robinson bloviating

I have asserted repeatedly that this argument will collapse when we touch it. Let me now show you exactly how it does.

First, to watch the house of cards start to wobble, have a look at the opening anecdotes from an article deBoer published in the Chronicle of Higher Education called “Some Students Are Smarter Than Others (And That’s Okay)” (writers don’t pick article titles, but deBoer wrote that he was pleased with this because it would “troll” people, i.e., upset them). DeBoer gets Chronicle readers to start thinking about the issues of the book by citing an experience he had teaching students:

    As I approach the door to class, I notice that one of my students waiting outside is crying, while friends comfort her. I know better than to say anything to her directly; the last thing an emotional undergraduate wants is an instructor offering consolation. After class I caught up with one of her friends to check if everything was alright.

    “It’s just first-year engineering,” she said. “Everybody cries.”

    I was a little concerned, and a little curious, so I poked around a bit and talked with a grad student I knew in mechanical engineering. He told me that only one in three students who started as an engineering major would finish with the degree, and that early courses in the major were actually designed to be “weed out” classes, meant to compel students to drop the major and choose another. Why? Because the rigor of the engineering programs was so high that a large percentage of students was guaranteed to drop out eventually, and it was far better for them to do so early, before they had accumulated a lot of credits.

    What had seemed like cruelty to me was, in fact, an act of mercy, an artifact of a pragmatic and necessary acknowledgment that not all students possess the underlying ability necessary to flourish in some fields. In time I would learn that many college classes, such as calculus and organic chemistry, function in much the same way. And I grew to think that rather than representing a failure of educators to do their jobs, these classes, which screen out students, perform a necessary if unfortunate function for colleges dedicated to training young people for their futures. Experiencing these moments as an educator, and observing many others as a student, deeply influenced my thoughts on how teaching does and should function in the real world.

[The pull quote on the article is: “What had seemed like cruelty to me was, in fact, an act of mercy.” We will return to this.]

Now, deBoer could have picked any moment that “deeply influenced” his thinking on how teaching functions. He picked this one. He tells us explicitly that it is illustrative. We are meant to draw an inference from it. How is that inference drawn? Watch:

    (Male) professor sees (female) student crying.
    Professor asks (2nd female) student why 1st was crying. Is told she is in first year engineering. Professor finds (male) student to explain what’s going on. He tells the professor the department is not just “rigorous” but actively tries to “weed out” students who do not “possess the underlying ability necessary to flourish” by “compel[ling]” students to drop out of the program and choose a different major sooner rather than later.
    Professor says that this data (female student in tears—though no first person testimony from her—plus explanation that she is in engineering and thus under extreme pressure from a program explicitly designed to encourage her to leave it), combined with other similar data, helped him form a conclusion: students have differing abilities. Some just can’t cut it. It’s impossible. No matter what, they will fail.
    THUS, it is better to knock these students off early. If 1/3 of program participants will ultimately drop out, it is far better that the 1/3 drop out on day one than for the dropouts to be spread over the course of years. If day one is a real motherfucker that makes you cry and feel stupid and incapable and want to give up all of your dreams and ambitions and go do something “easier” better suited to your dumb brain that couldn’t hack it with the big boys, this is not abuse. It is mercy. You are being given the opportunity to be your best self, by being shown that your ideas about what you could accomplish were wrong. You should be thanking them, really. Pain was inflicted upon you out of compassion. Sometimes you’ve got to be cruel to be kind.

I, um, I don’t know if you’ve noticed that there seems to be something a touch psychopathic in this. Given how people are very capable of constructing convenient rationalizations for cruelties that they also secretly relish inflicting (it hurts me more than it hurts you), we should be deeply, deeply skeptical of arguments that Actually, what seems like obvious transparent cruelty is really kindness, mercy, love. Actually Sweatshops Are Good. Actually We Needed To Nuke Those Civilians. This tends to be a right-wing position: the world requires cruelty in order to be just, and those who are too compassionate, whose hearts bleed too much are Hurting The Very People They Are Trying To Help. You spank the child for its own good, not because you like hitting children. Your class makes a young woman burst into tears, not because you want her to cry, but because she must cry and suffer so that she may prosper in her correct discipline of Art History or Gender Studies or Sociology rather than engineering, for which she is innately ill-suited.

 Now it’s time for me to take a turn as the Professor, and the class we’re taking today is called Logical Inference 101. We begin with a pop quiz. Please answer the following question: from the fact that a student is crying and you are told the engineering program tries to weed out students quickly by making them cry, is it rational to infer that the engineering program probably is weeding out students based on innate ability?

If you answered “No, of course it fucking isn’t,” congratulations, you get to stay in the class. If you answered “Yes,” I’m sorry, you’re weeded out. You should major in rhetoric or something. Go cry about it.

Now, if you are a political conservative, when you encounter arguments about the moral necessity of hurting people, you may drift toward them without examining too closely whether they hold up under serious scrutiny. If, however, you are a person of leftist sympathies, or simply have a functioning moral compass (the two often amount to the same thing), you might wonder if there is an alternate possibility: perhaps the school system is actually just not serving its students very well.

What if the argument that the male student made, and that deBoer and the engineering department believe, is actually not true? What if it’s just a story they tell? Okay, based on the fact that 1/3 of engineering students will ultimately drop out, they think they should find that group early and dispose of them ruthlessly. But why are 1/3 of engineering students dropping out to begin with? “Well, because they don’t have what it takes.” And how exactly do you know that, might I ask? How do you know anything about the woman you saw crying in the hall, especially considering you never even spoke with her? (By the way, less than 20 percent of engineering students in this country are women, and if we were curious social scientists we might wonder whether this woman’s experience could tell us something about why that is. If we talked to her, we might find out!)

I’ve actually taught students myself before. Only briefly, and only as a TF doing a section, but I was good at it (false modesty is annoying; the kids like me, I liked them, and they learned a lot. There are millions of things I’m awful at but teaching suited me really well). I, too, have a representative anecdote from which I could extrapolate beyond what is justified. My anecdote is: the most brilliant student in my class was also the worst student. She was Black and from a working-class background. She had a unique mind. Let me tell you: you do not get to Harvard as a working-class Black student unless you are some kind of one-in-ten-zillion weird genius, because you are going to be competing against people who literally hired professionals to write their college essays for them, and whose parents bought a building for the school, or who have been taking private violin lessons from the world’s finest player since the age of three, or whatever else. This is one reason why critiques of affirmative action are so grotesque: they stigmatize Black students as illegitimate entrants when the opposite is the case. They are the students to whom the “intellectual meritocracy” most brutally applies. The more marginalized you are, the more you have to depend on your talent, rather than money, connections, and that unflappable self-confidence that comes with a ruling-class upbringing. A Harvard student who is Black and female and working-class? Yeah, she’s going to be extremely smart.

When my student wrote papers, they were always among the three or four best papers in the class. (Not the best papers; I am here to tell the truth, not elevate her to mythic status.) That is when she wrote papers. But oh dear God, the struggle to get the papers. It was comical, really, because we were both very similar in many ways. Disorganized, chaotic, chronic inability to get the assignments in on time. We used to laugh about it in office hours, because to me it was funny. She got a good grade from me, not because I “altered my expectations,” but because she learned a ton of stuff from the class and came to office hours not to beg for extensions (as some students did) but to engage with the stuff I said in the class. Who cared if the fucking papers were late? That’s just rule-following, and I wasn’t teaching a rule-following class, I was teaching knowledge, and my evaluation was based on whether you knew what I was teaching you.

That was my approach. It was not, however, the university’s. My student was in big-T trouble. Her grades in general were horrible. She was being threatened with expulsion if she didn’t shape up. This made her terribly stressed out and afraid, because she had worked incredibly hard to get where she was and to lose it would be devastating. No matter what, she was going to be left with a set of bad grades that would follow her into the job market. I could already see, to my horror, those subconscious words forming in the mind of a future employer looking at a resume: Couldn’t handle it. Would have been kinder to show her the door at the start.

And I want to scream, because it’s the literal inverse of the truth. What actually happened was an institution was too screwed up to actually nourish one of its most promising students. Instead of figuring out what she needed and giving it to her, it punished and scared her, making her perform even worse because of the pressure, and setting off a disastrous cycle. It’s such a joke to me when conservatives say college students are coddled. Coddled? You kidding me? They’ll give you a room full of cushions or five Deans For Inclusion, but as far as actually helping you learn stuff and keep your life together, you are as alone as you’ve ever been in your life up until that point.

I think many, many teachers have similar stories. I know David Graeber has one. A working-class woman in his graduate class at Yale was brilliant, but she just could not bring herself to fill out the registration forms. That may sound ridiculous to you, but I was actually the same: every single year I had to pay a huge penalty for submitting my registration forms months late. I managed to make it work by bribing my way out of the situation (by which I mean just paying the giant accumulating late fees), but Graeber’s story ends tragically: the student was kicked out of the program. Over some forms! In fact, Graeber says his own experiences in grad school were similar. He had a hard time despite having the makings of a great anthropologist:

    As one of the few students of working-class origins in my own graduate program, I watched in dismay as professors first explained to me that they considered me the best student in my class—even, perhaps, in the department—and then threw up their hands claiming there was nothing that could be done as I languished with minimal support—or during many years none at all, working multiple jobs, as students whose parents were doctors, lawyers, and professors seemed to automatically mop up all the grants, fellowships, and student funding.

All of this is to say that as a leftist, rather than a conservative, your instinct when seeing the Crying Engineering Student should be: how is the engineering department doing its job so badly? Some students are always going to leave a program, because they lose interest, and yes, some may not “be able” to do the work (more on this shortly), but since we know that the number of ways in which our society makes it difficult for those who could do the work under the right conditions given the right support, we should probably ask first about how to create those conditions rather than to justify intentionally adding factors that will discourage them from succeeding. The conservative asks: what is wrong with this person that they are crying? The socialist asks: what are the causes of this person’s pain and how can we ameliorate them? Do we not think there is a chance that this “weeding out” process, which will inevitably be hardest on the students to whom the college environment generally is a difficult transition (those whose parents didn’t go to college) will not actually figure out who has the “aptitude” but will instead figure out who can do the best in the program as it is structured? The buried assumption is that the program as it is structured is the only way, or the best way, to teach engineering. Assumptions are not evidence, though. In fact, engineering programs are different across countries, and dropout rates vary widely. Levels of financial support, the culture of the program, and levels of preparation provided beforehand are all factors that might be at work. But we have to investigate that empirically.

So the first sign of trouble for the whole argument is that the illustrative anecdotes deBoer exhibits for us cannot and should not lead to the inferences that he drew, because they equally well support the exact opposite conclusion, which is that instead of figuring out what it would take to get as many interested students as possible through the engineering curriculum, the university is already operating on deBoer’s theory of Natural Aptitudes without having actually proved it.

I say they haven’t proved it because, as we are about to see, you can’t prove it. Let me tell you when we will have shown something about “fixed limits” on an aspiring engineer’s capacity to do the work: it will be when we have let that person take decades of completely free classes on engineering, taught by every conceivable pedagogical method, and we have no complicating factors in their lives that might make school harder (like having to survive under capitalism, or dealing with trauma, death, and divorce). When we have given students a boundlessly kind, supportive engineering program, that lasts as long as they need and is structured around them with as many of society’s resources as possible put toward its perfection, rather than a brutal one that tells them that 1/3 of their classmates are incapable, then maybe we will know their “natural capacity” for engineering. We will also have to have verified that this program isn’t misogynistic and that we have tried to fix elements that might cause certain students to be more likely to not want to participate.

But, no, even then we won’t know about “potential,” because it could still be that a few small misunderstandings of crucial concepts are blocking a given student from moving forward, but if they had gotten past those misunderstandings there was no fixed factor in their brain that meant they couldn’t continue. (The misunderstandings are not necessarily in themselves a fixed factor, because it could be that they could understand better if we knew a better way of presenting the information, but we don’t). And even in the case that society puts “as many of its resources as possible” toward teaching, we still don’t know if it could have done better, because “possible” will always be a political choice. I tell you what, how about this: when we have built an entire society around teaching Arthur Goldfarb of Altoona, PA to be the engineer he aspires to be, when literally every person’s every task is in some way in service of that goal, when every technological innovation is designed under a “help Arthur be an engineer” mandate, when Arthur tries his absolute best for 24 years but still can’t master the material, then let’s conclude that it was just not in Arthur’s genes. Except, of course, we won’t even be able to do it then. Because Arthur likely failed due to the pressure.