(conclusion, part IV of IV)
Fighting
over the Scraps
“Dreams are extremely important. You can’t do it unless you
imagine it.” - George Lucas
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” - Abraham Lincoln
When I came to the university 11 years ago, it was a
dream come true for me. I was finally going to be able to work with upper
division students as well as the underclassmen I had previously been teaching
at the community college. I would be using all the higher education I had
worked so long and hard (17 years to be exact) to achieve. I would be working
with very bright professional educators whose areas of research interest challenged
me to engage in ongoing learning from their expertise, a true gift for a
life-long student like myself. I had even hoped that among the many classes I
knew I’d teach, I might actually have some time to get some research and
writing of my own done.
I was truly
excited when I secured the visiting instructor position and elated when that
position became permanent four years later. I will always be grateful to the
three colleagues who helped make that possible. Despite all that has occurred in
the department, the college and the university since then, I am still deeply grateful to
have had the chance to be there.
The department had great plans back then. We were working
on securing a graduate division (complete with graduate students to assist in
teaching our undergraduate courses), opening a humanities center on campus,
creating new courses and curricula with connections to programs and students
universities around the world. The faculty socialized regularly at parties and
pot-lucks. There was a camaraderie and a sense of team work among us that was
determined to do great things even at a university that had long had difficulty
shedding its persona as just one more average at best tech school.
That all seems like such a long time ago now.
Early on there was trouble in Paradise. When I came to
UCF in 2001, in part to continue teaching the General Education courses I’d
been teaching at the community college, the Gordon Rule classes we taught were
capped at 37. That was nearly twice the number of students in those intensive
writing classes I’d been teaching down the road at Valencia but I wasn’t
teaching as many sections (4 instead of 5) so that was a fairly even trade.
Within four years, however, the 37 had doubled to 75. An instructor teaching
four Gordon Rule sections could well be teaching up to 300 students per
semester and reading their four Gordon Rule assignments each, 1200 total papers
a semester.
When I pointed out to my then chair that it was pretty
much impossible to do justice to that kind of a workload, I was informed that I
should tell the students that the Gordon Rule only said they had to write the four papers. It didn’t say
they had to be graded, so the plan
was that I’d only grade one. Students wouldn’t know which one would be chosen
for grading so they needed to do a good job on all four. Of course, that
completely defeats the purpose of the Gordon Rule which is designed to help students’
writing improve through feedback and opportunities to improve. It also reflects
a rather Machiavellian pedagogy which engenders little trust and even less
respect from students, deservedly so.
After ongoing complaints from instructors teaching these
classes, the Gordon Rule classes were cut to their current range of 55 to 65
total students per section. Many of them are now “delivered” online (in the
language of the business-technology complex), a format that consumer-students
presume (demand?) to be easier than formats which require at least a warm body
with a pulse in a seat three times a week. It also allows the university to
avoid the responsibility of providing a seat for all of its students on campus,
for lighting and cooling their classrooms and it permits the university to tack
on an extra technology fee for the
class. Never underestimate the cleverness of the business-technology complex
when it comes to money.
For the record, I still read and grade every Gordon Rule
paper. If I’m not going to grade it, why assign it?
Faculty meetings that were once wide open brain-storming
sessions regarding where the department wanted to go have now become endurance
tests for round after round of bad news, most of it about money or curriculum.
The meetings are sometimes marked by acrimonious fighting in public and by back-biting
in private. Departmental socializing has declined.
Of course, it’s very easy to see your former colleague as
a competitor if not a potential foe when the Sword of Damocles is constantly
hanging over your department, your program, perhaps over your very job. The
result is that a once vibrant, harmonious social organism has devolved into a
department that thus far remains functional with a veneer of civility if not
cordiality but which overlies a tense uncertainty just beneath the surface. And
this is one of the healthier departments at the university.
When a recent hire to the department asked me to
summarize the state of the department, I responded that what might be seen by
outsiders as anger, detachment, even depression had to be seen in context. Sadly,
we no longer talk about our hopes and dreams here anymore. Given the once-promising
history of this department over the past decade, what one really sees among its
remaining members today is little more than heartbroken survivors surveying a
field of broken dreams.
In all fairness, the context for that heartbreak is
largely set outside the department. When the pie continues to be cut smaller
and smaller, it’s not surprising that those relying on a share of that pie
would fight over the scraps. College
administrators play petty games with budgets, curricula, faculty lines and
academic programs keeping faculty and departments constantly up in the air. The arbitrariness
which marks decision-making regarding departments and the micro-managing
oversight which increasingly mark its interactions with their staffs is incredibly
infantilizing in impact. Little wonder people sometimes behave like children. University
administrators exact retribution against a union virtually powerless by
state law when it has the audacity to insist the university follow its own
contract to pay study abroad instructors for their instruction. As a result, all faculty
members and programs are penalized with impunity. State
education department officials cut general education programs with abandon
leaving departments to guess how they will respond to such changes and staff them.
And then there is the
state legislature which from its sniper’s nest in Tallahassee continues its slow but steady march to defund higher education even as it demands colleges produce four year degrees for set
prices. Worse yet, legislators presume the pedagogical competence (for no
apparent reason) to dictate curricula. The governor
uses his bully pulpit to bully his own employees, proclaiming that
disciplines like ours which insist student learn to think critically,
creatively problem solve, effectively communicate and assume ethical
responsibilities in the larger world are unnecessary and should be eliminated
entirely or made more costly by raising tuition for these classes. All the
while the media continues to
mindlessly cheerlead unsupported truisms such as the overriding importance of
STEM courses and the lack of connection between all other disciplines and the
job market.
This is well beyond demoralizing. It verges on being
self-destructive for those who continue to labor within it, selfless dedication
notwithstanding. Our own department has had an enormous turnover in the past five years alone and I would estimate that at least a quarter of the faculty currently have considered other opportunities in the past couple of years.
It
is, after all, what we ordered
I think it would be easy to see these remarks as little
more than engaging in the same kind of whining that I lament here. Indeed, a common
defense strategy to avoiding critique is always to shoot the messenger.
However, there is a difference between complaining about
legitimate concerns – the factors that increasingly make it difficult if not
impossible for teachers to actually perform their jobs – and whining arising
out of the unwillingness of lawmakers, administrators or students to actually do
their jobs out of a sense of entitlement that suggests they shouldn’t have to perform
their part of the bargain. For the professional teachers who perform their jobs
to the best of their abilities under difficult conditions on a good day, who care
about their work, how it impacts others and about the ongoing deterioration of
the once noble enterprise in which they are engaged, the failure to object to
unjust compensation and being treated in a manner in which their dignity is
consistently violated effectively makes them complicit in their own
exploitation.
Moreover, even as I criticize the largely mediocre (at
best) performance and the attitudes of entitlement of the majority of the
students I currently encounter, I hasten to note that I do not hold them
entirely responsible for these adolescent behaviors. In many ways, they are
much like Pavlov’s dog, taught to respond upon command. And, in all fairness,
they are well trained.
Cathy Davidson, a professor at Duke University, makes a
very good case for this in her blog entry at
the HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Sciences, Technology, Advanced Collaboration) site.
In her essay “Why Students Today Complain About Grades—and How We Can Fix It,”
Davidson says the following:
You are the best teacher in the world and
you’ve just turned in your grades for the best class you’ve ever
taught. If you are a college professor you know what comes
next: the barrage of complaints about the low grade, the litany of
excuses for why this or that missed assignment was due to health reasons, the
pleading that the B+ be raised to an A- or medical school plans will be foiled and
a life ruined, the thinly veiled threat that changing a grade is easier than
dealing with a student judiciary complaint (or an irate parent).
It’s the most demoralizing part of being an educator today.
And here’s the paradox: if our
students weren’t all
tireless grade-grinders, we educators would have failed them. Yes, you
read that right. They were well taught and learned well the lesson
implicit in our society that what matters is not the process or the learning
but the end result, the grade. A typical college freshman today has been
through ten years of No Child Left Behind educational philosophy where
“success” has been reduced to a score on a test given at the end of the
course. For a decade, they have had the message that a good teacher is
someone whose students succeed on those end-of-grade standardized tests.
Davidson goes on
to say that “We will not eliminate the
grade-grubbing until we change our current educational system.”
I believe Davidson is right on target. As a long-time mentor
of teachers from Chicago recently said to me, "No Child Left Behind is one of
the biggest disasters in American educational history." I have come to believe
that the misuse of high stakes standardized testing as a means of assessing
everything from children’s learning to whether schools must be closed entirely
must end. And we must replace it with an approach to learning that truly leaves
no child behind, that develops all
aspects of their potential (not just those skills global corporations deem
important to future obedient worker drones) and that fosters a love of learning
in human beings who in their lifetimes will be required to constantly adapt to an ever increasing
pace of change and thus must be able to continue to learn and relearn the rest of
their lives.
So,
what would be better?
So what would be better? What needs to change? And how do
we get there? As I see it, the answers to these questions are daunting to say
the least. And as always, the iNtuitive tends to look at the big picture first.
First, we’ll have to deal with some of the larger
problems forming the context in which these behaviors occur beginning with
America’s historical anti-intellectual tendencies (see Hofstadter,
1964. The confusion of anti-intellectualism with notions such as populism and
the common man makes this task even more onerous. And its connection to an
indefatigable and largely uncritical anti-government sentimentality and the radical
individualist and NIMBY tendencies that mark American politics today threaten to
unravel any notions of the common good our Framers sought so diligently to enshrine. That makes this concern even more
urgent.
More immediately, we must deal with state legislators who defund public
institutions even as they make ever more demands upon them all in the name of
protecting the privilege of wealthy Floridians. We must deal with the absurdity
of former used car salesmen and business boys whose own academic records are at
best mediocre who arrogate to themselves the competencies to create and impose
educational curricula on those who actually have experience in creating and
implementing them and the students who must be subject to them. As an attorney
I never let my clients make my closing arguments. They simply weren’t equipped
to do so. And I see little reason for those with little if any experience as
educators to dictate to educators how they should do their own jobs. If you don’t
trust us to do our jobs, don’t hire us.
We’ll also have to call to account a media which has largely failed to tackle critical issues such as
the failure of No Child Left Behind
while propagating unfounded presumptions that all students need to know lies within
the limited disciplines of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. If you want to see a society that tried to elevate STEM while eviscerating its arts and humanities and thus its very soul, you need look no further than the Third Reich to see how bad an idea that is. We
must also confront the unchallenged truism propagated by an infotainment media that the
ills in education today arise solely from the overworked, underpaid and – in
many cases – highly demoralized teachers who continue trying to make a silk
purse out of the sow’s ear they have been dealt. There is plenty of blame to go around for our current fiasco and thus plenty of responsibilities to deal with it.
We must deal with the citizens of Florida, our friends and neighbors, many of whom have
readily traded in their duties as citizens for what they see as a
responsibility-free role as consumers. Ultimately is the people of Florida who
irresponsibly elect such legislatures and happily vote themselves tax break
after tax break while demanding that schools and universities improve their
services in the face of defunding and demonization. Of course, it was precisely
in a public school that I learned as a child that there is no free lunch. That lesson remains as true today as it did in the 1960s when I learned it.
Finally, those of us in the academy must also shoulder our share of the blame. Systems of
promotion based in publish or perish (or more recently, procure grants or
perish) play a very direct role in the perpetuation of classes with no real
demands beyond showing up for exams bubble sheet and pencil in hand. Tenure
track professors who are always busy publishing or money grubbing trying to
survive simply don’t have time to engage their students at any depth.
Moreover, adjuncts, who now compose up more than half of
the instructional duties of America’s colleges and universities, cannot pick up
the slack by teaching sections which are too large to effectively grade their many
students’ assignments. Adjuncts must balance their work at any given campus
with their work at multiple other sites and the commute between them, all of
this to keep the lights on, the student loans paid and the premiums for health
insurance not provided by their employers paid out of their pockets.
If we want teachers who value academic rigor and
integrity, who would live into the Carnegie Unit’s requirements for academic
soundness of our classes, we must hire enough of them to do so and make
possible the required conditions to competently do their jobs. And then we must
demand they do so. Lazy instructors make it difficult for all of us who seek to do our jobs of providing rigorous, demanding higher education for the people of Florida.
There are plenty of big problems to deal with, indeed. The question is not whether we are capable of
meeting any or all of these challenges. Rather, it is a question of whether we
will.
Post-Scriptum
“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way
to succeed is always to try just one more time.” Thomas A. Edison
Inevitably when I write these kinds of big picture
cathartic essays, I feel the need to add a “However,…” section. It’s the
Perceiver at work, adverse to final judgments and wanting to insure all the
evidence is considered, no doubt. There are always exceptions to the rules. And
a failure to take them into consideration is always a recipe for disaster in
any analysis.
The initial “However,…” must be addressed to two groups
of students who fell outside the paradigm I lay out above this past semester.
The first was an Honors Humanitistic Tradition I section of 17 students. Led by
two seniors who had taken my classes previously (and thus knew what to expect),
this was an outstanding group of students. They worked hard, discussed
vigorously, wrote well, worked together with very little competitiveness and
presented some of the best group projects I’ve ever seen in my teaching career.
In many ways, this was precisely the kind of experience instructors should have with
honors students as a matter of course. I’ve taught a lot of honors classes and
this one was decidedly the best. Sadly, it is also a major exception to the
rule. Few students evidence more entitlement than honors students. Indeed, teaching
honors students is seen as combat pay in many colleges for good reason. But for
this little experience of grace, I am truly thankful. And I hope I will see
these students again.
The second “However,…” that must be addressed is the
handful of students in my two face-to-face courses last semester who provided
living examples of what a real college student
looks like. Interestingly, these students were all women, slightly older
than their cohorts, most of them with families and jobs. Yet, amidst the
demands of family and a local workplace which habitually exploits college
students desperate to keep the lights on and the beans on the table, these women
still wrote exemplary papers, consistently came to class prepared and often
carried the dead weight of their slacker group mates in class discussions.
I am deeply grateful for their witness to the value of
higher education. But more than that, I admire them deeply for their
dedication, hard work and excellence in the face of very difficult
circumstances in each case. These are students I hope I will see in the future. Indeed, many of them seek to be college professors themselves and I look forward to the day I can call them colleagues.
In the same vein, the final “However,…” goes
out to the many fine students I have had the privilege of knowing and working
with over my professional career. You know who you are. Some continue to remain in touch with me long
years after their departure from the university. Indeed, some have provided some very
thoughtful comments to the first installments of this blog entry, comments I always read and consider carefully.
I watch with
great pride the many good things they are doing with their own lives and in their efforts to change the world for the better with whatever education they managed to get at our credentials factory. As today, that
handful of real students has made the task of dealing with the hordes of detached, entitled and self-absorbed credit hour seekers bearable and, on occasion, even joyful.
They were a privilege to teach, a gift to know and now to count as friends and
colleagues. I am grateful for them.
Still........
How long can one teach for the handful of real
students, the occasional good class, swimming upstream in a torrent of
entitlement, demonization and acquiescence to mediocrity? What are the limits of
devotion and dedication to the state of one’s birth when it drives its dedicated
teachers to heartbreak over broken dreams no longer safe to even hope for? When
does that debt become paid? When does enough become enough? How does one go about staunching the wounds from an
ongoing societal Waterloo?
For those of you who have made it through this extended
lamentation, I thank you. And for those of you who have any suggestions about any of the topics I’ve covered here, as Ross
Perot said in the 1980 presidential debates, “I’m all ears.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The
Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
If the unexamined life is not worth living,
surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth
holding.
Most
things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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