Combat Pay for Professors?
Perils of interrogation by terror

I have been caught up in getting ready for Christmas and caring for my Mom, who got an "emergency face-lift" as the result of a battle with a bedside table that left a nasty forehead gash. Thus I have fallen down on my blogging, but had to take a break to post excerpts from Rosa Brooks' LATimes editorial, Grading on the terrorist curve . While I was still teaching at the university, I detested grading with a passion that led to early retirement. However, I never timagined that irritating chore could also be dangerous.

ON MONDAY, I'll be giving a final exam to 80 law students, and judging from their e-mail messages, they're worried about grades. But this term, I'm even more worried about their grades than they are.

That's because the Washington Post this week revealed yet another casualty of the Bush administration's "rule of law/what rule of law?" approach to fighting terrorism:
Among those detained and secretly "rendered" to a third country for interrogation was "an innocent college professor who had given [an] Al Qaeda member a bad grade."

The background here is that the CIA seems to be having a little problem with what the agency terms "erroneous renditions." That's when you pick up an innocent guy and — oops! — send him off to a foreign country for some of that "enhanced interrogation" stuff.

[ . . . . ]

It appears that U.S. intelligence agents at some point picked up a guy they identified as an Al Qaeda member. He was duly interrogated (you guess how). And when interrogators demanded that he cough up the names of other terrorists still at large, the suspect got revenge by rattling off a list of everyone who'd ever annoyed him, including one of his old college professors, who had really burned him up by giving him a bad course grade.

This is the kind of news calculated to send chills up a professor's spine. The law school where I teach employs a grading curve, so giving low grades to some students is inevitable. But if one of the students who gets a bad grade from me ends up as a terrorism suspect in the hands of the, ahem, authorities, how long will it take before he fingers me? Because I'm not keen on experiencing rendition and enhanced
interrogation firsthand, I'm contemplating the only thing possible to protect myself: asking any terrorists in my class to kindly identify themselves to me immediately, so I can be sure to give them a good grade.

But there are a couple of wrinkles in this plan. Because the government seems unable to avoid making errors, practically anyone might someday end up being suspected of terrorism, which makes it hard to know who ought to be given a good grade. Anyway, my law school insists on anonymous grading: Exams are identified only by number, not by student name. I can't think of any way around that one.