BY AARON BARLOW
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Things do need to be tried to create more expansive learning environments and some have been, including the introduction of technology into the classroom; the hybrid concept where a lesser period of time is spent within, a commensurate amount online; the fully online class (the contemporary version of the old correspondence course); the Massive Open Online Course or MOOC; and the much older Personalized System of Instruction or PSI that makes the lecture hall but one facility at an instructor’s disposal. These, and more, have met with varying degrees of success. Yet they have one accidental flaw in common, the paradoxical effect of turning teacher attention away from direct participation in the task of instruction, though they are not alone responsible for this.
This side effect that turns us away from teaching makes activity away from actual interaction with students more important to careers–and to the campus hierarchy. Along with growing emphasis on scholarship in Reappointment, Promotion and Tenure (RPT) processes across all of higher education (including such traditionally teaching-focused entities as community colleges), these attempts to challenge our teaching traditions are, at odds with intent, allowing us to focus less than ever before on what occurs during our Carnegie hours. Throw a third factor into the pot: the growth of reliance on adjuncts for teaching that has made quite a few full-timers view actual teaching, especially at lower levels (which, I admit, has always been viewed by some faculty as work for the non-tenured, and “worse”), as something beneath them. Teaching, no matter the lip service paid, slips further toward institutional unimportance.
Today, and partly because of this growing and often unconscious disparagement of the actual act of teaching, many full-time and permanent faculty members at all sorts of institutions of higher education look longingly at research universities where the tenured elites sometimes teach only one course a semester or, more generally, two. Faculty members rationalize that the other things they are doing—writing books and papers, attending conferences, developing programs, refining general education (the list is endless)—are more important and more interesting than (yawn) another fifteen-week encounter with undergraduates. That’s where they could really shine, if only they had the time.
Making matters worse, instead of teachers, many academic departments today want their permanent full-time members to be leaders, leaving the bulk of the actual teaching to instructors, adjuncts and contingent hires. The faculty are often tempted into compliance by release time, a reward for doing non-teaching work that is often both easier and more obviously rewarding (in terms of RPT) than toil with students. We’ve gotten to the point, on many campuses, where release time is jealously guarded and highly prized. In some cases, the more venal sort of chair uses it to solidify power, giving it out as favors to those who support him or her, something like the patronage of Tammany Hall.
There are plenty of full-time university teachers today who have created cushy enclaves for themselves away from daily interaction with colleagues and students—much to the annoyance, of course, of those many who still do see teaching as the heart of their profession. They do this in a variety of ways. Some take possession of online or hybrid offerings that allow them, essentially, to do much more than ever of their work from home—almost to disappear from campus. Others work the administrative system, becoming the faculty the power structure turns to when needing participation in things like preparation for accreditation review. A few might even be able to convince the institution that their scholarship is just so important that it makes teaching a trivial impediment that the school should kick away.
There are plenty of other ways to get out of teaching. Each of them carries the implicit agreement that this alternative activity, whatever it is, carries more institutional weight than teaching. That it is more important.
Aside from promoting scholarship, the purpose of release time should be to reward people who are completing needed but arduous tasks, things taking us away from what we really should be wanting to do, that is, teaching and working on our scholarship. Instead, far too often, it is becoming a device enabling full-time and permanent faculty to avoid teaching, further distancing the work of the tenured and tenure-tracked from that of the part-time and contingent. Few of the lucky ones want to hear this, but the adjuncts know it is true: it is part of what has become a system of unequal work as well as unequal pay that they see every day, the point driven home as they pass empty full-timer offices for the crowded stockyards where adjuncts are housed.
I don’t know how to reestablish pride and enjoyment in the role of teaching as a prime faculty activity. I do know some of the factors, however, that have demeaned it: Student Evaluation of Teacher forms that give little useful information and are easy to abuse; peer observations that become punitive, not helpful; Student Learning Outcomes developed far away from classrooms with little relevance, as a result, to actual student progress; assessment that promotes numbers over an activity that has never been successfully quantified—and that shouldn’t be; low pay, which signals lack of importance in the eyes of administrators, for those (more and more often adjuncts) doing the bulk of the teaching; and reward for teaching “excellence” decided upon by people who have never seen the individual in action.
The only way to change this is for more and more of us who are tenured and on the tenure track to start refocusing our activities, making teaching our personal priority. We generally got into this game because we love the dynamics of teaching but have allowed that love to be beaten out of us by a system that rewards activity surrounding teaching more than it does the teaching itself, a system that, in fact, denigrates teaching and teachers (wittingly or not).
At the same time, as adjunct advocates have long been arguing, we permanent full-timers have to begin to show more respect (and to feel it) for our contingent and adjunct colleagues, advocating for vastly increased pay and bringing them into departmental conversations (with compensation) about teaching. Some of us try this, but administrators continue to attempt to divide us, offering to increase adjunct pay by cutting increases for full-timers (as recently happened in contract negotiations between the Professional Staff Congress and the City University of New York). We have to reject this while working to increase the respect for all teachers, even those outside of higher education, advocating for a reasonable wage for everyone, everywhere.
Only when we succeed at this will we re-establish respect for ourselves as we enter our classrooms—or into whatever facilities we decide, as teachers, will best further the goals we set. Only when we succeed at this will we once more enjoy our jobs.
As you know, Aaron, I’ve been arguing a version of this for years too; every time we devalue the work of teaching, we make it easier for decision-makers to treat (and compensate) it less seriously as well. Glad to see you adding more voice and more reasons to what needs to be a loud chorus about this.
You certainly have, Seth, and are one of the people whose example convinced me to give up release time and concentrate on my own teaching. Thanks to you and other advocates for teaching, this semester I am teaching only First Year Composition and am participating in professional development within a group that primarily consists of adjuncts. And am loving it.
Well, I have been taught since I was 20 and applied to a Ph.D. program that I should not say I put teaching first because as a woman I would end up NTT if I characterized myself that way. Also, had I not been interested in research I would have quit after the M.A., used my California junior college teaching credential, and gone tenure track at a public institution in a decent state, with mountains, cities, and seas, where I am from and have friends, as opposed to move to an awful place across the country and go through forty kinds of h***. So I am not willing to renounce the research orientation, no matter how much people may think it is worthless. And oddly, after being told never to put teaching first, I have been browbeaten about the opposite since I finished the PhD: teaching is what you should be up for, it is your bread and butter, dear, and on, and on, and on. And I teach a LOT, and I spend a LOT of time on student services, and I really resent every article that comes out saying I should do more, and more, and more. If I do not get to do research some of the time, I will not have anything left to teach.
Leslie, not everyone is the committed activist/scholar/teacher that I know you are. You don’t hide behind anything or anyone but work hard and well. Like you, I spend 80-90 hours a week on my teaching and writing and tending to other professional responsibilities. We don’t have to do that, but we do. My concern is with our colleagues who think teaching is beneath them and with administrators who insist teaching is something anyone can do so pay teachers (especially adjuncts) as little as they can.
Neither Aaron’s call nor mine is a call to do more teaching. It’s a call to take it seriously, which we know you do. But there are too many of our colleagues who pay it lip service, if that much, or see it as ancillary to their “real work.” I’ve never seen or heard you say anything of the sort, but others do shockingly often.
Ah, but I suffer. I am in fact NOT the best person to teach the first two years, and the more advanced the class is, the more interesting I become. I’m bad pedagogically, bad at exercises, groups, literacy enhancing assignments, all of it, and part of that is because I am bored with it. *Especially* in a foreign language, that makes it even worse, it’s yet another remove when the students are struggling with a foreign language in addition to everything else. I’m also not efficient, don’t do well with more than two courses, never have; after that I am peopled out. So I am one of the evil elitists who thought that university teaching MEANT that, a graduate seminar and an advanced undergraduate course every semester, plus theses and dissertations and so on, and serious work on shared governance, and real research. This is what I signed up for and what I still want and I am not willing to apologize for it. I wish I had been told the truth; I’d have gone into something else, anything else, and at least be living in a decent state instead of so damned far from home. People want you to sacrifice everything for academia: your home, your research, everything. I find it disgusting.
I also have a question about the culture of English departments. Do you REALLY not say hello to contingent faculty? I keep reading about this in articles, we need to start saying hello. It seems really rude to me — we don’t treat people that way in my field — although I’ll believe anything at this point.
As to your last point, I did experience that as an adjunct and have seen it happen since.
For some, there are better roles to play than teaching but, for the most part, we are hired as teachers and continue to be told that teaching should be the center of our work. Personally, I did not discover that I liked teaching–and am sometimes good at it–until I was in my fifties and had returned to adjunct work to supplement my income. I liked it so much (and, luckily, had also started publishing) that I decided to switch careers. I guess what I am saying is that we can all become good teachers, even if we start at it late or after thinking we cannot do it well. It’s a skill that can be learned.
I would add–not everybody has to be a great teacher of all the things or want to do it more than you want to do other things.
The point, at least for me, is that as a profession we enable respect for people who are committed to doing lots of lower-division teaching, for example, by privileging other kinds of work.
If we all just respected all the work and all the people who do it, that would go a long way.
Sorry, bad editing.
**We enable disrespect.
Well, I am all for paying people decently and respecting them and so on. However I think service is the most maligned thing. People totally look down on it, yet want it done. And now there are NTT who want never to go TT because not only do they not want to have to do a particular amount of research but they also want to not do service. And they don’t believe in shared governance, the work of it, although of course they want to be consulted and vote. So no, I don’t think it is just the tenured who aren’t dedicated enough.
You are right about service–and too much is being demanded of full-time permanent faculty in that regard. They are being asked to be administrators, and almost for free. Yet much of what is being asked should not be faculty responsibilities and we should be fighting that, too. Still, like teaching, real service needs to be appreciated but is not–only the star scholars seem to get much notice. Much real service is, as I wrote in the post, arduous and deserving of release time. It should not become, however, a means for avoiding teaching.
I’m not saying I’m bad at lower division teaching at all — I’m probably better than most — it’s just that I have so many career interests, that’s hardly the first and had it been, I’d have gone community college when I got the M.A. NOR am I saying I dislike it — heck, it’s fun. Lots of things are fun. I just have specific career interests and a lot of the things that I think are fun and respectable aren’t on my personal short list. *And* I don’t like teaching required courses. *Or* as part of multi-section, multi-leveled courses with cumbersome standardized materials and poor management. I mean, freakin’ YUCK.
And IRL I don’t see most of those who virtue-signal about the plight of the adjuncts actually doing much about it (which is probably why they virtue-signal so much).
AND I am irritated with those who aren’t willing to go on the tenure track because they think it is too much work — they want people like me to work on their behalf, but they are not willing to do the same for others.
Re the not saying hello to adjuncts, I’d leave a field that had that kind of ethos. I mean, really. I wouldn’t be in French because of how they behave, and I’ll add English to that now!
Good points. Somehow, we have to work out these tensions between T/TT and NTT. Frankly, I don’t know how. I do know, however, that I was hired to be a teacher and I want to be the best at that I can be–and wish that were respected.
As to departmental ethics, well, I do understand why you would leave a field and I withdrew from my own department for a number of years (into admin, release-time duties, in fact) and contemplated finding a way to stay at the institution but in another department (that would not have been possible). I decided instead to dive back into the department and teach and work with adjuncts.
I would say, tenure track for all. And value teaching. I don’t think this is really that hard but it is hard in a context where tenurability has been defined as production of visible high level research and mega external grantmaking, and where budgets have been cut so tight. My undergraduate professors were major scholars AND good teachers, or major teachers who were also up in field and doing some valid scholarship and service, but this was possible because there was more money then and therefore more time … and those circumstances meant greater collegiality.
And I have more to say on this matter, being in an irritated mood since I always am the day I get back to Louisiana. I’ve got friends in better circumstances than I, who lead the life of academic luxury I wish I did, and I can’t imagine indulging myself the way they seem to me to do, they have so little drudgery (or so it seems to me). BUT they are generating the research I use to teach. I don’t have the time / circumstances to do that, but they do and if I reduced their situation to mine then none of us would have their work to use. Who would win then?
Got that! I came close to burning myself out during my first decade as a full-time academic, writing or editing about a book a year, teaching and meeting my service obligations. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone but I do recognize others who have put in the same kind of effort–including you. And I also recognize the frustrations engendered. For me, the compensation is that I love working with the students at my institution, love even the frustrations and the too frequent failures that make me constantly reassess my methods. I would be hard pressed to turn down a position at a prestigious institution offering a “life of academic luxury,” but I hope I would show the integrity of my own beliefs and satisfaction and turn it down.
I’d take it and not look back; similarly, if I were an artist and could afford it, I would just do art and would not feel guilty about it. The movement-type jobs I’d like are different, and my movement-type actions are different. I do see how people do basic education as a movement-type job, though.
On the question of service: paradoxically, there is now more service, and useless/arduous service, required of faculty and at the same time there are more administrators creating more service … while there is ALSO no more shared governance. For example, we no longer get to work on hiring or vote on tenure, that’s all done by upper administration, but we do very many more lower level tasks — as well as things that used to be jobs of their own (like making contact with foreign universities and negotiating study abroad agreements). Governance and that kind of service, and thoughtful leadership, DO take time and are things that need doing. And I am one of those who thinks faculty should do MORE and not less administration. I think everything that is now done by an administrator with an Ed.D., an outside consultant, a small group of faculty who have stopped teaching and now only do administration, etc., should be done by faculty who also still teach and conduct research, as part of shared governance.
(I am trying to create a Jeopardy game for my class. I think it’s a better option as an activity for this class than some kind of more traditional test. But this is what I mean when I say I can’t honestly put teaching first — other kinds of teaching, sure, but creating this kind of game, writing out the scaffolding for how to compose a paragraph, all of this, drives me *insane* — I don’t like doing stained glass or quilting, either, and creating these language activities is like that. To me, it is very claustrophobic, and I keep having these fantasies of taking the LSAT, or getting in the car and driving to Santa Monica. I could sit still and concentrate if I were getting ready to teach Adorno or something, and that is said to be evidence of my elitist attitude or bourgeois aspiration. I think it is merely indicative of the interests that led me to graduate school.)
OK, one more thing and I will stop hogging the thread. The university as it was when I was a near child had research, teaching and service/administration all as aspects of the same endeavor. Seth elsewhere has described his current job like that. It enables you to really go for whatever it is you are going for. Like my freshman history prof., he was really into research and would teach that to freshmen, and also to his fancy PhD students, and we’d all meet each other, all working at different levels but on the same thing. Now, instead, what I look at is (a) a ghetto of contingents working on administering a commercially produced educational product to disaffected undergraduates required to be there, (b) a set of administrators out of field making major decisions that affect us all, (c) research demands that there is no institutional culture to support, (d) majors produced by the aforementioned educational product, with career interests that do not match the research interests of faculty, and (e) voiceless faculty trying to support these majors, but with the decisions made by (b) working against that. It’s this fragmentation that creates the malaise so many of us feel, I think.
In the past four-plus years I’ve been researching all the factors which have made my undergraduate students, over the last decade or so, harder than ever to teach: very brief attention span, scanning rather than reading at sentence level; the constant deferral of the learning moment until it’s too late, nonattendance at classes, refusal to participate or come to office hours for assistance, and the myth that everything they need will be found on the internet in any case. My work on this continues and I have a draft article I consider useful, practical and containing new recommendations for spoken word assignments, among others (in particular, informing them that these problems exist, and are largely accidental result of technological interventions over the last twenty years beyond their – or our – control, because they’re not aware of them). I’ve never published on pedagogy before, being a medievalist, so it’s been quite slow going. As a result of not publishing much over that time, I’ve been barred from applying for research leave; none of my colleagues who promised to read my draft of the paper have done so, and some eye-rolling is done when I bring up such matters with colleagues – except for graduate or recently-graduated students, who are very interested. I really wish more fellow-profs would engage with thinking these things through. My university invests millions in electronic technologies which glitch and bungle as much as help, and institutes and initiatives which just produce more technology and refuse to recognize that practical literacy is not something we can take for granted. I was referred to a research funding person from one of these, told to come by and describe my problems, then advised by a very young women that I ought to “you know, like break the information down a bit for the students.” I think I’ll have to retire soon and work on government funding and initiatives outside the institution.
I would read your article. And here’s the reason I don’t like lower division teaching: if it could really be about literacy at the sentence level, I’d be fine with it, but it is about teaching students to do exercises and pass a certain kind of test. I don’t have any decision making power over it.
The other thing I came up with years ago about people who “love to teach” was that they actually love to hold authority, not necessarily teach. If teaching were defined differently, if you could teach on a less authoritarian model, and if courses were not required but chosen, then yes, I love to cooperate with people about learning stuff.