{"id":12695,"date":"2013-05-27T23:53:29","date_gmt":"2013-05-28T03:53:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/?p=12695"},"modified":"2013-12-17T21:18:23","modified_gmt":"2013-12-18T02:18:23","slug":"say-goodbye-to-lake-wobegon-u-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/2013\/05\/27\/say-goodbye-to-lake-wobegon-u-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Say Goodbye to Lake Wobegon U. (1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A.<\/a>Though you wouldn’t know it from the unusually chilly weather here in New York City, we’ve reached the season of graduation ceremonies, senior proms, and the other rituals of passage from one level of education to another or the transition from the classroom to what we call “the real world.” Let me participate in that\u00a0celebratory\u00a0process in my usual contrarian fashion, by offering my own version of a commencement address \u2015\u00a0albeit from an uninvited guest<\/em>\u00a0speaker \u2015 intended for delivery\u00a0at some college, university, polytechnic or art institute<\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Greetings, Graduates<\/strong><\/p>\n

As you’ll no doubt recall from the National Public Radio show “Prairie Home Companion,” in Garrison Keillor’s fictional midwestern town of Lake Wobegon,\u00a0Minnesota “all the children are above average.” Just like all of you, I’m sure.<\/p>\n

\"Garrison<\/a>

Garrison Keillor, “News from Lake Wobegon” (1990), cover.<\/p><\/div>\n

Well, Lake Wobegon now has its own law school, where the same principle applies. Or, to be more accurate, the Lake Wobegon model \u2015 “all the children are above average”\u00a0\u2015 has now spread to law schools nationwide. See Catherine Rampell’s\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0story of June 21, 2010,\u00a0“In Law Schools, Grades Go Up, Just Like That.”<\/a>\u00a0According to Rampell, law schools across the country are using assorted formulae to bump up their recent students’ grades across the board, in order to increase their employment opportunities after graduation.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf somebody\u2019s paying $150,000 for a law school degree, you don\u2019t want to call them a loser at the end,\u201d Rampell quotes Stuart Rojstaczer, a former geophysics professor at Duke who now studies grade inflation, as saying. \u201cSo you artificially call every student a success.\u201d The official name the schools use for this process is the wonderful euphemism “grade reform.”<\/p>\n

Grade inflation and social promotion didn’t start in law schools, of course. It’s pandemic now throughout the K-12 system, and commonplace in the liberal arts, humanities, and social sciences. What’s unusual here is that it’s infected the study of law, heretofore considered a rigorous discipline. As Rampell writes, “Unlike undergraduate grading, which has drifted northward over the years because most undergraduate campuses do not strictly regulate the schoolwide distribution of As and Bs, law schools have long employed clean, crisp, bell-shaped grading curves.”<\/p>\n

\"College<\/a>

College Grade Inflation 1940-2008. Chart \u00a9 copyright 2008 by Stuart Rojstaczer.<\/p><\/div>\n

Not any more, it seems. As the charts accompanying “A History of College Grade Inflation”<\/a>\u00a0(a July 14, 2011 follow-up piece by Rampell) indicate, by Y2K the letter grade A had become the most frequent grade given to college students in the United States. Click here for the study by\u00a0Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy<\/a> on which Rampell based that story, plus other disheartening graphs.<\/p>\n

Kiss Those Curves Goodbye<\/strong><\/p>\n

Having witnessed this “northward drift” of grades as a teacher in both undergraduate and graduate liberal-arts programs over the past four decades, I can testify that it’s very real. And I’m willing to wager that, if this practice ever get traced to its origins in higher education, we will learn that it began in college-level studio art programs, and, even more specifically, in college-level photo programs, circa 1965. As I noted\u00a0in this blog last summer<\/a>,<\/p>\n

Post-secondary photo education is notoriously one big gut course, evidenced by the facts that nobody flunks photography and a GPA below A-minus has become unusual in most such programs. Social promotion, grade inflation, the overall lowering of the basketball hoops, are the norm. (Like the children of Lake Wobegon, all post-secondary photo students are above average.)\u00a0Over the past decade I\u2019ve guest-taught at two schools \u2014 one a BFA program in a university, the other an MFA program in an art school \u2014 that tacitly required me to grade all my students between A-plus and A-minus, lest they lose tuition remission and other financial perks, an imperative not disclosed to me until I turned in my initial grade sheets.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/a>I’d struck approximately that same note in a keynote address I delivered to\u00a0the Photo Imaging Education Association (PIEA)<\/a> Conference at the Sydney Convention Centre, Australia, on April 29, 2006:<\/p>\n

I believe that I err on the side of generosity in calling photo education a discipline. There’s little discipline involved in it, by any definition of the term. No one flunks photography, certainly not in fine-art photo programs. How could they? In the current environment for photography-as-art, there’s no right way to make photographic work, because there’s no wrong way to do so; there’s only pleasing your faculty’s taste patterns or failing to do so.<\/em><\/p>\n

As my former colleague Richard Kirstel used to say, “The difference between commercial photography and creative photography today is that the commercial photography has to be well done.” I can remember curator, critic, and editor Carol Squiers asserting, at a regional SPE conference in the 1980s, that the pomo photographers \u2014 Cindy Sherman et al \u2014 were gradually “bringing their work up to professional standards.” I can remember, in the same era, the director of the photo program at the Maryland Institute, College of Art boasting that 80 percent of their most recent crop of students had graduated cum laude. Neither he nor Ms. Squiers showed the slightest trace of ironic intent in their statements.<\/em> (Click here<\/a> for a PDF of that talk.)<\/p>\n

The Survey Not Taken<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Society<\/a>Here’s a survey that I guarantee you will never get undertaken by the Society for Photographic Education<\/a> \u2014 and whose results will never get published in the unlikely event that someone does undertake it.<\/p>\n

1. Over the past 10 years, in your BFA department of photography, how many students have you had working toward their degree in photography? How many taking photography as a minor, or part-time?<\/p>\n

2. Over the past 10 years, in your BFA department of photography, how many\u00a0times cumulatively have your faculty given students the grade of:<\/p>\n