RFs Should Apply To All Students

To the Editors:

Booker Peek’s letter in the Review last week voices complaint over a proposed college policy to record Fs on students’ transcripts. He hinges the argument largely on racism and its corollary disadvantages. It is true, Mr. Peek, that racism still remains hidebound to American culture. While, in the present, it is a less valuable device for explaining subpar black educational performance than say, poverty or ghettoization, those two conditions owe much to the legacy of slavery, and the case can be made that limited forms of educational affirmative action during school could offer some benefits. But when do black students begin being judged in the same arena as everyone else? Your letter would seem to suggest never; that we would at every turn produce new caveats to justify special assistance for needy blacks.
I say at the university level, colleges should be encouraged, but not mandated, to give a chance to a student who is perhaps not well enough prepared for a place like Oberlin, but could make it with hard work. You say, “The motion seeks to impose Fs on students’ permanent transcripts.” Another way of saying this might be, students will get the grades they get. Continuing, “the College should not impose any additional disadvantages upon them should they regrettably get an F in a class…” Who are these phantom students on whom the college is imposing? Could they be the people who regrettably earned an F by not doing their work, or not going to the class all together? Having missed an above average amount of classes during college, I can say that it isn’t without work that one earns an F. You have to be steadfast, too many teachers will broker a compromise C- with the unscrupulous student who might in haste hand them a piece of paper with some amount of writing on it.
Finally, “some students (black, white, others) might get an F or two in their first or second year but go on to do quite well later, BUT the F will forever follow them.” Well good for them. But why, if grades are meant to be one evaluation of a student’s academic life, should we exclude data some find unsavory? Is the goal, Mr. Peek, simply to have black students graduate with unblemished transcripts, or is it rather, to have black students along with the rest of the student body strive to earn grades they can be proud of and live down their failures through accomplishment, not erasure.

–George Balgobin
Philadelphia