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The Boston Globe Campus Insider Column

Posted on: Monday, 13 February 2006, 15:00 CST

By Marcella Bombardieri and Sarah S, The Boston Globe

Feb. 12--AT HARVARD, MORE CONCERN FOR TOP GRADES: Four years after Harvard professors agreed among themselves to try to crack down on grade inflation, they seem to have made no progress.

An annual report has found that grades are again at all-time high, although the upward creep has been small. In 2004-05, 23.7 percent of all grades were A grades, compared with 23.1 percent the previous year. (That doesn't count A-minuses, which were 25 percent in 2004-05, slightly below the 25.2 percent the previous year.)

The dean of the college, Benedict Gross, sent out a letter to professors on the topic, saying that "grade compression continues to be a concern."

The problem is that individual professors have no incentive to give lower grades and that some believe that Harvard students are so much stronger today that they deserve more A grades than did previous generations.

The administration did sharply reduce the percentage of students who can graduate with Latin honors, but it has done little else. Gross said the college had made a strategic decision to put off grade inflation until after a review of the undergraduate curriculum.

Perhaps as soon as next fall, Gross said, he would put together a faculty committee to consider what to do about grade inflation. He said he has been impressed by Princeton's new policy, which asks departments to limit the number of A grades they offer.

GARAGE BLUES: Last September, prospects seemed good for a repair for the parking garage at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, which serves as the foundation of five campus buildings and is a crucial space for the commuter school.

Governor Mitt Romney pledged millions for its repair, and paid a visit to the campus and traipsed through the dimly lighted structure, eyeballing a ceiling dotted with hanging wires and large areas cordoned off with bright-orange tape and warnings of dangerous construction areas.

But that money never materialized; the proposal died in committee.

Now the school is seeking to move forward with repairs but finding progress difficult.

The UMass president, Jack Wilson, announced last week that the system had to pledge to guarantee the cost of the repairs -- which some estimates put at $100 million -- just to secure a study of the problems. The engineering study now is under way, and a report is expected in the spring.

System officials said they are still actively seeking the money from the state.

The UMass-Boston chancellor, Michael Collins, said the school had made "progress in understanding the challenge."

Moreover, UMass officials emphasized, the garage does not appear to be a danger for faculty, staff, and students. (In the fall of 2002, a 2- by 3-foot chunk of concrete crashed from the upper level of the garage to its lower level, leaving a hole now covered with steel plates. No one was hurt, but the school was forced to rope off 150 parking spaces for safety.)

The UMass-Boston deputy chancellor, Andrew O'Brien, said there have been no additional incidents.

"It's all shored up," he said. "Someone is down there inspecting it on a regular basis."

INVESTMENT PROTESTS: The movement to divest from companies that do business with Sudan is taking off on college campuses. So much so that two of the recent "divestment" victories involved schools that actually weren't investing any of their endowments directly in the companies.

Last month, Amherst College trustees passed a resolution that declared that they would "divest" from 19 companies, but went on to note that they weren't invested in them. So that meant, the resolution said, that they would not invest in the future in any of those companies. Beyond that, they declared that the school would try to sway the managers of its indirect investments, such as mutual funds, to divest, by communicating its opposition to the companies, according to the college.

The hope is that it will lead the funds to dump the companies from their portfolios altogether, which means pulling a lot more money out of the companies than any one school could do alone, said Amos Irwin, the Amherst student who began the campus campaign.

In November, Dartmouth College trustees voted not to invest in six companies linked to Sudan, none of which they were directly invested in at the time.

Two other schools have pulled money out of these companies: Almost a year ago, Harvard University became the first school in the nation to divest from companies that do business with Sudan, but limited its move to one company, PetroChina, even though it owned stock in at least two other companies linked with Sudan. Last summer, Stanford University divested from four companies.

By Marcella Bombardieri and Sarah Schweitzer. E-mail tips to campus@globe.com. Campus Insider and the Globe's Ask The Teacher column run on alternate Sundays in the City & Region section.

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Source: The Boston Globe

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