Saw this over at Firehand’s place and decided to expound a little more.
In today’s installment of how to give higher education another black eye: some faculty at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill have decided to try their hand at blackmail. The university declines to name them but over 760 UNC faculty and staff signed a petition calling for amnesty for students, faculty, and staff who were arrested or suspended.
Their goal: the re-instatement of fifteen suspended students who got froggy at the Pro-Hamas protests on campus.
Their method: Punishing the rest of the student body by withholding grades for the semester (or at least those students who were unlucky enough to have these asshats as instructors).
But here’s a pretty huge disconnect that these faculty don’t seem to realize because they are ignorant of the ramifications of their actions. As pointed out by the Chancellor of UNC, NR grades will prevent students from graduating, will prevent them from going up in classification (Sophomore to Junior for example), will jeopardize their athletic eligibility with the NCAA, will impede their progress by preventing registration into classes if the NR graded class was a pre-req, could impact job searches and graduate school applications. Additionally, NR grades might automatically flip to ‘F’s if they are not resolved within a certain timeframe or stay on the student record forever.
Can you imagine if all of a particular student’s instructors are participating in this? The student would have an entire semester of NRs. Which does not look good.
In a joint statement to The Federalist, UNC-Chapel Hill Provost Chris Clemens and Graduate School Dean Beth Mayer-Davis confirmed the anonymous report posted on X.
“We are hearing concerns from students whose instructors have informed them they will withhold grades as part of a protest,” they said. “These students depend on the timely submission of their grades for graduation, jobs, and athletic eligibility, and it is part of the required duties of all faculty and graduate TAs to submit grades by the registrar deadlines.”
The administrators said, “The provost’s office will support sanctions for any instructor who is found to have improperly withheld grades, but [it] is our hope we can resolve this matter amicably and without harm to students.”
UNC faced immediate controversy over faculty threats to withhold grades in solidarity with pro-Palestinian demonstrators, with users on X demanding officials fire instructors participating in the pressure campaign. The school refused to reveal the names of those involved.
I hope that UNC’s ‘solution’ is not to cave to this stupidity. They can fire the lot of them and access to the Learning Management System to pull grades from there and enter them. They can also choose to just give everyone a passing grade or a pass/no pass (which has its own headaches and is not optimal).
I’d imagine that the students affected by this attempted blackmail would have actionable cause, especially if they are not allowed to graduate and thus miss out on jobs, or if they can’t do internships or lose their athletic eligibility. Ideally, they should be able to sue the faculty members individually.
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