Last week, The Voice and THE HOYA (“GU Investigates Academic Culture,” Aug. 31, 2007, A1) published a link to the report of the Committee on Intellectual Life. That leak has certainly sparked some vigorous thinking and conversation in Hoya circles! Over the past week, I have heard about that report from many current students and a surprising number of my classmates in the Class of 1982 and my sister’s classmates in the Class of 1986.

All of these report-related conversations eventually came around to pointing out the “Alice in Wonderland” undertones of the report’s driving dynamic. It goes something like this: The report documents that faculty members, the designated keepers of the flame when it comes to the university’s academic standards, are deeply concerned about a perceived decline in the quality of intellectual life at Georgetown. Admissions statistics are cited, anecdotes are shared, student-reported impressions are highlighted — all to bolster claims of intellectual decay or at least increasing intellectual indifference at Georgetown over at least the last decade.

Up to that point, most folks I have talked to were concerned but grateful that Georgetown is both brave and confident enough to tell itself hard truths about itself. The capacity for such self-critique is, after all, a necessary component of human growth, whether for an individual or a collective enterprise such as a university. That the faculty is willing to raise this yellow flag, my Hoya friends say, speaks to the health of the university’s academic enterprise.

But there’s more. The report laments the diminishment of student intellectual curiosity and academic work ethic at Georgetown over the last decade. At the same time, it acknowledges that grades, the one and only agreed-upon, lasting measure by which faculty register their assessment of the academic and intellectual accomplishments of students, have gone up over the same period.

A classmate e-mailed me asking, “Is the Mad Hatter working in the Registrar’s office?”
To its credit, the report does note this unsettling discrepancy between alleged intellectual decline and documented grade increases, but it does so in muted tones. Grade inflation is not unique to Georgetown and God knows that it has myriad causes, but all the kvetching in the world will not motivate students to work harder or better or more passionately if they can earn high (and rising) grades with what they and their professors acknowledge is less effort or fervor.

My own sense is that the intellectual climate and mindset that most Hoyas accept as the status quo could use some work. There is an intellectual and academic flabbiness to many of our students. They’re smart, all right; they wouldn’t be here if they weren’t. But their intelligence is the clever, action-seeking, crackling sort that is easily distracted by the swirl of the world, be it politics or diplomacy, business or policy-making. It is no accident that they came to college in Washington, D.C., and not in Ithaca or Durham or South Bend.

Most Hoyas arrive at Georgetown already knowing how to parcel out their smarts and energies to satisfy the demands of the various interests that pull at them. They quickly come to believe that the name of the college game (like the name of the high school game) is grades and not the quality of their intellectual life. If the Intellectual Life Committee’s report is on target, professors’ grading decisions tell them they are right.
There are aspects of our students’ academic flabbiness that can be addressed by residence life and student affairs and the deans’ offices. We can tweak around the edges of the culture in which our students live, and we should — we are not powerless in the face of the challenges that face us as educators.

But the fact will always remain that Georgetown students are motivated largely by grades, regardless of the content of the curriculum. Such is the nature of the beast that high-powered American universities attract. Our students will rise to the standards set for them, or if they don’t, they will respond to the resulting grades as stimuli. Maybe they will pursue too many internships and travel too much or be distracted by drinking and politics, with the result that they cannot perform to our intellectual and academic standards. In that case, the rude awakening of low grades serves as a powerful reminder of the task at hand. As the report itself notes, the “gentleman’s B+” motivates no one.
It’s true that low grades will provoke whining and outrage from students, blistering entries on ratemyprofessor.com and even hostile phone calls or e-mails (some even threatening lawsuits) from parents — my colleagues and I deal with such joys every week, and I suspect some professors do too. But those are among the pitfalls of the usually rewarding vocation we educators have chosen!

Taking stock of the culture in which our undergraduates live and study and grow, I don’t see any motivator other than grades that a university like Georgetown can use to focus the lion’s share of its students’ energy and attention on the life of the mind.
I wish things were different. I wish that the love of learning and the thrill of pushing back the frontier of ignorance were enough to convince students to wrap the best of their energies around intellectual discovery and the contest of ideas. But I also wish that crème brulée weren’t fattening.

Fr. Ryan Maher, S.J., is an assistant dean for Georgetown College. He can be reached at rjm27@georgetown.edu. AS THIS JESUIT SEES IT… appears every other Friday, with Maher and Fr. James Schall, S.J., alternating as writers.