Reflection 2: Response to "A Very Special Marketplace"

I wrote a commentary in response to the above-mentioned article by Thomas Benton, which appeared in the March 19 Chronicle of Higher Education. But as luck or whatever would have it, I wasn't able to post my comment on the Chronicle website itself (and I did try), so I'm posting it here.

It is true, as blowback notes, that “those who have power and position” in academe, i.e. those who should be making needed reforms happen--even more particularly, those who continue to allow the obvious exploitation of adjuncts, lecturers, and at my own institution, even junior faculty members--probably won’t change unless forced to from somewhere on the outside. But I do wonder who that “outside” could be. It would seem that the most obvious power force that could take on the villains would be students and their parents. But the sad truth is that students and their parents don’t know what’s really going on behind the scenes, and those in power who--to use blowback’s words again--“continue to distort the truth for their own self-serving interests” like it that way. And even if--as is the case at my institution--students know there’s something going on, and ask questions of those in power about what’s going on, and don’t get any real answers, they still don’t know they have the power to change things, and those in power like it that way.

In all of the debate about needed reforms in the academy, little has been said about the fact that no university could, or would even have reason to exist, without students. And yet what students really want from their university experience is rarely given much serious thought. Every university will say in its mission statement that students and education come first, but more often than not, it’s an outright lie.

When a professor who consistently has poor teaching evaluations can get tenure on the basis of publications, but a faculty member who is inspirational and motivating, and consistently has excellent teaching evaluations can’t get tenure because they had such a heavy teaching load that they had to make a choice between giving students a positive learning experience and publishing a book that will spend most of its time gathering dust on some library shelf, that mission statement becomes a lie.

When what got a faculty member tenure 15-40 years ago would not get them tenure now, and yet they have tenure, that mission statement becomes a lie.

When the number of adjuncts--who have no benefits and no real reason to be especially loyal to any of the institutions where they work (and can they really be blamed when they spend most of their days traveling from county to county, just to piece together a living, much of which will go right back into the cost of commuting here and there and there and here?)--is twice the number of tenured/tenure-track faculty, that mission statement becomes a lie.

When lecturers, adjuncts, and grad students who are doing 50 or more percent of the teaching that gets done at a university and making 50 or more percent less than tenured faculty, that mission statement becomes a lie.

When junior faculty members aren’t getting tenure because they have heavier teaching loads than tenured faculty at the same institution, have no support from or advocates among tenured faculty (“it’s not my problem, I have tenure”), or take on extra service that tenured faculty don’t want to do anymore (service which is quickly forgotten or considered irrelevant when tenure application time comes around), or aren’t given sufficient, or even realistic, release time for scholarship, that mission statement becomes a lie.

As for the Humanities, do they really even exist anymore? How often they seem to be reviled and scorned as useless, impractical, unnecessary; and many schools of the Humanities are being downsized because they are “deficit departments.” And sadly, as my own experiences have begun to demonstrate, even those in the Humanities, and especially those who have position and power, have forgotten who they are. If the original purpose of the Humanities was, at least in part, to be the conscience of the university, of the world, that purpose has largely been lost. If the original purpose of the Humanities was, at least in part, to teach people how to be ethical and humane to all people, that purpose has been lost. It seems that neither capitalistic America nor the university wants a conscience any longer.

Reflection I: Consolation

So there was a program on awhile back (in June, when I still had cable TV) about parallel universes and string theory. I didn't watch it but I knew what it would be about because I've seen some other programs like that and because I've read Borges. And "taught" Borges. I've especially loved reading and teaching "Garden of Forking Paths." And when I'm feeling down, it's sometimes uplifting to remember the following quote from this short story.

"In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us. In the present one, which a favorable fate has granted me, you have arrived at my house; in another, while crossing the garden, you found me dead; in still another, I utter these same words, but I am a mistake, a ghost."

This opens avenues of consolation for me when I can't be traveling through wormhole after wormhole in order to be sure that my life doesn't always turn out the same way it has "here" in every parallel universe. I entertain the possibility that whatever I lack "here," I have "there." So, for example, at the same time I'm in this universe, I'm also in a universe where I make over 100,000 a year doing what I love, in a career that never feels like work; it just feels natural. I'm in a universe where I'm respected and valued because I'm me, and where the great work that I do is noticed and valued and rewarded.

At the same time as I'm in this universe, I live in another where someone at Publishers Clearing House realizes that if they really can and do give one winner 100,000 bucks a week for the rest of their life, they could also give many, MANY more people 100,000 bucks a year for the rest of their lives and almost single-handedly change the economy for the better. And they actually DO it!

In yet another parallel universe where I DO exist, the HAVEs are generous because they don't want any HAVE-NOTs in the universe. So every day, no, every nanosecond, one of the very wealthy pays off the debt of someone who's struggling to survive until no one has to struggle anymore.

At the same time as I'm "here", I live in a universe where the university remains first and foremost a teaching institution, not a corporation, but a place to expand the mind and above all, learn how to be kinder humans. I live in a universe where students know they have the power to remind government officials and administrators that they're slipping back into corporate mode, and they'd better cut it out. And they DO it!

I also live in a universe where no one wants to discover (invent?) new diseases because they've found cures for all the terminal ones, where nothing's bad for your health, no one gets ill and there's no longer any need for medical/pharmaceutical professions or medical insurance (but EVERYONE still gets to have work that doesn't feel like work).

So teaching really isn't important anymore?

In my search for answers, I ran across an editorial written by a Student Union president at the University of Alberta (http://www.su.ualberta.ca/mainpage_content/news/20061010_teaching_sp) that really resonated.

"The student experience suggests that our institutions have suffered desperately when it comes to the core mission of teaching undergrads. . . .It's not only that the number of students [and tuition] has increased . . . but a good portion of this troubling trend is attributable to the fact that there are actually less faculty now here than before the cuts. . . .as faculty are expected to devote more energy to building this 'world class' research university, they are almost certainly spending less time interacting and engaging with undergraduate students. . . .This is not to say that research is not an important part of a university, but these days research is becoming the university's main function, and teaching is an afterthought. . . .as a professor is forced to do more research, he or she cannot devote as much time to teaching students, because there is just no money to be made by the university from teaching. . . .All told, the deep and still-unremedied cuts to public funding have left the system, including its leading institutes, unable to fulfill its teaching mandate. . . .And despite the best intentions of institutional administrators and many motivated professors struggling to do more with less, we still have a system where students are not getting the support they need to really flourish.
The simple fact is that students were asked to pay more and are getting less in return.
This is the Klein legacy. Government certainly won't admit it's a raw deal, and neither will the university.
The question is: will you?"

Couldn't have said it better myself. The concerns expressed for students trapped in a system which has grown and continues to grow harsher and rougher with every funding cut certainly mirror those of students at many universities, including the one I've called "home" for several years. But what is even more distressing, to me anyway--because I really despise hypocrisy--is the perpetual insistence among those whose decisions have been most detrimental to the academic teaching mission that teaching does matter.

I came into this profession as a starry-eyed idealist, because I wanted to teach. It might even be said that I came into it by accident. My first teaching experience happened as soon as I had those 18 hours beyond the MA. My most inspirational professor and mentor from grad school suggested I might try adjuncting at a local junior college until I found full-time work doing something else; but he was very careful to caution that I shouldn't even think of making a career out of "professing." I didn't listen, of course. Because from the moment I walked into my first classroom, it felt more like home than any career I'd tried before, and there were a number of them. I came late into this profession and despite my age at the time (34) and my life experiences, I'm sure I was more idealistic (or naive, if you wish) than many younger PhD's coming into the field now. In fact, sadly, a number of grad students whom I've met in recent years already consider teaching "an afterthought." How well the system perpetuates itself.

Clouds have obscured the stars of my initial idealism, of course, but it's taken over 20 years for me to entertain the idea that the weather really may not change.