Potatoes big and small

The academia story of the moment is about the professor who may or may not have been fired for giving an actor and known academic Renaissance Man a D for a class that the student-actor-writer-"Freaks-and-Geeks"-heartthrob may or may not have skipped for most of the semester. Let it be known, before I go any further, that I've never had JF in any of my classes, never so much as glimpsed him on the street, nor, to my knowledge, did he ever take a course in my department, or even in my school. I would estimate that maybe five of NYC's eight-plus million are in some way affiliated with the university in question, so it's not so surprising that our paths never crossed.

When I first read the story, in the Daily Mail of all places, I figured missed class is missed class, students who miss too much get bad grades, often according to departmental policy and independent of an individual instructor's feelings on the matter, and it seemed like there was more to the story that we weren't hearing. Again, I know as little about how the school in question operates as anyone, but... yes, it seemed like there's more going on, things of a small-potatoes-except-for-those-involved academic-politics nature, and the star's name has brought it all into the public eye. I couldn't begin to guess what's going on behind the scenes, let alone who's in the right.

The angle of this that interests me is that now another former professor of the actor in question is weighing in on Slate, in a way that kind of makes me lose faith in the entire enterprise. But, but, the second professor interjects, JF is so a good student! Now, as anyone who's ever been a student knows, sometimes you do well in one class but not another. Maybe some classes you find more engaging than others, for whatever reason, and in the others you're relatively zoned out. Maybe one class's requirements you find much simpler to meet than another's. Maybe you've been unfairly maligned by one instructor and unfairly lauded by another, who knows. The end result is that one instructor would say about you isn't what another would, which is why, come letter-of-recommendation time, you ask the instructors you impressed. It's not that individual students become radically different people in different classes, but it's also not as if there's this constant Student X, with identical performance across all courses. It would seem, then, that one instructor couldn't say much about how a student comes across in another instructor's class, in a different department, at a different institution. Yet that's precisely what Slate has published.

Isn't there supposed to be something like student-instructor confidentiality? Or is it totally OK to use a big-name student to garner sympathy for yourself, whether casting yourself as the adjunct crushed by the star-struck big-city university (when, if there is a larger story, there's no way that too will be brought to light), or the serious (if also pre-tenure) professor so devoted to his students that he dares take a stand and defend an especially famous one, and if this ends with his own name in a big mainstream publication, that's the price he must pay?