BY EVA-MARIA SWIDLER

I wrote “The Purge of Higher Education,” which appears in the winter 2020 issue of Academe, this past fall while at the start of a year-long furlough from a financially troubled, unconventional liberal arts college. I wondered what would be left standing on the college landscape once the current purge of institutions has run its course, and what kinds of colleges were particularly threatened with closure in the current shakedown in higher education. I concluded that while small liberal arts institutions are generally vulnerable, alternative colleges with student-centered pedagogies are particularly endangered.

The fall was a sad season for me. I’d spent the last ten years working with no more than eight students a semester in intense and personal relationships, relationships that encompassed both students’ intellectual curiosities and emotional landscapes. I accompanied them as they navigated being fully respected and trusted and supported for often the very first time in their educational lives. Now I had no advisees. I missed my students, and my work with them, deeply.

But I got sadder, and angrier, this spring, when I began teaching several courses at various institutions to make up for part of my missing paycheck. I am now personally confronting the realities of the bifurcation of higher education. In my piece for Academe, I wrote about the realities of elite colleges, which continue to have wonderful faculty-student ratios, face-to-face seminars, personal guidance, and professors paid enough to focus abundantly on each of their assigned courses. I also wrote about the evolving counterpoint model of an industrialized college for the masses, complete with a faculty that consists in large majority of constantly rotating, harried, underpaid, and overworked contingents (that’s me), huge classes, and computerized “learning management systems” with special features to act as organizational crutches for those overloaded teachers. But after composing the article last fall, this spring I had to actually live the unfortunate reality of the industrial experience in the form of teaching four courses at three colleges, with enrollments of thirty students per class.

The students in my spring classes are angry, too. They know that their teachers are overburdened, that their classes are too big, that they fundamentally disagree with the only pedagogy they can afford to access, a pedagogy of standardized rubrics and lock-step progressions and anonymity in a crowd. They talk spontaneously about the bewilderment of being expected to captain the ships of their own lives as they approach graduation, when all they’ve ever been allowed to do is to follow instructions and check off boxes. They talk of their resentment at being judged and graded at every moment of their campus day, and of the joy of their work withering under the assessing scrutiny. (They also talk of the pressures of mounting student debt while working at minimum-wage jobs after classes.)

But my students are also stalwart. They shyly stop by my desk after class and wait their turn to ask me if I’ve ever heard of “this cool guy William Morris,” or if I’ve ever read the nature writer Robert Michael Pyle, whose book they came across in a used bookstore the other day. They are heartbreakingly grateful for my floundering attempts to learn their one hundred names in our once-a-week meetings, for an unsolicited email I send to one of them with a reference that I think they might like, for my eye contact and quiet insistence that the class wait together and listen as they struggle to articulate their thoughts in a discussion. They look up hopefully at me as we pass on the sidewalk a day or two after the course has met, waiting to see if I might recognize them before they beam in return when I acknowledge them with a nod and a smile. They persist with dignity, thinking that some day a teacher might see them; they soldier on in their search for meaning and a future. I want to cry.

So the big question that continues to face us is: what will be left? Left, that is, for anyone who is not one of the handful of students in elite schools. The answer we fight for is an important one for the future of citizenship and critical thinking, for intellectual culture, for the future of education. But right now, all I can think about is that the emerging model of higher education for the masses is a crime against the humanity of my students.

Guest blogger Eva-Maria Swidler is a world environmental historian with an interest in alternative pedagogy. She taught at Goddard College for ten years.

Articles from the current and past issues of Academe are available online. AAUP members receive a subscription to the magazine, available both by mail and as a downloadable PDF, as a benefit of membership.