I weep for this generation of college students. I really do.
The Cruelty of Deadlines
One more front in the university’s war on reality
By Ted Gup — August 30, 2016
nationalreview.com
All right, now that we are accustomed to safe spaces, trigger warnings, grade inflation, speech codes, and shields against opposing political viewpoints, we are ready for the next phase in our effort to coddle a generation of American students. Enter Amherst assistant professor of history Ellen R. Boucher. Her contribution to the ongoing campaign to infantilize students is to effectively do away with deadlines, those pesky demands that suggest the world may not be willing to wait for us.
Boucher has written an essay in the most recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. The headline reads: “It’s Time to Ditch Our Deadlines: Why you should stop penalizing your students for submitting work late.” Boucher’s book is entitled “Empire Children: Child Emigration, Welfare, and the Decline of the British World, 1869-1967.” That phrase — “the decline of the British World” – resonates in the current context as if, perhaps having studied the collapse of one empire, she is readying our children for our own imminent decline.
(You may remember that Amherst is where the informal mascot “Lord Jeff” Amherst was retired because 250 years earlier the real Lord Amherst, during a time of war, schemed to exterminate the native population.)
In her essay Boucher links deadlines to student stress, and says it’s a contributing factor to depression, drop-out rates, burn-out, and maybe even suicide. Everything but acne (oh, wait, isn’t that made worse by stress too?). Her solution, which is already reflected in her own courses and which she suggests for the entire curriculum, is to make the deadline meaningless. In Boucher’s system, deadlines aren’t deadlines, they’re just cordial invitations. There should be no penalty for noncompliance, she writes. To do otherwise, she argues, is inhumane, courts failure, and could have catastrophic consequences.
If you didn’t see this one coming, you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been happening on campuses, where cosseted students are being reared to believe that there should be nothing upsetting in their glide path of life.
Under Professor Boucher’s scheme, each student now has two extra days beyond the deadline (dare we still call it such?) to comply. No need to show cause or make an appeal. Oh, but don’t worry: If they miss that extension, nothing untoward will happen. “If at the end of that period,” she writes, “they are still having trouble completing the assignment, they must meet with me in person to go over an outline of their ideas and set a schedule for getting the paper done.” Forgiveness and flexibility are now the hallmarks of a pedagogy that is determined to protect students from failing at all costs, and I do mean all.
Professor Boucher used to dock students half a letter grade for each day past the deadline, hardly the rack and screw. But the results, she suggests, could be broken lives and failing students. The disadvantaged, in particular, were vulnerable to the psychological ravages of deadlines. (Why is it that those who have already endured so much are cast as the least able to endure so little?)
Now, I admit, as a professor of journalism and as a former Washington Post staff writer, that deadlines can be stressful, and certainly there were times when, had I had the option, I might have ignored them. But here’s the point: I did not have that choice. And neither will these students once they leave the velvety embrace of the classroom. Boucher’s hope is that students will learn to differentiate between “hard” and “soft” deadlines. I have yet to hear an employer make such a distinction.
Her ideas, doubtless driven by genuine compassion, are one more step towards undermining students’ confidence in themselves and delegitimizing self-discipline. It fits neatly into a pattern in which students are protected from disturbing images, from offensive speech, from disappointing grades, and from the effrontery of those who disagree with them on ideological grounds. They are treated like so many gingerly served soufflés, only later to be jostled and shifted, tossed and dropped, and introduced into a world where deadlines are taken seriously. In that world, those who do not meet deadlines will discover the true meaning of stress.
In my classes, late papers receive zero credit. I still edit the work line by line and meet with students to discuss their writing. But a late paper gets no credit. (Only a death in the family or other true crisis buys them more time.) In 30 years I have had almost no students drop the class (indeed, most classes are oversubscribed), and it is extraordinarily rare that a deadline is missed – even though nearly all my students have one or two off-campus jobs. And by the way, a disproportionate number have gone on to distinguished careers.
Discipline and rigor may have gone out of style, but not in my classes. I believe I would be doing them no favor by setting an example of indulgence or creating a model in which frailty is the norm against which all expectations are set. When students are in distress, they know they can come to me, and many do. But designing the curriculum to accommodate the most vulnerable is a dangerous distortion of reality, amounts to bad parenting — call it “enabling” — and offers a false life lesson.
At risk of being snarky, I am guessing that the trains, planes, and buses that deliver Amherst students departed on time, with or without them; that the Rhodes, Marshall, and Fulbright scholarships offer no grace period; and that Amherst’s bursar would be none too pleased if a few hundred students missed tuition payments.
And for those graduates who become lawyers, they’d better pray for understanding judges; for those who go into the military, they’d better hope for charitable drill sergeants; for those who go into medicine, they’d better keep their fingers crossed that the operating room is still available when they are finally ready. Otherwise, all those lessons about flexible deadlines will lead to nothing but disbarments, courts-martial, and malpractice suits.
I am sure that Professor Boucher, as a scholar of history, knows that the origin of the word “deadline” goes back to Civil War days, and refers to that line in a prisoner-of-war camp which, if crossed, brings fire down upon the violator. It comes down to us as emblematic of the proposition that choices have consequences. But today, on many campuses, actions and consequences have been severed.
Now, I may be unfair in singling out Professor Boucher. She appears to be articulate and caring, and she is hardly alone. Read the comments to her article or some of the chat-room discussions of students and faculty, and you will see that distrust of deadlines and an embrace of “grace periods” is now the norm. Some have done her one better. Students at Brown University wanted such extensions because their leftist activism wore them out and left them unable to meet academic deadlines — and in extreme cases, some few even reportedly received dean’s notes in support of their claims. A Vassar professor noted that many in academia now follow a “get-it-in-when-you-can” policy.
Part of education is building up tolerance for stress — learning how to triage a crowded schedule, how to cram the most into the hours given, and yes, how to take ownership of one’s life — which includes the prospect of failure, of accepting the penalties for being tardy, of recognizing that our needs do not define the world. To an increasing number of academics, my words will no doubt sound callous and reactionary, but I believe they still reflect the world that our students will populate. One day, the meek may well inherit the earth, deadlines may dissolve into mere suggestions, and life may be pressure-free. On that day, Professor Boucher’s students will be particularly well prepared.
— Ted Gup is a Boston-based author, a professor of journalism at Emerson College, and a visiting lecturer at Brown University. |
