Grades cause anxiety in universities – for teachers as much as for students. 

While there are occasional mavericks who try to get by without grades, I think grading is necessary and even quite useful. One possible suggestion is to think differently about grading. Currently, grade reports and summaries are a dry list of absolute scores with little useful information about how to improve or how past performance connects to course goals and objectives. Thomas Goetz' TED talk below has provocative implications for grading within the university. 

Now, I know that this model depends upon Bell curves, uniformity, standardized curriculum design and so on. There is a governmentality piece of this which we shouldn't accept wholesale. But I claim that it certainly isn't worse than what we are doing now.
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"A total institution may be defined as a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life." So begins Erving Goffman's book Asylums.

Two years before Foucault wrote the Birth of the Clinic, and a full decade and a half before he wrote Discipline and Punish, Goffman wrote a book about the inner workings of prisons and mental institutions. While Goffman's works are, in North American fashion, tremendously easier to read, they are no less profound in their description of social institutions. Foucault focuses on the knowledges that allow for the creation of institutions, and also on the new knowledges that are created as a result. What is sometimes lacking in Foucault – the rich, everyday descriptions of inmates within the institution – is found plentiful in Goffman. In my mind, Goffman provides an exemplary link between the philosophical-historical analysis of the birth of institutions, and the everyday experience of being wrapped up in such a system. Like Foucault, Goffman does not appear to blame people for abuse of power, as if power is wielded. Rather, Goffman provides an account of how people imagine their roles and then fulfill them within institutions, often regardless of personal "morality". 

It seems unfortunate that Goffman and Foucault did not share notes. It seems even more unfortunate that the two remain at a distance posthumously. More work should be done to compare the way these famous writers explained the role of professionals within the institution, the role of agency, the effects of language, and the molding of individual subjects within modern medicine. 
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