""I think most faculty regard grades as a nuisance," he says. But if professors didn't give them, "students probably wouldn't work as much and wouldn't do homework and wouldn't study for exams," he argues."

"The liberalism of the 1930s and 1940s was shaped by the Great Depression, and the response was, in many respects, communitarian: the strengthening of unions, the provision of jobs and government benefits to the poor and unemployed and the creation of a safety net to provide a modicum of security. The left has, in part, shifted focus, with more stress on the values of self-expression and self-fulfillment, on individual liberation from the constraints of traditional morality, especially sexual morality - what my colleague Ross Douthat calls "The Liberalism of Adult Autonomy" or "the morality of rights." Economic liberalism - despite progress on the minimum wage - has lost salience. Instead of communitarian principles, the contemporary progressive movement - despite its advocacy of local issues like community policing - has produced a counterpart to conservative advocacy of free markets: the advocacy of personal freedom. "

"How Do We Know Who We Are?"

"Consciousness"