Managing the turmoil that arises from the imminent collapse of one’s professional sector, and perhaps one’s country, does not leave a lot of time for thinking about grading. And while two or three ideas about grading occurred to me this week—ideas I would very much like to explore in writing—I simply haven’t had time to pursue them.

Instead, I’ve mostly been thinking and talking with colleagues about how to respond to the DEI legislation that is immediately forthcoming in the state of Mississippi, as well as other troubling developments—like the fact that Mississippi libraries have been ordered to delete academic research on race and gender from their databases.

If you, like me, are concerned about government censorship in your classroom, funding cuts to lifesaving research, international students and scholars being detained unjustly and without warning by ICE, or other related threats, I encourage you to check out the resources created by AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom—including their Substack newsletter, Academic Freedom on the Line:

Academic Freedom on the Line

This newsletter examines academic freedom, its role in democratic society, and what is lost when academic institutions face politicized attacks on institutional autonomy and shared governance. Views expressed are those of the authors, and not the AAUP.

By Isaac Kamola

And if you, like me, have no time to think about grading right now but would very much like to do so in the near future, I encourage you to register for this year’s Grading Conference, the flagship event of the Center for Grading Reform. The virtual conference takes place each June and is a great place to learn from colleagues all over the country (and the world) about how they’re practicing alternative grading in their classrooms.

Thinking about grading and thinking about how to resist attacks on higher education may seem like two different things. But I think they are intimately connected. Ultimately, advocates for alternative grading and advocates for higher ed in general share at least one goal: a world in which every student and teacher, no matter what their background or identity, has an equitable chance to pursue the kinds of educational questions that interest them; to access the support and resources they need to thrive professionally and personally; to feel welcomed at our institutions; and to live lives filled with deep meaning, purpose, and learning rather than with transactions, treadmills, and precarity.

Here is a true story:

After writing the above, I was planning to end the post with a quotation about education and fascism that I saw earlier this week on social media. It was shared by Nick Covington, co-founder and director of the Human Restoration Project, and it was taken from John Dewey and Goodwin Watson’s “The Forward View: A Free Teacher in a Free Society,” published in 1937.

Like a good scholar, however, I never share quotes without first verifying them myself. Unable to locate this particular passage in an online text, I trudged off to the library to consult the collected works of John Dewey. After finding the right volume, I was able to identify the quotation on page 537:

“The years immediately ahead will be characterized by struggle...It will require struggle to secure the necessary freedom to think about the meaning of these facts. The most bitter struggle will come when teachers begin to act in the light of these essential facts and meanings...If there be any teachers who chose their profession because they imagined that in it they might stand securely aside from the turmoil of battle for power, they will probably find the next decade or several decades very dismaying.

A free education is incompatible with fascism. Education is likely to be one of the great battlegrounds upon which is waged an intense and desperate struggle for power.”

It’s good, right? I thought it would strike just the right tone to end this post.

Satisfied with the veracity of the quotation, I was about to close the book and move on when I ran my eyes over the next paragraph, just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. I was immediately brought up short by the following sentences:

“It may give both guidance and courage to teachers who must participate in the imminent struggle, if we turn in imagination to the period after the smoke of battle has lifted. Let us suppose that the forces of education, cooperative labor, and the common people have been successful not only in preserving but also in extending democracy. What kind of society can we anticipate and what kind of teacher will be needed?”

I was intrigued enough to read on. In fact, I abandoned my to-do list for the next half-hour, sat right down on the floor of the library, on the worn carpet in the middle of the stacks, and read the whole chapter.

It struck me, as I read, how infrequently I do this—walk to the library, find a book, sit, and read it. It struck me that few, if any, of my students ever do this, or have ever done it, or will ever do it. It struck me that an AI reading assistant could have located my quotation for me in less than a heartbeat and delivered it up to me on a little digital platter, perfectly punctuated and completely devoid of any meaningful context.

Gazing up at the many multicolored volumes of Dewey’s work on the shelves, I thought about how crypto poster-boy Sam Bankman-Fried once said, “I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that...I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”

I thought about how funding cuts all over the US are decimating public libraries and about how many books in those libraries have been banned, are being banned, or will be banned. I thought about how much academic research, how much new and crucial knowledge, will be lost to the current crisis.

I thought about how in the dismal future envisaged for us by tech bros and fascists, there likely wouldn’t even be a library to go to—or at least not one that includes John Dewey, progressive thinker, and the authors of thousands of dusty volumes that are taken off the shelves only occasionally. I thought about how, if I could continue to work in education at all, I would probably be doing something much more “efficient” and “productive,” like running 1,500 student papers through my AI grading machine or programming chatbot tutors to make sure they’re equipping students with workforce-ready skills. Or maybe I would be purging my course materials of any reference to “divisive concepts” or advising faculty, in my role at the teaching center, about how to teach the biology of sex or the history of slavery without running afoul of the law—that is, if the teaching center even existed.

It’s hard to say what, exactly, this future would hold. But I don’t think it would include sitting on the floor of the library, in a beam of sunlight, reading John Dewey for no good reason at all.

I won’t recount what Dewey and Watson said in the little piece I read yesterday afternoon. I wouldn’t deprive you of the pleasure of trudging to your own library to read it for yourself. But I will share with you two final quotations—ones that, I think, leave us in a better place than the quotation that initially drew me to the chapter. The first, coming near the end, imagines the future that could come to pass once “the smoke of battle has lifted”:

“We may look forward, therefore, to a society in which teachers are fairly secure and truly free. We can hope that they will be encouraged to attack professional problems in a creative spirit. We forsee the kind of administration which exalts the free and intelligent personality and does not depend upon rules, regulations, formal procedures, and prescriptions. Under these conditions teaching can become the high art that it rarely is today. Teachers individually and their organizations can develop standards for professional work and can work in accord with those standards without being hampered by external worries, limited economic resources, impossible working conditions, military-minded executives, and popular misunderstanding of the function and work of the schools.”

After imagining this future, the authors go on to note that it is, at least in part, within our own hands:

“The free society is being made—or defeated—by present practices. We have described a possible education of tomorrow, not with the desire to have teachers yearn for that bright day but rather with the hope that this picture may serve as a criterion in the evaluation of present activities. What we do today in revising a curriculum, studying psychology, preparing a lesson, educating a teacher, addressing a group of parents, or passing a resolution in our organization of teachers will take us a little nearer to, or remove us farther from, the practices which have here been envisioned for a free teacher in a free society. What teachers do as citizens in supporting or failing to support the movements which endeavor to protect or to extend democracy may also contribute, even more than usual classroom practices, to the realization of a better society and consequently a better education.”

May we all take Dewey and Watson’s advice to envision the education of tomorrow and to let that vision inform the actions we take today. May we all make choices to protect and extend democracy everywhere we can, every day we can, for as long as we can. May we all, one day, be free teachers in a free society.