Faculty don't want to be pawns in a game played by the
administration to secure your housing and dining money.
My advice would be: resist
the shopping for dorm essentials and pack lightly or not at all. Administrative
decisions to get back to campus are likely to collapse.
Preparing for Pandemic U
A
professor's perspective for fall 2020.
Posted Jul 18, 2020
Even at 50 years old, I’m a sucker for new
back to school supplies, the freshly sharpened pencils, the new lunch box or
bag, and the clean blank slate feeling of it all. It signifies the chance to
begin again. And as a professor, I still get that nervous excitement walking
into a classroom after the summer, and think about ways to join my students
with a sense of beginner’s mind, remembering what it feels like to be new to college
and a community. I have many thoughts about this coming fall.
I’ve studied numerous announcements and reopening
plans across the country and they all say much the same thing with a few
deviations that remind me more of a group of people involved in a game
of “Would you rather?” over too much booze, concocting highly
elaborate ideas for social engineering. In March, before we could
even wrap our heads around how dire things would become, colleges went online.
Yet with things far worse now, we are witnessing intricate bureaucratic
machinations for reopening.
Let me share with you what informs how I think
about all this now. When I was in elementary school in the ’70s, my mother who
taught at another school in Cleveland, invited my teachers to lunch at our
house every year. It was a warm, sweet gesture, and the teachers welcomed a
homemade lunch with my mom’s winning presentation of food. Now, this would
strike people as bad boundaries or trying to get on the teacher’s good side for
my grades. The truth is, I did well anyway, and I’m able to look back on this
and see what my mother was trying to instill---a sense of teachers as human
beings for whom we express empathy, gratitude, and respect.
When my mother was 24 and fresh out of
graduate school, she had a student named Ellen who was 12. They’ve enjoyed a
deep, lifelong friendship. Now, they’re 85 and 73. And I have my own
Ellens. Fast forward to when I taught my first college class, and I was 26; a
remarkable student, Amy, who is now in her mid-forties remains a dear friend.
Happily, I have dozens of former students, now friends, who’ve made an
indelible impact on my life and with whom I feel a profound sense of inspired,
mutual mentoring.
The emphasis on students and parents as
customers is a disturbing phenomenon in higher education. The saddest thing to emerge from it is what I
would call adversarial pedagogy which is to say that the kind of alliances I,
and my mother, enjoyed is largely eroded now, and what’s left is something
alienating and broken.
Adversarial pedagogy takes shape in a society
that thinks so little of education and educators and makes that clear at every
turn.
Here’s just a taste of what adversarial
pedagogy looks like: administrators hire more contingent faculty;
approximately, over 75 percent of faculty nationwide are not on the tenure
track and earn an average of $3500 per course in a given semester, are without
health insurance, retirement benefits, and an office, often on top of
crushing student loan debt.
Most faculty, on or off the tenure track,
sacrificed so much in their lives to obtain more schooling with the hope of
advancing into permanent work, and some decided to forgo marriage, children, or buying a home to make their dream
a reality. The amazing thing is people in these positions want this career and really want to work with your
children.
What are we asking of educators this fall? Are
we really suggesting that they should risk their lives even more? Apparently,
devaluing teachers isn’t bad enough; instead, we should actively try to
endanger them.
As parents, you’ve likely saved for years,
made enormous sacrifices, and dreamed of your children’s futures. And, now a
pandemic has seized a chokehold on our lives and you understandably feel like
you’re getting screwed and worried about how screwed your kids will be. You may
be thinking professors are prima donnas who should suck it up and teach your
kid regardless. Please trust me, most of us want to. We really do.
While on nine-month salaries and without
summer pay, yet with the expectation that we will publish so we don’t perish,
faculty are spending hours on zoom to push administrations to be more
forthcoming, to not mislead, and to make decisions based on science and
integrity. Like you, we’re sick of hearing the same empty phrases combined with
highly detailed yet vague and abstracted plans. We’ve resisted and asked
pointed questions to make things more transparent for students and families so
you can make informed decisions.
Faculty don't want to be pawns in a game
played by the administration to secure your housing and dining money. We
want it clear that the language around what face-to-face learning means is
being manipulated. Those of us who said we needed to teach fully online wanted
clarity provided early on for students. Many of us are doing this because it's
more of a choiceless decision in the midst of a global pandemic and
humanitarian crisis. We value your kids' health and safety, your
family's, and our own. We begged for earlier announcements because we
didn’t want you to be deceived and betrayed. We're actively trying to
reduce the very adversarial nature of this because we actually value aspects of
the academic enterprise and want your kids to benefit from those.
My advice would be: resist the shopping for
dorm essentials and pack lightly or not at all. Administrative decisions to get
back to campus are likely to collapse.
I get that you want a college experience
for your child that’s multidimensional, intimate, and meaningful. That’s what
it was for me. Consequently, I loved college and found it completely
transformative. I want young people to enjoy that. You want them to be happy,
and they likely want to get back to campus and spread their wings. My gosh, I
want that too. It’s all about individuating from families of origin and forging
a new path.
When your kids are with us, they share a great
deal about the reckless decisions they make, which are the very things that
give us pause about going back in the fall. I love this age group, I trust
their hopes and fears, but I don’t trust all their behaviors.
And let’s be honest. In a pre-pandemic year,
many of you worried and packed elaborate medical kits for your kids to have in
the event of any ailment. What happens when they do get sick, if they’re
prohibited from flying, have to be quarantined, have to be hospitalized with no
visitors, or come home and get you and your family very sick or worse? Or get
more vulnerable students, faculty, and staff sick? Would it still be worth it?
Or, might this thinking be part of the continuum of adversarial
pedagogy?
The way you talk about what’s to come will
significantly affect your children and how they come to see their professors
and the entire learning experience. I beg you, please don’t add to the
adversarial nature that is so much a part of things. Your students will be
taught by many professors who, while they love students and the subject matter
they teach, may be concerned managing their own well-being and that of their
families. Will you help your students be compassionate and respectful towards
their professors’ humanity?
Part of the point of college is for students
to see the world larger than themselves and to cultivate a sense of independence
and agency to make a difference. Those of us who have devoted our lives to
doing this want to be around a long time to continue on this remarkable journey
with your kids.
About
the Author
