This autumn, when the student-athletes who compose the University of Michigan’s football team are girding their loins in preparation for Armageddon, a.k.a. the Ohio State game, suppose some freshman players make mistakes in practice. They miss blocking assignments, fumble handoffs, run the wrong pass routes.
Do we think Michigan’s coaches will respond therapeutically? If they emulate the university’s administration, the coaches will soothe their freshmen by saying:
Golly, to err is human, to forgive is to “curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals.” It is unfolding even among individuals who will not line up across the line of scrimmage from Ohio State’s stress-inducing student-athletes. As your coaches, our priority is to allow you freshmen to “acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys.” So, we will not respond to your mistakes with extrinsic motivations — e.g., criticism. We coaches are here to help you transition to academia. Thrashing OSU would be fun, but first and foremost we are “investing in students’ well-being and growth by fostering a culture of connection and collaboration — rather than competition.”
Granted, the quoted words do not sound like coach-speak from those responsible for filling the Big House, the nation’s largest stadium (capacity 109,901). The words sound like what they are, an emanation of today’s academic mind.
They are from the official explanation of why, beginning in autumn 2027, classes in Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts will be pass/fail for first-semester freshmen, who will be spared the stress of final letter grades. The grades will be given but hidden. They will not appear on transcripts. And they will not be factored into grade point averages. The least surprising news from Ann Arbor, the self-described “Athens of the Midwest,” is that students like the new policy.
The word “journey” (slathered by the university with the adjectival “personally meaningful”) is a favorite of people fluent in academic jargon. It trips effortlessly off the tongues of academics who ladle up education as a college “experience,” a rudderless four-year sail on a boundless sea of elective choices.
The rhetorical goo celebrating “connection” and “collaboration,” and disparaging “competition” (an implicit reproach of “capitalist culture”?), has a practical as well as ideological function. A pass/fail first semester will partially obscure an embarrassing aspect of today’s “college for all” culture: the proliferation of remedial classes for students whose high school “experience” left them ill-prepared academically.
The Chronicle of Higher Education is a painfully accurate recorder of campus thinking. It reports that “teaching experts” say Michigan’s new policy addresses the question of how colleges can “offer constructive criticism during one of the most formative periods of a young adult’s life without crushing their” — yes, their — “spirit (or GPA) in the process.”
The Chronicle quotes one expert who thinks Michigan’s change could relieve undergraduates of “undue” pressure. But how much, if any, pressure is proper if competition is regrettable, and collaboration and cooperation are aspirations?
And if the spirits of today’s presumptively fragile freshmen can be crushed by grading their work, will they mature out of this “formative” period by second semester? Or by senior year?
Other universities have or have had variations of Michigan’s new policy. Johns Hopkins University abandoned its policy when, the administration said, it delayed “development of study skills and adaptation to college-level work.” But delay is obviously Michigan’s spirit-protecting intention.
Linda Nilson, founding director (emeritus) of Clemson University’s Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation, says what often goes unsaid in academic discourse: the obvious. She says a pass/fail policy “demotivates students,” and “learning has got to be a little bit stressful.”
Is it not possible that Michigan’s postulated “mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals” is a self-fulfilling diagnosis? Tell young people that their professors presume them to be crisis-afflicted, and young people might conform to authority figures’ expectations.
And if “intrinsic motivations” are sufficient for learning, and are, as Michigan implies, somehow superior to dictated motivations, such as grades, supplied by professors, the university itself seems almost superfluous. Other than as an excuse for the football team.
A president of the University of Oklahoma was presumably being droll when he said he wanted to make the university something its football program could be proud of. But say what you will about the football industry that has been grafted onto institutions of higher education, no one doubts that this industry is something that higher education is not very: serious about what it is there for.
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