A Letter to Jacqueline Stevens and Jorge Coronado
My friend Eliza and I wrote this in response to an op-ed from two Northwestern professors in the Chicago Sun-Times. We’ve emailed it to them, but we also wanted to share our thoughts publicly:
Have you considered that it’s possible neither of you have the experience to provide students with “concrete strategies for resilience”? Imagine living through multiple years of highly publicized lynchings before your mid 20s and having the most recent one come during a pandemic of which has become the most frequent cause of death for Black people. It is disrespectful of you to invoke the conversations you’ve had with students about police violence and provide “strategies of resilience” in the face of state violence instead of thinking about how harmful the conditions are. In addition, why are you focusing on the perceived lapses of victims instead of the actions of perpetrators?
Both of you have been able to operate in this pandemic with the consistent salaries, job security, and access to testing and healthcare that being a professor at Northwestern ensures. We are not living through the same crisis, and you do not understand the position that students are in. You don’t know what students have gained their resiliency from and I know it sure isn’t from maintaining a GPA. The paternalism runs deep in your writing. It’s laughable that a white person who has said the n-word publicly in front of students thinks she can provide concrete strategies let alone support to Black students.
In your op-ed, you claimed that policies in place before Hagerty’s announcement were “sufficient to meet legitimate student needs”. The decision to give students the CR/NC option was based upon two petitions put forth by students in both spring and fall asking for universal pass fail. If you couldn’t even mention the petition calling for this decision in your writing how are you aware of student needs? Further, your use of the phrase “legitimate needs” is evidence enough that you have an existing bias that would require students to receive support regardless of your personal opinion.
You also praise Brown University’s Provost’s decision to “encourage as much flexibility as is feasible”. The issue with this lack of a policy is that it doesn’t actually provide students with any supports. If universities want to make sure that all students have access to structured support instead of being at the whims of their individual professors, they need to institute concrete policies, such as the CR/NC one. Professor Stevens provides a great example for the importance of this. At the end of winter quarter 2020, as students left Evanston because of the onset of a global pandemic, the provost asked all professors to make their finals optional. Professor Stevens refused, and her students had to write a ten-page final.
In addition, you write that the CR/NC “is a cheap way to increase the likelihood that students receiving financial aid will graduate”. I was genuinely shocked to see that you think this is a goal worth criticizing. The global pandemic disproportionately affects low-income students, and the school has already done the bare minimum to help us during the past two quarters. Just because this is a metric that affects Northwestern’s rankings, why would it be a problem that the school is trying to make sure that students receiving financial aid graduate? You clearly think that maintaining professorial discretion is more important than student wellbeing.
Why are you so insistent on needing meritocratic values of worth during a global pandemic? Even before the global pandemic, Northwestern has been an uneven playing field in terms of both admissions and student experiences. This has only been exacerbated during the pandemic. Privileged students who you fear are “gaming” the system have been doing this anyways by virtue of being legacy students, by not having to be a student and work to support themselves, and from the flagrant cheating we know wealth can pay for. There are ways that the privileged benefit that you can call to change that would not cause harm to Black and low income students. The gains elites are making on the backs of the oppressed is a systemic failure, not something solely caused by structural supports intended to FINALLY help low income students.
You are advocating for additional meritocratic tracking of students’ value without any consideration that some students are currently not in living situations where these standards are a priority above our mental and physical well being. Furthermore, in a world in which wealth and power is gained from anti-Blackness these standards already privilege the white and wealthy who have more access to accrue these merits. These “standards” you are asking the school to maintain, to the detriment of those oppressed on campus, have the benefit of being another measure that would justify your salary.
P.S.
You wrote “The ‘B-’ in Microeconomics earned this fall because the course is graded on a curve? Gone! The ‘D’ in the winter because you didn’t submit the final paper for your Anthro class after the car got a flat tire on your way back from visiting your girlfriend in her parent’s mansion in Key West? Voila, gone, too! But not the course credit.”
We thought a more fair characterization would be: “the ‘B’- in Microeconomics earned this fall because you had to plan your mothers funeral and begin providing for your siblings? Gone! The ‘D’ in the winter because you fell into a deep depression after realizing that Black people will continue to get lynched over and over again your entire life with impunity and your professor is insisting being a student is your #1 priority? Voila, gone too! But not the course credit.”*
*So I can graduate on time without taking out a loan I will pay off for the rest of my life.
