What’s Wrong with the World

Perhaps Prof. N was being both "practical" *and* ironic.

Teaching others how to be successfully meretricious while making fun of prostitution?

Not a game I can at all approve of, if so.

But I didn't detect any humor, in any event.

"Part of what it meant for there to be a "good old days," whenever those existed, in the academic world was that professors earned the respect accorded them. And they did so by knowing the value of what they did, a value apart from themselves and their careers and apart from their students' careers, and by passing on that value. Honor to all of you professors out there who still know and do that. You are the small candle to which students come--a vision of a world of learning and wisdom that is the only justification for a university."

I was laughing at your first few paragraphs, but your somber assessment is right on. I have to say, Maggie's experience at Hillsdale, although undergraduate, is inspiring for her in a way that, I think, you would approve.

It's heartening to hear such good things about any college, especially now. A young man we've known since he was very young is at Hillsdale this year and loving it. Perhaps he and Maggie will run into one another.

The main thing English professors need to do is teach, something not one of mine ever did in college or high school. I learned on my own. For example, we were assigned to read Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow, and we were given a major test on that text alone. Being a science major and thinking always about girls and sports first, I was ill prepared to interpret literature. But my friend had a friend in the same class, and we decided to study together since my friend (really smart) also was clueless about literature. But our now mutual friend (who was really, really smart) did know how to interpret literature. So we began the night before the test after reading the book a day or so earlier (which was very boring). Our friend got us going about some of the symbolism before he bowed out (he never finished college by the way). I had gotten the hang of it and became enthused, so I kept my friend up most of the night figuring the whole thing out. I got an A, and both my friends got B's. No English professor ever came close to showing me how to understand literature.

Paul

If pay for humanities professors were limited to, say, 1/3rd the median American household income, and if tenure were eliminated, the careerists and the poseurs would soon disappear. The Mr. Chips types would remain, and do a much better job of instilling a love & understanding of literature, philosophy, etc. in their charges than the grotesques who dominate such fields today.

we have to do worthwhile things, to love those things, and to have a deep desire to communicate those worthwhile things to other people.

Part of the natural consequence of this would be a professor believing, and SAYING, that some things are more worthwhile than others, and that some disciplines are more important than others. This is pretty close to the most grave sin a modern academic can commit. We have a long, long battle before us.

My experience at Thomas Aquinas College was entirely different: the school was started in 1971 on the understanding that modern universities had given up the point of education, and the founders decided to get back to the real business of teaching. The professors there do not publish.

@Steve,

I disagree. Insipid humanities professors are humanities professors for the same reason Al commits large portions of his free time railing at this blog, and likely a number of others, often continuing long after everyone else has moved onto another thread.

Career advancement and tenure are nice benefits, but their greater purpose is keeping score amongst themselves and attending to their own egos. If it could be used as a means of pushing their crazy on impressionable young adults away from their parents, the bad professors would even pay for that opportunity.

The few remaining professionals would quit first.

It would be better for all the departments in the world to be closed than for the meaning of the disciplines to be reduced to the cynical pointlessness reflected in that professor's remark to that student.

It would be more practical to shutter the Political Science and Sociology first. The latter in particular is den of Marxism that makes most English departments look like a stronghold of reactionary, quasi-medieval Christianity by comparison.

Another difficulty with Steve's suggestion is that there are "Mr. Chips types" with families who couldn't support them at 1/3 the median household income. I'd say that a drastic reduction in the universities, in professorial pay or benefits, etc. (which may come eventually if we have some kind of economic collapse), will probably sweep the good and the bad more or less indifferently--randomly. More bad than good will get swept, but only because there are more bad than good there to begin with. As Patrick points out, some leftist ideologues have their own reasons for hanging on as long as they can. They are also pretty much guaranteed to have two-income families. The collapse of the universities might in some overall sense be a "good," but only in the "burn it all down" sense, not in the sense that the good professors will survive.

It's interesting that you shd. say that, Mike T. I had definitely gathered that about sociology. As for poli. sci., I would have surmised that it is as you say, in an almost a priori way (it's political science, after all), but have a friend who is a poli. sci. professor, and the very fact that he could _get hired_ in a poli sci department at a secular university has forced me to think that it cannot be quite as bad as I would have thought.

This piece by Jason Peters at FPR addresses some of these same issues (Peters himself is an English prof):

http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2010/10/handing-higher-education-to-the-cripples-on-john-williamss-stoner/

BTW, I fully concur with Peters's assessment of the Williams book. I read it last fall after seeing the same article in The Sewanee Review that he refers to. It really is a very fine novel that should be better known.

That's a great column, Rob G, and I'd never heard of the novel. It looks like something I should read.

Lydia, if you thought your prof was off base--I had Marjorie Garber for Shakespeare when I was a sophomore. Now, she was a trip! ;)

Oh, that sounds like a must-read; how have I never heard of this novel?! Thanks for bringing to our attention, Rob.

And Lydia's right -- if I couldn't support my family doing this thing that I love, I would *have* to do something else (I am our sole financial support). Not that we make all that much here, compared to the state universities, but I expect it's more than 1/3 the median; very much less and I'd be gone.

John, I can just imagine. I would certainly rather have had Prof. N. than a superstar of contemporary literary criticism (shudder).

According to the Richard III Society, Richard was not a hunchback and he wasn't even a villain. Shakespeare's portrait of him, they claim, was mere Tudor propaganda.

Laurence Oliver's performance as Richard III is a great comic reading of the part.

There is a point to be made here, though: If we academics are even to come close to justifying the prestige we have in society (and I don't think we can actually fully justify it, because academics have, in my opinion, too much prestige in Western society), we have to do worthwhile things, to love those things, and to have a deep desire to communicate those worthwhile things to other people.

I have prestige??

The Chicken

Chicken, if you're an academic, you do. Just think of the power you have over your students. I can say this to you, because I know you won't abuse it. Some people do, though.

Lydia,

Here are some additional thoughts on the subject from a professor who linked to your post:

http://profmondo.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/hearing-the-winds-of-limbo-roaring/

Just think of the power you have over your students.

I have power over my students?? Now, you tell me!

Seriously, most professors I know spend time trying not to get disciplined because a student complains about them. In the market, today, it's the students who have most of the power. I can't make exams to the level I think the students should be performing at because they will complain. A couple of students complained that I gave them optional lecture notes online which were more complete than the textbook. I was asked to remove them by the department despite the fact that all of the other students begged for copies.

The Chicken

It would be interesting, Chicken, to see how these things vary by type of school, by department, etc. With friends with children just entering college, I have horror stories mounting up of professorial nonsense and course nonsense that apparently they get away with without any repercussions. The most striking of these recently was of an English lit. teacher at the local community college who forced two uncomfortable boys in the class to hold hands so that she could smirk over them and ask them, "Does that make you feel uncomfortable?" As far as I know, no one complained, and certainly the teacher was not dissuaded from this exercise in homo-bullying by any fear of student complaints.

Jeff S., thanks for the link. It's always nice to be linked by a blogger doing good work. :-)

Chicken, another thing that occurs to me as far as the "power" issue goes is what I might call educational misconduct that can be spun as "this is my opinion of what my students need to know and do." For example, students can be forced to read or watch _extremely_ inappropriate material, R-rated movies about homosexual couples, even outright p*rn*graphic material, and the like, and/or to write about it. In one composition course at this same community college, students were told to "write about your first sexual experience." The virgins just had to get up the courage to say no. I don't think I ever heard what happened if they refused. But if that teacher were challenged, presumably he would say that it's his class, he thinks this will be a useful educational experience for the students, and who is to challenge him? It's his "professional" decision. You can say that his chairman could stop him, and I agree with that, especially if he is just some untenured flunky, but most chairmen either don't hear about it, think such things are fine, or are worried vaguely about "academic freedom" and hence won't do anything. And if the teacher backs down if a student objects to the assignment, then _for sure_ no one is going to tell the teacher to pull the assignment for the rest of the class: "You got out of it. What are you complaining about?" But there could be plenty of students in the rest of the class who quite legitimately felt uncomfortable with it but didn't have the same courage as the student who refused. There are plenty of examples like this all over the place, where the professor's "educational judgment" equals tremendous power over students in ideologically freighted areas to force them to do inappropriate things or view inappropriate content. I would guess that perhaps you are in a discipline where this doesn't arise.

Richard wasn't a woman, he was just gay.

I don't know, Lydia. Maybe it's the type of institution or the kinds of issues? We are constantly being harassed here by students begging for accommodations of all sorts and running to the administration when they don't get their way. Thankfully our current administration mostly supports us, but the previous one would change grades despite our protests if students complained, would demand that professors dumb down their courses if students complained, would take us to task about homework or whatever if students complained . . . And even with the current administrative support we have, it's wearisome because it's a constant dripping of whine, whine, whine.

I spent nearly an hour during the course of a week with a student over whether he would follow one of my course policies or I would have to toss him out of class. They show up in tears of rage over a low grade and demand that every jot and tittle be explained and then that we raise it because we're so obviously unfair. I had one student tell me *in class* that I didn't understand Romanticism and then tell me that an essay assignment in that class -- one I'd given for several years without *any* student *ever* misunderstanding it -- was so unclear that I HAD to accept his response to it as adequate; he even explicitly told me that I didn't understand the assignment myself! A student caught plagiarizing blamed it on my being "unapproachable" so she was "afraid" to ask for help on the essay. And so it goes day after day after day, and you know what kind of institution we are -- nothing like the kind of foolishness and evil that students *ought* to complain about . . . We're not perfect, but we don't deserve this kind of thing -- and again, even though we have administrative support right now, those student evals are taken into consideration pretty seriously, which, with the previous admin, had us all fearful.

The most striking of these recently was of an English lit. teacher at the local community college who forced two uncomfortable boys in the class to hold hands so that she could smirk over them and ask them, "Does that make you feel uncomfortable?"

I would have gotten up and said "excuse me, I have to throw up now" and left the class. Then I would have marched to the dept. chairman and demanded an accounting for the behavior: unequal treatment, for example, would be a clear issue. Sexual harassment would be obvious (hostile environment). Degrading attacks on my personal attitude and preference is contrary to "diversity". Even more obvious would be "what does this have to do with literature", but since probably nobody in the English dept really understands what literature is anymore (who is willing to admit it, that is), that would be an uphill battle.

I suspect that tenure is one of the pernicious influences on the academic profession these days. It is entirely out of whack. I would like to see universities move to a theory of stability that is much more tethered to reality. I don't object to a certain degree of stability that is greater than the generic "at will" employment arrangement in the rest of society, but tenure goes way too far in the other direction.

It is odd, isn't it, how there are these outrages (like the hand-holding incident) where nobody seems to complain and yet at the same time clearly true teacher stories of never-ending complaint from students.

These aren't obviously inconsistent. It could be that the community college where the hand-holding incident took place _also_ is full of grade-grubbing students complaining incessantly over ostensibly "too hard" assignments and the like.

Could it be that the students are more likely to complain about what they perceive as hardness in the grades than over ideologically motivated bullying and disgusting content? Perhaps they've grown used to the latter in high school?

Just conjecturing.

Which I guess is what Beth meant by the types of issues.

"...they show up in tears of rage over a low grade and demand that every jot and tittle be explained and then that we raise it because we're so obviously unfair...a student caught plagiarizing blamed it on my being 'unapproachable' so she was 'afraid' to ask for help on the essay. And so it goes day after day after day..."

Heh - talk about the "shock of recognition."

And yet, I'm perfectly happy to carry this burden for $2400 a course [the going rate, out my way] - 'cause it's just such a blast! Holding forth about Plato, and Descartes, and Kant, or, better yet, symbolic logic, in front of a captive audience?

It's heaven on earth.

Beth:

What you are experiencing is the result of roughly 25 years of universities and colleges treating education as an instrumental commodity and its students as customers. Remember, in America, the customer is always right.

Francis, that is spot-on. Once we got rid of the idea that universities are about truth, and especially the highest truths, and instead decided that the universities are job-training programs, then it was inevitable that there be a massive shift in perspective: students come expecting to be taught how to make money, and colleges expect to take money from the students to teach them how to make money.

Perhaps we should conduct a little pruning: any college that professes that providing job training is a mark of its central raison d'etre, (or, that that truth cannot be known) should therefore give up its tax exempt status and compete with for-profit institutions. But the ones that actually attempt to teach something because some things are intrinsically worth studying even if they don't get you a job can keep their tax exempt status.

Steve, that's the rate I got for the last class I taught as an adjunct, about 4 years ago.

Frank, yes and no. Obviously, no, the customer is not always right when it comes to forcing students to watch _Fatal Attraction_ and write about it in sociology class. No, the customer is not always right when it comes to Julea Ward being forced to engage in "gay-affirming counseling" on pain of getting kicked out of the counseling program at EMU. No, the customer is not always right when it comes to students being graded off for refusing to use gender-neutral language. No, the customer is not always right when it comes to forcing students in "health" class to put a condom on a banana. Do I need to go on?

The thing is, this just can't easily be categorized. We've seemingly got the worst of both worlds going here. We have spoiled kids acting like a good grade is owed them and terrorizing teachers with complaints that it's "too hard," but we also have bully teachers imposing their ideology and even outright conforming behaviors on the "customers" without the slightest apparent restraint.

Contra Frank Beckwith, I think that what we're experiencing here is the result of many years of treating higher education as a universal right and students as stakeholders.

Actually, Mr. Burton, for me it's the upper-level classes where the students have freely chosen the major and want to be there that are heaven on earth for me -- the truly "captive audience" classes (core curriculum freshman comp) can be nightmares! :) But I *have* been grateful (almost) every day for being able to do something I love -- go on about literature and writing -- since necessity forced me to support my family.

I have to agree with Frank, though, that the "business model" which helped to create "student customers" has created the entitlement attitude we see; it's very apparent that they (and/or their parents) feel entitled to As simply because they paid the money to enroll in my classes. I frankly wonder if most of my students would have even the vaguest idea of what a "stakeholder" is. Of course there are the wonderful students who want to be here and who work hard and care deeply; my husband often reminds me that if the large number of the uncaring weren't there, the school would die and I wouldn't be teaching anybody!

Lydia, having not taught in a secular university for many years, I've been less aware of the kinds of behavior by faculty you describe (I've known it's out there, but I've not ever experienced it as a teacher or from any of my colleagues, even when I taught at KU and MSU). So this apparent difference in what students do and don't complain about is fascinating . . . I need to think on that a bit.

I dont think Lydia, Steve, and Frank have contradictory positions. I see them as aspects of the same problem. I subscribe to the idea that education is a bubble. Too much money chasing too modest an outcome, by too many, for the wrong reasons. I think the days are numbered where people will seek education from a single organization, and I think criteria simply must be made to find out what people know instead of making them go to a class and giving credit for attending and such. There is to much obscurantism in education. I also get squeamish when teachers go on about how self-fulfilled they are, unless that vocation is entirely unique in that sense.

They show up in tears of rage over a low grade and demand that every jot and tittle be explained and then that we raise it because we're so obviously unfair.

Just this thing happened to me last semester. I ended up explaining in enormous detail how my student earned her (fairly low) grade, and when she wasn't satisfied I found another student in the same class who happened to have a similar attendance record and, by pure chance, the *exact same score* on all of his work up until the final exam, on which he had done much much better. I suggested to my student that for her to receive the grade she wanted would be unfair to the other students, in particular to this other student who did receive that grade, on account of having done quite well on the final. She had the temerity to insist that it was unfair of me to compare her to other students, since "individuals differ in study habits, intelligence, and interest in the course", and that she still believed she deserved the grade she was asking for. After all, a lower grade would look bad on a transcript and bring down her GPA.

She didn't get what she wanted, but bah humbug.

Lydia, how about this: "Richard III was a woman" is a metaphor. That's what it "means for it to be true". Maybe in analytic philosophy metaphors are supposed to have an explicit cash value, but why should that be the case in lit crit? In fact, it's exactly the metaphor's indeterminate cash value that makes it, uh, valuable. In what ways is Richard III like (simile, not metaphor!) a woman, whether in the text, in Shakespeare's imagination, or whatever? Good metaphors can aid understanding and stimulate further thought.

FYI for those who decide to read Stoner. If you get the recent NYRB reprint avoid the intro by McGahern until after you read the book. It includes a lengthy plot summary which contains several major spoilers.

(Why do publishers do this, I wonder? Seems to me that if you have an essay of this sort which includes important plot elements you'd make it an afterword instead of an intro.)

Yeah, whatever, Aaron. "Richard is like a woman" was the student's original thesis. One could see what it meant, but it was kind of dumb, because Richard actually isn't like a woman in any interesting sense, but the teacher wasn't satisfied anyway and wanted to up the ante. Nor did she make any attempt to explain what her suggestion could possibly mean in contradistinction to the student's original thesis, nor why we should think it corresponds to anything actually in the play. At all. Nor did she care. She was just suggesting something deliberately outrageous-sounding to help the student "get a publication."

I disagree with Mark in finding anything strange or problematic in hearing teachers talk about their job satisfaction. But I agree with him that the bully teachers and bully students are in some sense two aspects of the same problem. I would say that they are two aspects of this problem: We do not have a critical mass of teachers and students who are teaching and studying for the right reasons. So the problem arises on both sides.

I teach in the hard sciences and you would think things would be pretty cut-and-dry: the answers are either right or wrong, but I have students who were brought up doing nothing but learning to either push buttons on a calculator or plug numbers unto an equation and blindly get an answer with no regard for what the answer means. I actually have had students try to tell me things like 5 miles is the same as 23 centimeters. I tell my students that for the final exam they will be kidnapped and flown to a deserted island with a pile of wood, some food, and the plans for a boat with the plans written in different units for each part and no conversion charts or calculators available. Kids, today, are not as self-reliant as before. They could never build a radio out of a tin can if their life depended on it. I am a proponent of analog education. My generation can do math in our heads because we had pencil and paper or slide rules. We had to learn short-cuts and verification. Everything is done for students. A friend of mine who taught Shakespere used to have her students memorize 30 lines of Shakespere and recit them to the class. She said he had to quit doing it because the students couldn't remember the lines. Google really is making us stupid, lazy, and dependent.

The Chicken

Yes, Chicken, it's probably because you work in the hard sciences that you see more "bully student" problems than "bully teachers" problems.

Though I have to admit that I'm still on hold waiting to see what happens to a student in secular biology class who doesn't pledge allegiance to Charles Darwin. Waiting to gather more data on that one.

I do seem to recall that a recent suicide of a Christian boy who "deconverted" was prompted by an evangelizing atheist biology teacher at the local community college who dared him to read Richard Dawkins's _God Delusion_. I can't help hoping God is making a millstone right about now.

Oh, MC, wouldn't it be great if you could do that for your final?! :) Of course, I would die on the island if I were in your class (there's a reason I teach English and not math or science), but at least I could quote some Hopkins before the end . . . I make my students memorize poetry in certain of my classes, too; they have to do that for Shakespeare, in fact, this semester. But it is harder and harder for them to do so, I notice, mostly because they've never been asked to memorize or focus carefully for a long time on anything ever before.

I'm sorry there are those who are made uncomfortable by teachers who talk about how satisfying this vocation is. For me, I'm always delighted to hear *anyone* talk in those terms about their work, whatever the work is, because it means they see a higher purpose than a paycheck in it, and that's a good and a godly thing.

Which goes right along with the idea that we're not doing either teaching or studying for the right reasons anymore -- which leads to conflicting and inappropriate expectations by everyone for everyone else.

I disagree with Mark in finding anything strange or problematic in hearing teachers talk about their job satisfaction.

Of course I'm fine with expressions of job satisfaction.

friend of mine who taught Shakespere used to have her students memorize 30 lines of Shakespere and recit them to the class. She said he had to quit doing it because the students couldn't remember the lines.

My wife makes the kids memorize all the time - it's part of the curriculum. If you spend a little time every day from 1st grade on (5 minutes) it does get easier. The 8th graders have to memorize Henry V's great speech: "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me thine ears..."

Ha - I know ;-). Just funnin' ya. Yes, they have to memorize Marc Antony's speech as well as Henry's. Now, here's a little odd fact. The syllabus gives you 3 or 4 weeks to memorize longer poems and speeches. But ALL the kids have memorized Jabberwocky in about 3 sittings. No kidding. Something about that piece, as weird and nonsensical as it is, is very well attuned to the ear.

I actually have had students try to tell me things like 5 miles is the same as 23 centimeters.

I had a most frightful experience with a student after a math test: she performed 2 steps both of them TOTALLY wrong and against basic rules of operations, and ended up on the right answer. I gave her no credit for the problem. She pointed out that I said in the beginning of the semester that "if you show the work and get part of the work right, I can give you partial credit" and turned that upside down: she should not be penalized for showing the work, because if she had not shown the work to get partial credit I would have marked it right. Her attitude seems to have been: the ONLY POSSIBLE purpose is to get partial credit on test scores, not to, you know, learn something.

But there are always some students like that. What is bothersome is the degree to which the administration gives in to such bullying. Going back 27 years to when I was in graduate school, I gave a kid a D in a remedial math class (effectively, 8th grade math), but he needed a C to get credit for his one "math course" for his fine arts degree. 2 years later the school called me up (I had finished up and moved on) to badger me about seeing if I could change the grade to a C-, because the kid STILL had not passed a math course, and needed the grade to get his stinking degree. First of all, what the administration _should_ have done is say sorry, no 8th grade remedial math course counts as a course for meeting the requirements of any degree in the program, but obviously they should have told the kid hey, you had 2 more years to correct the problem, get with the program. The worst of it was that he was smart enough to have done better: he only came to class 1/3 of the time, all he would have needed to up his grade would have been to re-enroll in the class and come 1/2 of the time instead, and then take the tests. I have no idea whether the admin office changed the grade without my consent, but back then that was uncommon. Apparently now it is not.

I am curious: how many of the bloggers here are part or full time teachers (or have been, like me)? Seems like more than half.

ALL the kids have memorized Jabberwocky in about 3 sittings.

Yes, it's amazing. I've had a similar experience. You just read it to them, practically, and they absorb it. For some reason I thought Blake's "Tiger, Tiger" would be easier, but it was actually a lot harder for my youngest to memorize.