Professor Refused to Inflate Grades, Make Class Easier at Historically Black College

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.”

Even with the inflated grades, Morales told Fox's Lawrence Jones he calculated that 44 percent of the class would fail his class. He admitted that the series of events threw him for a loop — and he's now wondering if a career in academics is still the right path for him to follow.

I thought, in terms of going for an academic position, that I would be able to have autonomy and not have administrators kind of meddle with grades and meddle with the incentive structure that I was trying to put in place. I'm not really sure if it's viable for me to continue as an academic.

My advice: Oh, hell no — get out of there as fast as you can, Mr. Morales — if you haven't already done so.

You can watch the segment here.

Former Atlanta professor says he was fired for refusing to change students' grades | https://t.co/jNMFlgiLLf Does this mean Spelman College Diploma's aren't worth the paper or ink they used to print them?
— Martin K (@cmbcowboy) January 11, 2024

Fox News Digital followed up with Spelman to ask why Morales was fired — and received a ridiculous word-salad response:

At the heart of the Spelman College experience is the academically rigorous program we offer our students. Meaningful and effective classroom engagement is the hallmark of a Spelman education.
The College, its administrators, and faculty exercise appropriate judgment in the delivery of our learning activities in order to maintain consistency across Spelman’s campus.
Spelman College has reviewed this matter and has no further comment on the opinions of this former faculty member.

In other words, every word that Morales told "Fox & Friends" was true.

So, here's a question: If Morales was indeed terminated because he refused to inflate students' grades and make the class in question easier, was his academic freedom as a professor violated?