DEAR EDITOR
Dear Editor The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words. Harrington I want to thank The New Leader for Robert Lekachman's...
...To give someone a higher grade than has been earned produces a state of "complacent ignorance...
...The "A" is now a debased coin...
...Instead of being able to "argue" and "counter" an instructor's theories, students often sit so silently that when one of my former professors at Hunter College drew a response he exclaimed: "It is really good to hear another voice...
...Justice is definitely on Harrington's side: You cannot justifiably tax the poor and minorities in New York and have those taxes finance "education primarily for the nonpoor and the white...
...Allow me to concentrate on one of them: the subject of open admissions...
...Harrington admits that he is an easy grader...
...At [east in athletic competition gold is still gold, silver is silver, and bronze is bronze...
...New York City Eliot Kestenbaum Despite Robert Lekachman's encomium on Michael Harrington's autobiography, I am troubled by several features of The Long-Distance Runner...
...Perhaps, if we take those inflated grades as evidence...
...Class sessions earmarked for discussion are quickly converted into explanations of the written material...
...They are like skilled surgeons who have to settle exclusively for setting splints...
...I thought 1 was talking to myself...
...At the Queens College campus Harrington is able to teach Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, yet many of his colleagues, particularly at other City University campuses, have students who simply cannot make sense of ? he most lucid textbook or document...
...Bronxville, N.Y...
...To this 1 would juxtapose Max Scheler's remark that true tragedy arises "when the idea of 'justice' appears to be leading to I he destruction of higher values...
...The Long-Distance Runner, is richly deserved...
...Harrington "understands the anger and frustration" of City University faculty members who cannot employ their extensive knowledge and leaching skill...
...Harrington I want to thank The New Leader for Robert Lekachman's "Struggles of an American Socialist" (NL, July 25...
...He sympathizes with but does not really participate in their frustration...
...Harrington has spent his life attempting 10 clarify the outer world for himself and his readers...
...J. Mitchell Morse, the literary critic, has reminded us that "Plato's Eleatic stranger called complacent ignorance the worst deformity of the soul, since it leads us io think we are saying something when we are saying nothing...
...And what happens to those who possess genuine excellence...
...Melvtn L. Rogers...
...Theirs are not voices we can afford to lose...
...Something is very wrong when instructors with the ability to transmit their special knowledge have little opportunity to do so...
...Yet inflated grades can impede one's attempts to clarify the inner world...
...thus the instructor ends up telling students what they should have learned from their own reading...
...Is Harrington nevertheless right that "the experiment has worked, warts and all...
...His warm tribute to Michael Harrington on the occasion of the publication of Harrington's autobiography...
...But we should recognize that some instructors, out of a sense of "generosity" or compassion, give students much higher grades than they actually deserve...
...Many teachers simply do not have students like Harrington's "labor activists," whom he properly lauds as stimulating...
...As one who has for many years benefited from reading their books and their writings in The New Leader and elsewhere, I fervently hope Michael Harrington and Robert Lekachman will continue to prevail in their battles against cancer...
...Both men have been engaged in different, but often overlapping, aspects of the endless struggle to improve the quality of American society, and particularly the lot of those at the bottom of our socioeconomic structure...
...No, grades do not define human worth or exhaustively define one's knowledge, but they can tell the student, at a moment in time, what he has accomplished in a particular course of study...
Vol. 71 • October 1988 • No. 17
