Telemachus and Mentor

BY AARON BARLOW

A commenter who signs herself “RAB” posted, in response to my own last post, about something that has been gnawing at me for a long time, the lack of “presence” of faculty in student lives.  I had never used that particular word as i worked over what we both see happening, but it is a good one.

The advocates of online learning, of digital this and digital that, don’t understand the importance of “presence,” or don’t want to, but most of us who have spent considerable time in classrooms know just how critical it is, no matter what we may  call it. We should all be paying a great deal of attention to it.

RAB writes, in part (emphasis mine):

In a career nudging fifty years now, I have come to believe that true hospitability and communication in an academic setting depends first and foremost on PRESENCE. The instructor has to reliably BE somewhere; the student has to have access to occasions and places for human exchange within the array of educational opportunities, stressors, and needs; and ideally, life allows for the ease that enables patience within the presence. Working against this essential condition is the reality of the part-time-faculty schedule, which rarely includes the luxury of random availability or random unscheduled interactions beyond required (and tightly-scheduled) office hours or brief exchanges just before or after class. Adding a layer of difficulty despite the best of training and intentions are “student services” departments where some students, at least, go with problems and issues and wind up with more layers between student and instructor. All of these factors put a greater burden of interaction on full-time faculty, and deprive part-time faculty of some of the deepest joys of teaching and of academic life. I think most academics are willing to find needed accommodations, are eager to foster exchange of views, consider students to be interesting human beings rather than needy aliens, and welcome opportunities to learn from their students–and in one of the departments where I teach I see full-time (and some part-time) colleagues doing these things very well and warmly indeed, and working to make more such opportunities available. But I fear our institutional and bureaucratic realities get in the way more often than not.

An uncoordinated but effective campaign to undercut the position of “teacher” in American society over the past forty years has eroded the trust needed in educators for what RAB writes about to almost nothing, leading to the constricting of the teacher’s role to the classroom only (where it is often further limited by external curricula) and, more and more, even diminishing the classroom altogether, turning the learning experience into a solitary exercise before a screen. This is having baleful consequences for American education.

We educators aren’t doing enough to fight this. We don’t even know who to target. Or how. We simply throw up our hands as, each year, the mechanization and bureaucratization of education becomes closer and closer to completion, with real educators having a smaller and smaller role.

When I was an undergraduate toward the end of the era of real personal engagement between students and their teachers (close to fifty years ago), my teachers were part of my life. We socialized with them and their families, and they mentored us in ways extending far beyond the classroom.

But Beloit College, the small, midwestern school I graduated from, is at a far remove (and not just a temporal one) from the, fairly typical in this regard, City University of New York campus where I teach—and it is getting farther. At a “vertical” urban campus, both students and faculty drop in for class—and not much more. With a ratio of about 40 students to every full-time faculty member, it’s much harder to build relationships between students and faculty than where is was more like ten to one—harder still, when all of us commute to campus, often for an hour each way (like me) or even more.

To make matters worse, we rely heavily on adjuncts to teach many of our courses—in my department, there are more than two adjuncts for every full-timer, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they teach more than half our classes. The adjuncts have limited office space and little reason to stay on campus beyond one paid office hour a week. They often have another campus to rush off to, anyway. None of us, as a result, is able to be the presence in student lives that my professors were at Beloit.

Though the over-reliance on adjuncts has arisen as a cost-saving measure, it is not as much of one as administrators might like to believe. As RAB points out, student support services have grown alongside the use of adjuncts, taking over some of the duties that full-timers alone can no longer be expected to perform. But, again as RAB points out, this promotes a further distancing between student and teacher. Not only that, but it diminishes the efficacy of advisement. The best advisers are teachers, for they know what goes on in classrooms and can provide a kind of support that non-teaching support staff cannot. There’s no need to go into why that is here, beyond pointing out that, when I had a heavy advisement role on my own campus, I consoled students in tears at least once a week, students who had been rebuffed by other offices on campus. Not by teachers, but by staff nominally there to make student life easier. From what I understand, my campus is no different from any other large public institution.

Teachers, whose specialty is finding ways to connect with students, are often best positioned to deal with student problems. Yet that function becomes a smaller and smaller part of a teacher’s job as fewer and fewer are hired with that expectation (adjuncts are not) and more and newer levels of “support specialists,” people with little experience as classroom teachers, emerge.

The encroachment of administration into arenas once considered belonging to faculty is well documented. But, for all the problems it engenders, it continues. Today, hiring committees are overseen by lawyers and syllabi are constrained by bureaucrats whose boilerplate dominates the classroom more and more each year. Much of this is mandated by outside forces, especially in public colleges and universities, but the administrators don’t complain and don’t fight it—naturally, for it expands their power over faculty.

That it also adds another remove between faculty and student doesn’t bother them at all. And, again, it confirms RAB’s fears.

Real teaching requires real presence—and presence in student lives that extends far beyond classroom and office hours. When that presence is constrained, it becomes less and less effective. Yes, there are way too many cases where faculty have overstepped boundaries in their relations with students, but it is unfair to students to limit interaction because some fail or lead to exploitation. There are other ways the problems can be addressed.

To start, we can at least start stressing the importance of presence.