Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/11/04/the_appletonfolt_correspondence.php
Friday, November 4, 2005
Editors' Note: What follows below is the email message Prof. Jon Appleton of the Music Department circulated to a number of faculty members last week; Dean of the Faculty Carol Folt's response, sent to the chairs of all of Dartmouth's academic departments; and Appleton's response to Folt, sent to The Dartmouth Review.
Appleton's Letter
Dear Colleagues:
The Supreme Court declared in Regents of the University of Michigan v. Ewing , 474 U.S. 214, 225 (1985): "When judges are asked to review the substance of a genuinely academic decision...they should show great respect for the faculty's professional judgment." Plainly, they may not override it unless it is such a substantial departure from accepted academic norms as to demonstrate that the person or committee responsible did not actually exercise professional judgment.
I came to teach music and musical composition at Dartmouth College nearly forty years ago. It had recently emerged from the tradition of a gentlemen's finishing school to an institution of intellectual strength, brought about in part by the mathematician John G. Kemeny. My own work as a composer dealt mostly with electro-acoustic music, a very new field at the time. Research with colleagues in engineering and computer science led to the creation of a user-friendly system where students without previous musical experience could try their hand at composing.
In 1972, together with my colleague Christian Wolff, we initiated an undergraduate course called Music and Technology. Over the years students used increasingly sophisticated computer programs to compose short electronic music compositions. This became the most popular feature of the course and it counted as half of the final grade. Thirty-three years ago the course enrolled 35 students but during the last several years I saw my enrollment in the course grow to 85.
Nowadays, all students have access to and indeed most own computers and are comfortable with the software used to compose music. There are probably too many musical options for them now and the trick is to limit the number of musical ideas so as to develop structure and continuity in their work. It is amazing to me that I have given this creative experience to more than 3000 non-music undergraduates over the last thirty-three years. Many alumni return to tell me how important this experience was in broadening their musical taste. Obviously it is very time consuming to listen to, criticize and grade 85 compositions even if they are less than three minutes each. Dartmouth College does not employ teaching assistants in the arts. Sometimes students are intimidated by the composition assignment and drop the course because they fear they will not get an A in the course. Dartmouth has done nothing to curb grade inflation unlike Princeton, for example. The pressure to give A grades is intense. It comes from the students and increasingly from their parents as well.
When teaching the Music and Technology course, I set aside class periods for students to present their first compositional attempts (their first drafts). Those that work through the term almost always improve. Two weeks before the composition assignments are due, I schedule individual appointments with all the students. Perhaps a quarter of the class never takes the chance to show me their work and this is because, sadly, they put off everything until the last minute. It is nearly impossible for a beginning composer to create anything significant the night before the assignment is due.
During all my years on the faculty of Dartmouth College, I graded as follows: A meant excellent, B was good, C was average, D was poor and if you didn't show up, you failed the course.
Somehow it escaped me that the average grade at Dartmouth last year was a B+. Thus when I taught Music and Technology in the Fall term of 2004, I gave 30 As, 25 Bs, 15 Cs and 4 Ds (eleven students dropped the course for various reasons during the term). The students who earned less than an A were very upset. They wrote me angry notes such as "you nuked my GPA" and "how could I get a B in a music course?" and "my mother loved my composition."
The students complained to the chair of my department and to the Dean of Faculty Carol Folt. Their parents called to express outrage. I never saw these complaints but I got a message from the Dean of Faculty who asked what "metric" I used to grade these compositions? I asked what metric she thought Haydn used to grade Beethoven's compositions; or for that matter the "metric" used by Arnold Schoenberg when he taught John Cage. I explained to the Dean that I had been teaching this course successfully for thirty-three years and I was employed at Dartmouth because of my reputation as a composer. I offered to show the papers and compositions to the Dean but she never wanted to see them. I thought if something had gone terribly wrong with my teaching that perhaps an outside committee of composers might tender a second opinion. Alas, no administrator ever attended the class nor reviewed any of the student work.
A week later the Dean of Faculty informed the students that anyone unhappy with their grade could have it erased and be given a "credit" for the course. According to President James Wright, this was done without his knowledge and I want to note here that the president and I have been on the faculty for the same years and as dean, provost and president he has always been supportive of my work.
Until last year I thought that I would continue to teach at Dartmouth until I no longer felt useful to my students. However, because of this situation I am retiring from Dartmouth and will teach elsewhere for the next several years. There is nothing more I can do but to explain this to you, my colleagues. Perhaps you, through meetings of the faculty, your committees, etc. will be able to prevent the current Dean of Faculty from continuing to erode our academic freedom. If you think this was an isolated incident, let me paraphrase Pastor Martin Niemoller, "First they came for the music faculty and I did not speak out because I was not a musician. Then they came for the psychologists and I did not speak out because I was not a psychologist. Then they came for the biologists and I did not speak out because I was not a biologist. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me."
Jon H. Appleton
Folt's Response
Dear Colleagues,
I understand that a mass e-mail titled, "The Decline of Academic Freedom at Dartmouth College" was sent to many members of the faculty last Thursday. While I do not know who received the email, I have heard about it from faculty in many departments. I am writing to you in your role as Chair to provide you with the correct information which you can discuss with your faculty if questions arise. The "Decline of Academic Freedom" email is filled with errors and unpleasant personal allusions, but rather than address all of them, I am going to focus on the errors that touch on fundamental issues for the faculty.
The email concerned grading issues in Music 3 taught during the fall 2004 to 76 students (final enrollment). At the conclusion of the course, the Dean's Office received 42 student complaints -- an unprecedented number – from students who received grades from A- to D. As is standard procedure, the Associate Dean for the responsible division (in this case for Humanities) was in charge of the inquiry into complaints. The review was very thorough and took four months to complete. It included: interviews by the Assistant Dean with 28 complaining students who were on campus, review by the Associate Dean of grades on all assignments, review of course information distributed to students (including information about grading criteria) and a discussion between the Associate Dean and the Professor about grading practices. Our investigation concluded that unspecified extra credit had been given to students who came to speak with the instructor about the course and their compositions, regardless of whether they improved their work based on his feedback, and that students had never been told that they could raise their grades simply by meeting with the instructor.
Under the circumstances, the Associate Dean and I both felt that some accommodation was necessary to ensure the student's right to understandable and fair grading. It was impractical to re-grade the musical compositions; it was weeks after the end of the term, students had dispersed and there were no faculty on campus available to undertake such a task. Instead, the students were given the option of receiving credit instead of a grade for the course. Please note that not a single student grade was raised and thus no GPA's were "inflated." However, because all students had passed the course, all students were given the option to receive credit for the course (this is like using Dartmouth's NRO option).
I want to make it clear that an alleged concern that the grades were either too high or too low was never a consideration. Many other courses have mean and median grades similar to that of Music 3 in the fall of 2004.
I also wish to emphasize that student complaints about grades are very rare at Dartmouth and only lead to administrative action in the most exceptional cases where there is clear evidence – after review by assistant and associate deans – of unfairness in the assignation [sic] of grades. I am aware of fewer than 5 grading complaints coming to the Dean's office about the more than 6000 courses taught by Arts & Science faculty in the last 4 years. However, if you or any of your faculty have questions about faculty independence in grading, please contact the Dean of Faculty or any of the Associate Deans.
Finally, in the context of this case, a broad assertion has been made that Dartmouth has a lack of standards and is uninterested or even complicit in the perpetuation of grade inflation. This is simply not true. Dartmouth was one of the first institutions to address grade inflation when it began reporting the median grade on the transcripts. Last year, the Committee on Instruction began discussions about grading practices once again and they plan to examine this issue more closely in the coming year. I look forward to working with the faculty on this and trust we will explore this complex question with the careful reflection and consideration it deserves.
Thank you,
Dean Carol Folt
Appleton's Rebuttal
1. Academic freedom means that deans do not tell faculty what or how to teach courses nor how to grade. None have for thirty-eight years until the arrival of Dean Folt.
2. Folt says 76 students were graded and 41 complained. The complaint was in the form of a petition and since I gave 30 As, one assumes this was from every student who earned less than an A. I never saw the petition.
3. Folt claims to have conducted a "very thorough" investigation but how could it be so if not one person looked at the papers or heard the compositions. It was only on the word of the student that the professor graded them unfairly. There was no examination of the evidence.
4. Folt claims "extra credit had been given to students who came to speak with the instructor" about their compositions. These meetings were required and those who availed themselves of the opportunity to let me hear their compositions before the last day usually improved.
5. Folt claims it was "impractical to re-grade the musical compositions" but why? They remained in my office for a year and there are plenty of qualified composers who could give a second opinion. In fact I had no meetings with anyone in the office of the Dean of Faculty and was simply informed by email that the grades had been changed.
6. I was told by a student who took the course that the child of a large donor to the College had his/her parents call the administration to complain about the grade. I have no proof that this is the case. However, something exceptional must have happened for my academic freedom to have been violated since Folt says that "administrative action [occurs only] in the most exceptional cases." Academic freedom means it should NEVER occur.
7. Folt claims complaints about grades are "very rare at Dartmouth." This is not the case as I have received a number of email messages from my colleagues to the contrary.
Jon H. Appleton
Arthur R. Virgin Professor of Music