The term “academic freedom” raises a host of issues. One of them is who has it – the professor or the college?
A recent case arising from a dispute over grading at Virginia State University (VSU) brings this matter into focus. One can’t help but sympathize with the professor, but the case raises a difficult issue.
First, the facts. Professor Carey Stronach has been a tenured faculty member in the Department of Physics at VSU for more than forty years. He taught Physics 112 during the Spring 2006 semester. Each student’s grade depended on the average of his three best quizzes out of five. According to Professor Stronach, one student received scores of 16, 66, 89, 21, and 22 on his quizzes. The average of his three highest was thus 59, which should have meant an F for the student. Stronach assigned him a D, however.
The student complained to Stronach, stating that two of his quizzes had been erroneously graded. He claimed that he had actually gotten 95s on the quizzes where the professor had recorded scores of 16 and 21 and therefore should have received an A for the course. When Stronach took no action to change the grade, the student faxed him copies of the two quizzes, but Stronach believed that the student had altered them and left the grade as a D.
Then the student complained to the chairman of the department, who sided with the student and upon his authority as chairman changed the grade to an A.
Stronach protested that action and the dispute went up the university’s chain of command to the provost, who ratified the A grade. At that point, he filed suit against the university in federal district court. There are other issues in the case, involving Stronach’s contention that the administration has retaliated against him for supporting a fellow faculty member who sued the university for job discrimination and won a large judgment.
The only part of the suit that has been adjudicated so far is the grade change issue. On January 15, Judge Henry E. Hudson granted the university’s motion to dismiss Stronach’s complaint that VSU violated his right to academic freedom by changing the student’s grade.
Battles between professors and administrators over grades are fairly common, although they don’t usually end up in court. Let’s examine the conflict. Does “academic freedom” mean that professors are entitled to the final say in grading? Or does that right rest with college administrators?
According to Professor Stronach’s brief, the First and Fourteenth Amendments combine to guarantee him a right to academic freedom that includes the right to grade students as he believes is warranted.
In a 1957 case, the Supreme Court stated that a university has the right “to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study.” Nice language, but it doesn’t settle this dispute. What about the lower courts?
Most relevant is a 1989 decision by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, Parate v. Isibor. In that case, the court sided with an engineering professor at Tennessee State University in a grading dispute, writing, “The freedom of the professor to assign grades according to his own professional judgment is of substantial interest to that professor….Thus, the professor’s evaluation of her students and assignment of their grades is central to the professor’s teaching method.” The court’s ruling, however, did not go so far as to say that professors have a constitutional right to assign students their grades.
The key to Parate was that the school had compelled the professor personally to change a student’s grade. The judges saw that as compulsory speech which violated the professor’s rights. If, however, school officials had simply entered the grade they thought the student should have, that action would be permissible. Without the compulsory speech, there’s no problem.
Under Parate, administrators always win as long as they don’t make the mistake of forcing the professor to change the grade himself. The professor’s “substantial interest” is very easily defeated. Either way the change is done, to someone reviewing a student’s academic record, it appears that he did better than the professor thought he did.
Returning to Stronach’s case, Judge Hudson did not think that Parate was pertinent. For one thing, VSU officials had not ordered Stronach to personally change the student’s grade. They made the change administratively, just as Parate said was acceptable.
Moreover, there was precedent in the Fourth Circuit for treating academic freedom not as belonging to professors, but to institutions. In Urofsky v. Gilmore, the Fourth Circuit was faced with a dispute over the use of university-owned computers. A professor sued over restrictions that had been imposed by the Virginia legislature, arguing that they violated his right to academic freedom. The court upheld the law, stating that while professors do not surrender their First Amendment rights upon accepting employment at a public university, they do not have any “academic freedom” rights that trump university policies.
Urofsky spelled defeat for Stronach. If VSU administrators choose to override his grading decisions, he has no legal right to stop them.
Is this a good result?
In my view, Professor Stronach was rolled by the VSU administration. College officials ought to back up their faculty when it comes to grading unless there is clear evidence of a mistake or animus against a student. Instead, VSU, either to retaliate against Stronach, appease the student, or both, changed his grade, thus making it appear that he regarded the student as deserving of an A in his physics course. The student actually had earned an F!
Despite my sympathy for Stronach, I’m inclined to think that in the absence of agreement otherwise, the rights to decide on academic policies (including grades) should reside with the school. Employers generally are entitled to establish the rules. Some of those rules might be bad ones, but still it’s better to have some bad rules than to give the faculty the right under “academic freedom” to do whatever they want.
Some schools will choose to give the faculty a great deal of freedom; others little. Diversity in this respect is fine.
There still might be controversies, though.
In Parate, the professor tried to get in the final word by inserting a note attached to the student’s record that the assigned “A” should have been a “B.” The university demanded that she remove the note or face punishment. That result is consistent with the notion that academic freedom resides with the institution: it owns the records and therefore can dictate what will or will not go into them.
But what if a scrupulous professor were to privately publish – on a personal Web site, for example – information about how his students had actually done in class? Several years ago, Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield told his students that he would give them two sets of grades. The first would be their “official” grades as reported to the university, with the expectation of good grades for all built in. The second would be the grades he actually thought the students had earned. Suppose that a professor didn’t just tell the students how he thought they had really done, but informed anyone who cared to peruse his site?
Would that be protected free speech or insubordination to university policy? Another difficult issue.