A Catch-22 It's Hard to Miss: C's Get Degrees and Affinity Bias

 In college, I once met a straight A student. She was very serious and diligent about her work, knew how to keep the perfect course load, and would often cry when she was scraping too close to a B. I still remember her fondly, as she had a very good understanding of her time and energy budget. However, I do remember one thing she said to me that sticks out, “You’re really brave going into STEM.” This was back before I relegated my cognitive neuroscience degree to a minor in favor of philosophy after suffering from burnout in addition to actually and genuinely loving philosophy more. I never asked her what she meant by that.

I was not a straight C student, in fact I averaged A’s and B’s until I had to take a depression leave — twice. I double majored while working multiple jobs, and I didn’t have anyone teaching me about the impossibility of that from an energy economics standpoint. I’m not afraid to talk about that — student burnout and depression are real, and I wish more young people knew about it before it has the massive effect it did on my life. Unfortunately, these withdraws do not score well in college. At the time, most of my understanding of counseling was that it was “baloney” and that just dealing with what one was given and toughing it out was the way to succeed. It’s taken me five or so years to slowly unpack those beliefs for the self-sabotage they are and throw them away. Nowadays, I swear on mental health practice, affirmation, and prevention like the bible. The generosity it lends in the academic community is unparalleled — nowadays I can’t possibly understand a campus that does not see a direct link between student success and prevalence/accessibility of counseling.

Let’s talk about what C’s gets degrees means. When someone says C’s get degrees, they’re saying that even if you just scrape by, you can still get a degree. It is a way to denigrate people who graduated in favor of those who — generally speaking — were not working, had familial and community support (were in a fraternity or sorority), and had ample access to resources it took to succeed (excellent health care, food, housing stability, healthy roommates, excellent and supportive teachers, etc.) On average, except in the exceptional and highly worthy case, it is a classist argument. And even in the highly worthy case, this isn’t something we should demand from people. Surviving and thriving under fire doesn’t mean that is something everyone should do. It simply means this individual is powerful and exceptional and deserves their due in that regard.

The problem, however, is not with the people who pass with all C’s. The problem is when C culture creates an affinity bias. In the case where there are exceptional students without withdraws or C’s or whatever organic chem or linear algebra grades originally whooped us (in addition to being in the lower end of resource accessibility) they face an uphill battle of people who do not feel affinity to their success. And this, too, is unfair.

Let’s talk about this. First, when someone is a C (excellence-ambivalent) student, we can assume that they do not have the analytical excellence of someone who consistently earned all A’s (excellence-committed) without outside influence. They didn’t budget their time, energy, course-load, calorie intake, social influence, or whatever it is well enough to come out excelling at everything. We can assume that, for the most part, their ability to do these come from either relevant exposure (aka, a parent who is a teacher at a prestigious university) or predisposition (the person simply has a good sense of temporal, material balance naturally). However, we say that their understanding is sufficient enough for the university to certify their understanding with a degree. For all intents and purposes, unless they are in a specialized field, the transcript is now simply a pass/fail token of ability to comprehend the required material. All the nuances are deferred to this signature.

Now, let’s say this person who lacks a strong analytical understanding goes into business or management, as they might. If they manage someone with a stronger analytical understanding, it can become quite the power struggle. The very strong balancer within a system (the university) is going up against someone with less of a balance within a system. Yet, they tend to balance within this lesser balancing because that’s what they’re good at — and let’s be frank, most universities have dysfunctional elements, like unpaid internships, dropping complaints without redress, not training their professors in educational technique, etc. This leads to pathological adjustment where someone who is good at balancing as a predisposition squishes and squashes themselves into excellence within a system devoid of relative structural excellence when evaluated on its own.

I may be able to do circus level acrobatics very well in a mud and stick house, but that doesn’t make it a gothic cathedral. It just makes me a good acrobat.

The catch-22, of course, is affinity bias. Affinity bias is the predisposition of those with mediocre or low analytical understanding to hire, employ, converse with, like, validate, or agree with people who look and act like them. Obviously, we relegate the likelihood of a person being this affinity-biased person to the C excellence-ambivalent student, not the A excellence-committed student who has shown a balancing act that necessitates a sort of analytical understanding if it is truly on its merit. And, unfortunately, as is the case with all high likelihoods, it would check out often factually. So now, if we know that this person is more likely to hire people with their dispositions, beliefs, and actions — to not expand themselves, but to remain relatively biased as is the naturally consequence of analytical mediocrity — then we will see that more C-grade bosses means more C-grade excellence-ambivalent employees. And this is precisely what happens. As this happens more and more, C-grade excellence-ambivalent individuals gain more of the corporate collateral and financial wielding power, which — as people with low analytical understanding often do — they use to oppress those they generically otherize.

What happens then is there is an oppression of excellence. As analytical mediocrity makes itself hegemonic — see the analyticity of Justice Barrett or Donald Trump, for example — it is more likely to attack that which it is not; analytical travesty (the true lack of any understanding) and analytical excellence (the B-grade and A-grade excellence-committed student) We do in fact see this, where there is increased abuse of vulnerable individuals like the intellectually disabled and neurodivergent along these populations (lack of similarity is seen as stupidity when there is analytical mediocrity). In addition, those who are academically inclined, good at and committed to it are seen as “uppity”, “narcissistic”, “arrogant”, etc. I once even heard college students being referred to as “cockroaches”. Because of these prejudices, they are discharged on these points even though they carry the knowledge necessary for the population to better their situation. The natural course of events, then, is the A-grade excellence-committed individuals then commit more pathological adaption and try to fix these structural problems, only taxing themselves further down the line.

So what’s the solution? It’s obvious why those who are great at balancing the various factors in their lives can’t become leaders because of this hegemony. At the same time, in order for a society to survive, one must not enable the further growth of the hegemony. It is then obvious that those with excellent understanding must create solidarity with each other, to preserve progressive bastions of education that are pushing up against the wall of analytical atrophy that will victimize every last one of us. This does not look like attacking our international excellence abroad, it looks like cooperating with international interests and working them out from a place of unification, negotiation, and mutual recognition of excellence (I do, honestly, believe those deeply committed to excellence naturally recognize each other). So what does that say about many current countries, including ours, in the current climate?

We must all say no collectively to this kind of behavior, but we cannot do that without the genuine cooperation of our neighbors. The problem is very insidious. And unfortunately, there is no America first when it is using its neighbors as self-harm.

Would you care if you got a C from a self-failing teacher? If it weren’t for common decency, it might be a bragging point.

Tomorrow we will talk about “not everyone/everyone” ethics of distribution.