When we think of academia, we mostly think about an environment that emphasizes rigor, objectivity, and critique, one that often uses assessments as a blunt instrument to idolize those values, not one that values love, kindness, or care. But what if I told you we’ve been measuring the wrong things all along? What if assessment- of students, of peers, of scholarship aid- could be rooted in compassion instead of control?
Kindness that Disrupts
Cate Denial, in her excerpt A Pedagogy of Kindness, begins with a deceptively simple premise: kindness is not the same as niceness. Kindness, as she argues, is “not weakness. Kindness is a conscious choice to assume the best of my students and to prioritize their humanity” or it’s rigorous. It demands accountability, not only from students but from their instructors and the institutions that they go to. A pedagogy of kindness recognizes that students are whole people, ones that have complicated lives, and that learning requires trust, vulnerability, and space for failure. In this particular framework, assessment isn’t simply a tool used for ranking or disciplining- it’s a conversation. It’s a way to ask: How are you growing? What do you need to get there?
Denial’s kindness isn’t sentimentality. It’s radical care in the face of a system that too often devalues human needs of both students and faculty.
Peer Review with a Pulse
This ethos of care also animates Love in the Time of Peer Review, in which Brito, Alexander, Miller, and Yang reconstruct the culture of academic gatekeeping. Peer review, they argue, is becoming a site of harm, whether anonymous, unaccountable, or steeped in inequity. Their particular intervention? Love. Not the type of romantic love you’re thinking. Love in terms of what bell hooks calls “ a combination of care, commitment, trust, knowledge, responsibility, and respect.”
Peer review, one that is rooted in love, will value the labor of writing and reviewing alike, inviting transparency and personality. It shifts from judgmental views to dialogue views, and in doing so, it breaks down the barriers to a site of collective growth- a community practice, rather than being a hurdle for many.
Expanding what Counts
Cheryl E. Ball pushes this even further by questioning the very forms of our scholarship. In Assessing Scholarly Multimedia, Ball uses a rhetorical genre studies approach to argue for a fair and nuanced form of evaluation for multimedia work. Her point is clear: if our assessment tools are calibrated only for print-based, linear texts, how are we to assess content in different forms when we aren’t enforcing a particular form?
Bell shows how to assess scholarly multimedia by paying attention to genre expectations, audience, and rhetorical contexts. It’s not about whether the work is “academically formatted” but about whether or not it does scholarly work in a way that makes the most sense for its audience. This reframing is powerful for creators who specifically work at intersections of digital media, cultural studies, and public scholarship. These areas are often marginalized by traditional academic rubrics, and it’s something to think about to better help the situation.
Assessment as Antiracial Praxis
And then there’s Inoue. In Assessing so That People Stop Killing Each Other, he offers a different perspective on the most urgent critiques involving assessment in higher education: it’s not neutral. Rather, it’s often racist. Standardized expectations around how a person’s language and performance are often in high proximity to whiteness, pushing those who speak, write, and think from other places. Inoue doesn’t just critique; he builds. His labor-based grading contracts, for example, shift the focus from output to effort, process, and engagement. He asks us to imagine assessment as antiracist praxis- not as a system that sorts students, but rather as a structure that sustains life, affirms dignity, and resists white supremacy. As Inoue writes, “we must change how we assess if we want to change who survives”.
Toward Transformative Practice
Taken together, these four texts do more than critique- they offer a different vision. One that explains how assessment can be used as a tool of liberation, not oppression. Where peer review is an act of solidarity. Where kindness is rigorous, love is political, and multimodal expression is valued. Where educators and scholars alike can stop pretending that disembodied objectivity is held higher over the messy, vulnerable, beautiful work of being human.
The academy doesn’t need to get softer, it needs to get braver, and that bravery begins with care.
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