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Professor Refused to Inflate Grades, Make Class Easier at Historically Black College — So He Was Fired

Spelman College in Atlanta is the oldest historically black private liberal arts college for women in the United States. That designation carries a certain amount of prestige — or it should, that is.

However, a former assistant professor of economics at Spelman told “Fox & Friends” on Thursday that he was fired for refusing to offer his economics students easier work or inflate their grades on assignments.

Tenure-track faculty member Kendrick Morales said the college raised the students’ grades, anyway — and subsequently let him go.

They definitely applied some pressure on me to raise grades above what I thought was reasonable, which I thought was totally against what I was supposed to do. I thought I was responsible for setting academic standards and making sure that the grades and degrees the school was conferring actually held its [sic] value.

“They didn’t give me any kind of warning,” Morales said shortly after he was terminated. Here’s more:

The Academic Freedom Alliance—a group that supports faculty free expression, including through raising legal funds and promoting the Princeton Principles for a Campus Culture of Free Inquiry, which is supported by many political conservatives—issued a news release last week calling for Morales’s reinstatement. It noted it had sent a Nov. 12 letter to Spelman president Helene D. Gayle.

“If the grading is done pursuant to an honest evaluation, sanctioning a professor for grading students too rigorously amounts to punishing him or her for being truthful about the quality of the students’ work—that is, punishing the instructor for fulfilling the institutional and fiduciary duty to honestly pursue truth,” the AFA’s letter said. “Giving students grades that a competent instructor has concluded, using his or her professional judgment, are not merited is a form of intellectual fraud.”

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