“While we may be reticent to tell our classes that everyone will get an “A” and that the syllabus work is optional, this gesture encourages us to cultivate intrinsic motivation to engage with the course materials. We have a historic opportunity to grow beyond familiar canons to focus on how this social pandemic offers a pedagogical moment with an explosion of new primary sources to reflect upon. Countless emerging scientific studies, sociological surveys, poetry, and personal testimonies can become our collective COVID-19 curricula.” –Jesse Goldberg, Jane Guskin, Vani Kannan, Marianne Madoré, Conor Tomás Reed, and Dhipinder Walia

On the eve of our final class meeting, bringing the end to a derailed semester in which institutions failed to provide students with the “product” promised to them, I encourage all of us to read this article, written by several adjuncts working within the CUNY system: https://medium.com/@conortomasreed/a-for-all-yes-all-transforming-grading-during-covid-19-a3a24de4e249

At the inception of distance-learning, I wanted nothing to do with school. All I could focus on was reading every bit of news coming in through The Guardian and The New York Times. I read, and read, and read, keeping myself up to date on global infections and deaths, even learning several basic epidemiological terms, such as R0 (pronounced “R naught”). This time was marked by an immense fear, a fear only worsened by living in the epicenter of the pandemic, as the future had never quite seemed so uncertain. The fear hasn’t gone anywhere, as I can feel it stalking me in all that I do, and while I still find myself glued to the news, my level of obsession isn’t quite as concerning as it was in late-March and early-April. But within that, I’ve still been asked to “attend” class, to complete assignments, to engage with material that has nothing to do with the pandemic or how we can restructure the world (including academia) as we know it. And this is coming from someone whose modus operandi as an undergrad was molding reading material/assignments in his image. Yet, I feel lucky in that I’ve been granted the opportunity to pivot my final assignment in the direction of Covid-19, specifically a pivot towards the lived experiences of several essential workers near and dear to me. Am I sticking close to the assigned topic? Barely. Am I going to put all possible effort into this project considering my subpar technological capabilities and the current state of my mental health? Absolutely. With that being said, I cannot help but think how absurd the notion of punitive grading is during the 2020 spring term. As mentioned in the attached article, “students did not prepare to distance learn during a pandemic.” Enough wasn’t changed within our classes and CUNY as a whole to allow for adaptation. Instead, a lot of us feel left behind, both materially (in regard to access to computers, Wi-Fi, etc.) and emotionally. Just as Covid-19 has exposed social disparities via who it afflicts and ultimately kills, distance learning has proven that not all students can effectively turn their bedrooms into classrooms.
I love school, perhaps more than anything else, but having the stress of getting a “B” my first semester in graduate school added to the stress incurred by not having paid rent the last two months, hastily dwindling funds, and a rising death toll across the country is nonsensical, if not insulting.

In the words of my film studies professor, “No one thinks of the essays they wrote during the Bubonic Plague.”

Even if we were to be judged on our performance before the shutdown, none of us deserve less than A. Considering we’ve even shown up to class once throughout this crisis, while capitalism’s swan song permeates New York’s empty streets, only solidifies that notion.

What this week’s reading stimulates me to think about is the problem of dualism: what does it really imply? And when do dualisms matter?

“Dualism,” according to the scholar Costall, “is institutionalized within the structure of our academic disciplines. On the one hand, there are the natural and the engineering sciences, and, on the other, the human or social sciences” [1]. In addition to that, he also mentions that interdisciplinary efforts, as a response to this kind of dualism, often fail because “they either fracture along the old divide or else retreat to the side of ‘hard science’” [1], [2].

In this week’s reading, Chuh also tackles this problematic division between “hard sciences” and humanities – a division that has been built into the structure of traditional, educational institutions. As Chuh writes,

“Now, with concerted emphasis on STEM fields deemed necessary to success and national competitiveness in the global workforces, outcomes towards and relevance to those goals serve as primary measures of institutional performance. It is thus that it seems necessary to defend the humanities as a means of resisting the rationality that authorizes and resources certain kinds of knowledge at the expense of others” [3].

As one can see, the structural dualism between “hard sciences” and humanities in the end disconnects what and how we experience the world (i.e., who we are) from what has been taught.

Chuh’s suggested solution to this dualism is kind of pessimistic in the way that she communicates it; as she writes, “we can at the least stop submitting to its demands as we claim the humanities as a ground for bringing forth sensibilities that grapple with rather than cover over its constitutive violence” [3]. To put it in another way, by stopping submitting to this structural dualism that gives more power to one kind of knowledge than to the other kind of knowledge, we can just let humanities be humanities rather than “a means of resisting the authority of sciences” and therefore, sciences can just be sciences rather than something that has been overestimated or underestimated. 

Reference

[1]       A. Costall, “Socializing Affordances,” Theory Psychol., Aug. 2016, doi: 10.1177/0959354395054001.
[2]       C. Kwa, “Representations of Nature Mediating between Ecology and Science Policy: The Case of the International Biological Programme,” Soc. Stud. Sci., vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 413–442, 1987.
[3]       K. Chuh, “Knowledge under Cover,” in The Difference Aesthetics Makes, Durham : Duke University Press, 2019, pp. 26–50.