I am starting to believe that there must be an inverse relationship between the blunt stupidity of an idea and its longevity as a cultural meme. I’m not talking about Obama’s birth certificate and the Pentagon conspiracy to bomb the World Trade Center, although those memes seem to endlessly circle around deep stinking pools of stupidly. Those are bad enough but they are just side-shows in the long run.

I’m talking about ideas that seem to quietly persist against all logic and across decades. When Reagan was elected more than 30 years ago he made his plans very clear. “Trickle-down” economics meant a sweeping redistribution of wealth from the poor, working, and middle classes, to the rich. If we give them our money, Regan said, they will give a trickle back. It’s made us all poorer but it’s an idea that just won’t die.

That’s what they did, too, as recent statistics have shown. Still, the Republican party and its “base” keep repeating the idea as if it were new and as if it were fine to give everything to the rich and then be happy with the trickle that comes back. There are lots of parallels in academia, too, dumb-as-hammer memes that seem to persist against all odds. One of the worst and dumbest academic ideas is the student evaluation.

Every year or so someone in the education press will publish yet another article explaining the “grain of truth“  that we should all glean from student evaluations. We can’t do anything about them, we are told, and they will be used to assess our work,  so we need to try to see what they might tell us.  Never mind that they have no legitimacy as data and that they can and will be used for the usual sorts of political pettiness.

I hate to go all ad hominem, but if I am, especially when it comes to someone like Harold Bloom (see, “Harold Bloom by the Numbers“) , I have to go for T.S. Elliot: “We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men / Leaning together / Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!” It’s not so much Bloom’s freakish careerism, if not greed, that’s so bothersome, although that’s disturbing enough.

What gets my goat is that Bloom– and the journalist, Carlin Romano– seem so blissfully unconcerned about the ways that Bloom’s ideas reflect the self-serving decadence of academic intellectual work at this particular time in U.S. history. “This is cactus land / Here the stone images / Are raised, here they receive / The supplication of a dead man’s hand / Under the twinkle of a fading star.”

Romano calls Bloom an “unsteady Midwest autocrat… oblivious as his ritual pronouncements fall on deaf ears.” Fair enough. What’s disturbing is that way that Bloom’s status seems to excuse him from complicity in the long list of problems– from labor exploitation to administrative salaries to rising tuition– facing academia. Isn’t there a connection between these problems and the old autocrats like Bloom?

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If you took a picture of a classroom at the time of the War of 1812, a professor once pointed out to me, it would look roughly the same as a classroom today: teacher in front, a blackboard, students in chairs. Maybe our classrooms have white boards, or some sort of electronic board; perhaps there’s a computer on the podium and a screen that drops down. In any case, the modern classroom has changed far less than, say, transportation over the last two centuries.

Then as now we had grades, yet we know that grades are not good ways to guide learning. Most grades– even if derived from multiple choice testing– are unreliable. Still we continue to have this pre-modern urge to rank and sort in simple, easy to comprehend ways. Grades can be cruel too, which is why we have grade inflation as well as the perennial complaints about grade inflation.
An authentic assessment of learning is a complex portrait not a letter or number.

‘“It’s generally recognized that an A by itself is not very meaningful,” said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. “Giving statistical context to assist recipients of a transcript in understanding the grades is definitely helpful.’” (A Quest to Explain What Grades Really Mean) Context is necessary but not sufficient. Grades are old, worn out technology; they need to be replaced.