't we do that? I know from reading CM and RYS that there must be reasons, or we'd be doing this. But what are they? I need a social scientist to explain it to me. And explain it to me like I'm a four year old, because I lose two grade-level points per student e-mail, and this morning I read 16 of them.
This is brilliant. This is what we should be talking about.
ReplyDeleteIt's a great amount of thunder, but it's my understanding that the threat to sue will not be taken seriously because grades are not sue-able offenses. That is, we are not contractually obligated to give SuzyQ an A. We might bow to peer pressure and bump a grade up because Dean Droopy is pushing for it, but all those kids who threaten to sue never go to court because there are literally no legal grounds for financial compensation.
ReplyDeleteCan anyone come up with an example of a student who successfully sued to raise a grade?
(sorry, legal scholarship is part of my job)
Along the same lines as AM's comment, a lot seems to be done in American discourse because of the PERCEIVED THREAT of legal action.
ReplyDeleteMuch like school shootings which garner a lot of attention but in actuality (thankfully) are quite rare, the WTF lawsuits are few and far between if not totally fabricated.
Most Americans (if not everyone worldwide!) has heard of the McDonald's hot coffee case. Mention it to a group of people and you get rolled eyes, exasperated grunts, various and sundry pissing and moaning because "the bioytch shudda known COFFEE IS HOT!"
However, if people would take a moment to learn the facts, the woman was not driving, the car wasn't even moving. The driver had pulled over so she could add cream and sugar. (Now, she IS the reason that McDonalds now does this for you in the drive through!) McDonalds had been cited MULTIPLE times for serving coffee 20 degrees hotter than the industry standard. The woman, who suffered serious burns offered to settle for only a few hundred dollars to cover her medical expenses, but McDonalds refused. McDonalds badly handled the case, making it sound like a few burns in the scheme of things wasn't a major deal. (Apparently they didn't count on the jury's reaction to actually SEEING photos of the injuries.)
So after McDonalds refused to settle a couple more times, the jury awarded Stella Liebeck $160,000 in compensatory damages and $2.7 MILLION in punitive damages.
But, again, what most people never heard was that the judge took that award -- which amounted to two DAYS' coffee sales for McDonalds -- and slashed it to $480,000. And that isn't even what Liebeck got. To avoid appeals, she and McDonalds entered into a secret settlement.
And, visit Snopes.com and search for the Stella Awards, named after Ms. Liebeck, to highlight egregious abuses of the legal system. You will be regaled with dozens of examples of totally FABRICATED "outrageous" lawsuits, which have been concocted to advance political agendas!
Long story short, I sympathize with WotC and understand the motives, but agree with AM that there is more heat than fire here.
Yeah, I think it's the perceived threat that is the problem. Our university has a crack legal team (i.e. good, not "on crack"), and every student case I know of that came up against them has lost. But it doesn't stop people worrying, and by "people", I mean mainly deans and heads of department, as far as I can tell. The individual profs start off happy to fail students and enforce strict policies, but get told off by their immediate supervisors. Then it becomes department lore that we aren't allowed to be too strict. The REAL higher-ups (chancelry, the teaching quality people, etc) are more than happy for us to be stricter.
ReplyDeleteThe perceived threat of legal action is still a potent force, though. Never mind that the student wouldn't have a chance of proving that you discriminated against them on grounds of (fill in the blank) - nobody wants to spend the money fighting the case.
ReplyDeletePrevious discussions on CM and RYS did point out that actual lawsuits from students over academic matters are quite rare. Cases in which they win are even rarer.
ReplyDeleteHowever, what is WotC's employment status? If tenured, I'd say stop worrying. Contingent faculty, however, are far too vulnerable. They can be quietly just "not renewed" by a lazy, spineless department chair, for even the most ridiculous reasons.
I have no opinion on the lawsuit idea, but I do see younger colleagues teaching in fear of getting bad evals or just "being" unpopular.
ReplyDeleteWhen do we stand up to that?
> When do we stand up to that?
ReplyDeleteOnce I got tenure, I stopped being such a milquetoast. It feels GREAT!
It still didn't stop me getting yelled at by chairs who need to spend less time on quantum field theory and more time figuring out how to spot student lies. Serving as chair myself has reduced that, but it hasn't completely eliminated it.
Nevertheless, I am about to submit this semester's grades, and I am pleased with them. This is because I think they reflect the students' demonstrated ability in my classes accurately. This is still so in cases in which the grade, more than anything else, tells the student that something needs to change, or failing that, a warning to prospective employers, since we have not abandoned accountability and responsibility at Middlin' State U. Ask me again a week from now how I feel about this, after the hue and cry has subsided.