Deadlines/Due dates as inequity generators - The emergence of pluriversities (Part 2)
Picture: Markus Winkler - https://unsplash.com/photos/Hmcpg4cnSRA
Deadlines/due dates[1] dominate the university experience. Before attending their first lecture, students must meet deadlines for applying for admission, enrolling in courses, and, of course, paying fees. Assignments, exams, and group projects also have pressing due dates at the end of semester. Heck, there's even a deadline for applying to graduate.
Academics, too, are constantly impacted by deadlines. Applications for research funding and teaching support have fixed due dates. Final grades have immoveable deadlines. Promotion applications have essential due dates. And if we miss these deadlines, we also miss out on the resources that are essential to our work. Even if academics meet deadlines, rejection is the norm. This creates a toxic work environment for academics which results in mental health problems at rates higher than the police or the medical profession.
Why do we have deadlines?
Far from an inclusive, contemplative learning culture we work in a highly competitive unprotected space with due dates/deadlines as a fundamental controlling mechanism. Due dates are an essential tool of the neo-liberal university in maintaining an audit culture focussed on continuously increasing performance. Deadlines are everywhere, and the accumulation of all these deadlines has a number of powerful effects. They allow the neo-liberal machine to keep on ticking over in a regular way, they restrict demand on precious resources (money), and they inculcate people into a kind of subjectivity that is complicit in neo-liberal hegemony. As such, deadlines intervene to mediate and dislocate the value that staff, and students generate in their work from the resources that are necessary to produce it. Instead of a direct recognition of the value of someone’s work and allocation of appropriate resources, application or submission must be ‘performed’ by a due date to gain recognition and resources (and often not). By way of example, let’s look at one of the most ubiquitous—and often most pernicious—of university deadlines: the assignment due date.
Assignments must have due dates, it’s just common sense…isn’t it?
From an administration point of view, it seems like a no-brainer that assignments must all be gathered by a certain time so that markers can be unleashed upon them within the statutory period allowed for moderation, marking, construction of feedback and return to students (so that they have time to use the feedback to improve their next assignment). This justification though is self-serving - we need due dates because we have decided to assess in this particular way for ideological reasons, and we need to assess in this way because we have due dates. Due dates are only common sense because of this common way of doing assessment. Once we realise that this way of assessing is in fact arbitrary—it suits the system not the people—and better alternatives exist (especially under pandemic conditions), due dates are brought into question.
There is also a pedagogical complexion given to this practice suggesting that the meeting of due dates is beneficial for students because it teaches them good time management. There are some problems with this though. Firstly, the meeting of due dates is supported by some kind of punishment for being late. Often this is a deduction of marks on an increasing scale, the later the submission, the greater the deduction. Or, if an extension is negotiated, there may be a reduction or absence of feedback provided. Secondly, the meeting of due dates and the teaching of time management are not part of the learning objectives of any course that we are associated with. It seems here that we have a practice that uses very poor pedagogy (punishment) to teach a skill that is unlikely to be part of the course, yet poor performance in this skill feeds into a reduction of marks that are allocated for a completely different set of learning objectives.
So due dates are not so much common sense, as a common practice that we have ceased to question.
But we can be flexible with due dates, that helps right?
Many conscientious instructors, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, have tried to minimise the negative effects of punishing students for missing due dates by offering a generous extension policy. ‘If you are unable to meet the deadline for an assignment,’ these policies often say, ‘just ask your instructor for an extension, and you will not be penalised.’ Some instructors do not even require an explanation or justification for the extension request.
But extension policies like these are also problematic. Extensions distort the already uneven power dynamics between university educators and students. Research indicates that middle- and upper-middle-class white students ask for accommodations like extensions in excess of what is fair or appropriate, a practice that exacerbates class-based and racial inequities.
Furthermore, extensions require students to approach instructors, cap in hand, and ask for mercy to avoid punishment. And mercy, of course, implies that the student is at fault. But all too often it’s not students' fault for missing due dates. And it’s not bad luck either. When some students submit their work on time, but others say they need an extension because they’re working long hours or taking care of sick relatives, they are pointing to the economic and healthcare consequences of centuries of colonisation, racial capitalism, and patriarchal institutions. And yet, late policies and extension requests force students to internalise the blame for flaws that are systemic.
Due dates are racist, sexist, ableist, and colonial – it’s about time we accepted this.
Missed deadlines are a better indicator of systemic injustices than individual vices because time itself is not experienced equally. For example, students and staff with disabilities, whether known or unknown, often require more time to complete tasks than able-bodied students. Although some universities provide accommodations to disabled students and scholars, research indicates that when these accommodations are given on an individual rather than a structural level—which is the pervasive form of accommodations—these practices “actually worsen inequity rather than mitigating it” (Price, 2021).
And it’s not just disabled staff and students who are disadvantaged by the injustices of university time. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, scholars who identify as men kept churning out manuscripts, while women’s manuscript submissions plummeted in many fields. Low-income students and minorities, too, were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic in ways that took more time away from their studying and threatened to impact their ability to pass their courses and graduate. Called “temporal regimes” (Bjork & Buhre, 2021), these unequal and unjust experiences of time are the reason that due dates and deadlines are so harmful—they amplify the racism, sexism, classism, and ablism that already deprive the most vulnerable in our communities of their basic rights and dignities.
Deadlines assume students are all the same (er...but like who?)
Fixed due dates supported with punishments appear more and more like a toxic residue from former times when a university education was more or less limited to wealthy elite students. Presuming a similarity of student backgrounds then would lend a little more credibility (but still not much perhaps) to the practice since it would more accurately be targeting and punishing the time management skills of students independently of their lived circumstances, assuming that students generally had plenty of scope in their lives to actually meet deadlines. In fact, it is only with this assumption of a uniform, wealthy, time-rich background for all students, that a weak claim for the pedagogical function of deadlines can be made.
Students in the third decade of the 21st century certainly do not have uniform, wealthy, time-rich backgrounds and so deadlines and punishments cannot be justified. This is because the deadline/punishment combo targets constellations of inter-related factors in the student’s life only one of which is the student’s ‘raw’ ability to time manage and meet a deadline. These constellations differ from student to student and so the practice punishes different things for different students. Even in cases where students meet due dates, the differing constellation of factors in students’ lives means that the energy and dedication demanded of some students to meet the deadline are far higher than for others. It is entirely expected then that the quality of the assignments submitted on time by diverse students will differ considerably in quality. But this quality is not in relation to the students’ abilities. To say the least then, the due date/punishment practice is an extremely blunt instrument that generates inequity and is likely to have an increasingly corrosive effect on the motivation of significant numbers of students.
So pluriversities?
In a previous blog post, the conflation of learning and assessment that is inherent in ‘the assignment’ was identified as an inequity generator. In this blog post, we have shown that the due date, as an apparently necessary ‘best buddy’ of the assignment, amplifies the generation of inequity creating a double whammy effect on a wide range of students living complex lives with multiple challenges. The tensions and struggles created by these inequity generators (and many others) also create the spaces in which pluriversities may emerge. We hope so anyway.
In our next blog, part 3 in this burgeoning series, we will sketch out what a pluriversity might be like and show how such an institution might dissolve inequity generation.
[1] Due date and deadline will be used interchangeably although deadline has a dark etymology
References:
Bjork, C. & Buhre, F. (2021). Resisting Temporal Regimes, Imagining Just Temporalities, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 51(3), 177-181, DOI: 10.1080/02773945.2021.1918503
Price, M. (2021). Time Harms: Disabled Faculty Navigating the Accommodations Loop South Atlantic Quarterly, 120(2), 257–277. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-8915966
I have been a secondary teacher of mathematics, physics and IT in a wide range of English-medium and Māori-medium schools. I have also been an adviser for English and Māori medium schools for mathematics|pāngarau and science|pūtaiao. I have lectured at Victoria University, Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi and Te Kūnenga ki Pūrehuroa|Massey University in education and the humanities. My research interests all centre around issues of legitimation and ethics in contexts where people from different backgrounds must live together.
Brian’s Contact Details: Email: b.tweed@massey.ac.nz Phone: (06) 356 9099 ext. 84401
Collin Bjork is a Lecturer in Science Communication and Podcasting at Massey University's Manawatū campus. Trained in rhetoric and writing studies in the United States, Collin's latest research project examines the relationship between true crime podcasting and justice. He also operates two podcasts: Pod Uni and Global Rhetorics. Learn more at collinbjork.com.