DE-BUNKED

To the Editors of The Crimson:

That was a cute little editorial on "Bunk" in your May 22 edition. Unfortunately for the truth in the matter, it was also ignorant.

(a) The History Department did not announce on Sunday, May 20, or ever, that any of its students did not deserve a degree. Nobody in fact announced anything. What happened was that your reporter, with a little help from his friends, found out some details that the Department and the particular students involved consider confidential, and you published them.

(b) The question is not whether anybody "deserves" a degree. The question is whether a student has fulfilled all the Department's requirements for a degree, one of which is to pass a general examination in History.

(c) You evidently know nothing about "untenured academics" in general, whom you scorn now as suffering "the natural (innate?) desire... to prove their scholarly machismo," though you champion them when they side with students against flabby old tenured academics. You admit your ignorance here when you admit that "probably... perhaps" you know what we did. You certainly know nothing about the assistant professors on the board of examiners this year, none of whom you have interviewed to detect their propensity to machismo. As chairman of the board and a professor, I can testify to two facts: one is that all our final decisions on the failures were unanimous; the other is that no one could have pushed or tricked me into agreeing to a decision in these cases that I thought was wrong. Maybe you had a flabbier professor in mind.

In short, without any information about our discussions, with only the breeziest excuse for reflection, you just guessed about what we did. Your guess would be offensive if it were not silly.

(d) No one but you has said that the board changed its standards for grading, which you could not know. In fact it did not change its standards, "abruptly" or at all.

(e) What did previous general examinations lead students to expect? Do you really know? Maybe it led them to expect that everyone passed, so that some did not study, and therefore failed. I do not know what they expected, and I would not say in public or in private until I asked the students themselves. For you to assume you know is crass speculation.

(f) Neither the Department nor Dean Whitlock can change the grades on the examinations. Maybe either or the Faculty itself could "overrule" the board. This would be a retroactive reform in the Department's requirements for a degree.

(g) Passable performances in courses over four years keep a student in school. They do not in themselves constitute a claim to a degree, in any department that I know. The general examinations in History are to test whether after four years of study the student can give passable answers not on History courses, in which there is no degree, but on the field of concentration, History as such, in which the student is a candidate for a degree.

If you are lucky, editorials like "Bunk" will get you jobs like Ziegler's. You have to know something to write for the Real Paper, the Washington Post, or Resist. John Womack, Jr.   Professor of History