By my junior year this debate case was more stale than a dead horse stuffed with old chestnuts. But that didn't stop me from running it against increasingly inexperienced opponents. In the wise words of Vin the Retard, "A win's a win."
While I am almost entirely responsible for the case's overuse, you can blame James McDonnell and Seth Yohalem for coming up with the idea, which is based on a discussion in Tuesdays with Morrie, which I have yet to read. I have no respect for my elders.
The case was only called tight (it's not!) on two occasions, unsuccessfully of course. I ran it opp-choice once; they picked the wrong side.
Can you beat it?
The Case
We're taking you back in time to the Vietnam War and putting you in the position of a liberal college professor who is opposed to the war. The government has instituted a military draft, but college students are legally exempt from it. Some professors have decided to give their students all A's in order to prevent them from failing out and to protest the war. We think this is a bad form of protest. We propose that you give your students the grades they academically deserve.
I. Your Academic Obligations
- As a professor, academic integrity and effective education matter a lot to you, even if they're not your paramount concerns.
- Grades are only meaningful if they indicate academic merit. Rewarding success and failure equally undermines the grading system and has harmful consequences. Keep in mind that institutions will treat your grades as legitimate. Your students – some of whom don't even deserve a diploma – will have an unfair advantage over others in the grad school and job markets. They will take positions that others deserve and are presumably more qualified for.
- Grades motivate students to study and work; without them, you're simply less able to educate.
- Bad students will be attracted to your classes to get free A's (either after you announce your policy or after the word gets out). This harms the entire class' educational experience (class size, quality of discussion, etc.).
- Even if your grading policy only directly affects a few dozen students, it has important moral implications.
- No lives are saved on either side; there's a draft either way. The issue is whether your students should be saved at the expense of those who will be drafted in their place.
- On a basic moral level, college students don't deserve a second chance out of the draft when they haven't earned it. Student draft deferment is a privilege, not a birthright; students' lives shouldn't be given intrinsic preference over the lives of others. You shouldn't effectively use others as human shields for failing students who don’t deserve to be in college.
- Moreover, colleges now are largely socially and racially discriminatory. The people who will be sent to war in your students' place are more likely to be poor minorities who never even had a chance of getting into college. As a liberal, you should be particularly opposed to perpetuating such discrimination.
- One of the points of a random draft is for society to more equally bear the cost of war. But when college students are kept out of the war no matter what, their generally privileged parents won't have as much of an incentive to protest. People with clout won't be as fired up when the sons of the disadvantaged are dying for them, so policymakers can more easily justify a prolonged war. Don't perpetuate the war by further shielding elites from its reality.
- You need to appeal to the masses in order to change social consciousness. If you abandon your academic integrity and preach to the leftist choir, the bulk of society will write you off as an extremist. You should use your credibility as an academic to write to Congress, speak out, and join larger demonstrations. Don't become just another campus radical. Don't become fodder for the Right.
2 comments:
This is obviously only a response to some of the above arguments, but here's a suggestion.
My suspicion is that draft boards aren't so sensitive to the number of people that they get that they're likely to call up more people in response to the number of student exemptions that an individual professor could guarantee. Perhaps there's a threshold-if they end up getting fewer than a certain number, then they call up a lot more. But it's at least plausible that in most cases, more student deferments simply means fewer people being drafted, and no response by the draft board.
This is similar to the point sometimes made in discussions about vegetarianism that one person's eating beef a few times a week isn't likely to make a big enough impact on the overall demand for beef that any more cows would be killed if that one meat eater were instead a vegetarian.
If there's a similar dynamic going on in the draft case, then you can say that it's not really a choice of sending college students to the war OR sending uneducated, poor minorities who can't get deferments. The minorities will go anyway, so it's just a question of whether some college students also go.
Of course, you could try to make arguments about how this isn't an adequate response, because if all professors graded this way, then there really would be more non-college-students drafted, and you'd get more inequality, but no fewer people going to war overall. But I think universalizability arguments are tricky to make. In a round, they're usually capable of being responded to with flippant, dismissive claims like: "yeah, and if everybody went to the McDonalds on 42nd street, it would be extremely crowded and uncomfortable, and bad for everybody there. That doesn't make it wrong for me to go." I think it takes some sophistication to make universalizability arguments that distinguish between what the professor does and what we all do when we go to restaurants with finite seating capacity.
Of course, there are other arguments in the case. This is only a response to one of them.
Thanks for the comment.
My understanding, based on a little research I did during college, is that each draft board had a strict quota. Thus a board would go down the list of eligible draftees in its jurisdiction and call them up until it reached the magic number. Something I read implied that most, perhaps the vast majority, of deferments were known to boards beforehand, as deferments were typically requested and granted shortly after draft numbers (1-366, based "randomly enough" on birthday) were initially assigned. Of course, I'm sure that there were draftees who responded to being called up by obtaining deferments or otherwise seeking to be exempted. But I don't think these responses posed any unique logistical challenges compared to, say, men who were called up but failed their physicals. So I think there was a one-to-one tradeoff, or at least something very close to it, between student deferments and "replacement" draftees.
That said, I did, indeed, also make the universalization response that you preempt. Admittedly, it's a problematic argument. Assuming draft mechanics in accordance with your speculation, it suggests that the ideal outcome is for professors to enable as many extra deferments as they can without the draft board calling up more men in response. This makes the problem one of measurement (what total number of unearned A's would lead to the highest expected lives saved, accounting for risk aversion) and collective action (how to allocate the unearned A's among participating professors and classes), not one of moral principle.
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