Following the model set at several law schools, students at Oberlin College are pleading for leniency during final exams and the final grading period this fall semester in light of the grand jury decisions in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases and the shooting of Tamir Rice.
A petition has been circling around the school community President Marvin Krislov to suspend the standard grading system because students of color, especially black students, are at risk of failing.
“I would really like to see the normal grading system suspended for this semester and replaced with a no-fail mercy period. Administrators should require professors to exercise complete flexibility in what students are saying they can produce academically. Require that every professor listen to what their students are saying and if that means rather than writing a paper students instead meet with their professor to simply discuss in groups their paper topics or if tests are taken collectively with professors there are ways to make sure we are learning what we are supposed to be learning in ways that are not so taxing in times like this,” the petition reads.
“Students in this moment should have complete access to alternative modes of learning while we process what’s happening. Basically, no student especially black students and students of color should be failing a class this semester. A ‘C’ should be the lowest grade students can receive this semester. Professors should be required to work with students, who would otherwise be at risk of failing, to create alternate means of accessing knowledge.”
The petition has garnered more than 1,300 signatures, according to The Oberlin Review.
The Oberlin administration has already offered “more flexible considerations” in granting emergency incomplete requests for students struggling academically thanks to recent events, the Review reported, but students have criticized them for not doing more.
Student groups believe that since Oberlin has always been progressive on race issues — the college graduated its first Black student 19 years before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued — that they should be extra sensitive to the plight of students of color at this time.
Since the school as a whole wasn’t “doing enough,” students started turning to their professors to grant exemptions and leniency on a class by class basis.
“It has come to the attention of students that students of color, particularly Black students, who have suffered significant trauma over the past few weeks due to the Grand Jury decisions are not at all in a place to take their finals right now. I am not among these students, and as a white, middle-class person, I have to privilege [sic] of being able to step away from these events and put enough energy into schoolwork and finals to assure that I will pass my classes,” Della Kurzer-Zlotnick, an Oberlin student, wrote to her professor.
Kurzer-Zlotnick went on to compare the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases to Newtown and accused the president of not caring because it wasn’t white people who died.
Post by Della Kurzer-Zlotnick.
After the professor denied her request, she and other student launched a campaign to shame the professor and Oberlin administration for not doing more.
Megan Bautista, a senior at Oberlin, told the Review that this lack of action by the administration adds to the systemic racism people of color have to deal with.
Students are working on a list of demands beyond exam exemptions to present to the administration now. These include “instituting weighted referenda for students of color, creating central spaces for deans to meet with students on a weekly basis, and giving students the power to hire and fire the position of the Dean of Students,” the student paper said.
“People are really sensing that this is necessary,” said Bautista. “The administration would be insane to leave this up to the professors.”
