Joanna Newsom – Good Intentions Paving Company
Teeth for the C.A.W.
Over the last forty years, there has been a dramatic shift in the instructional staff at US colleges and universities. Increasingly, institutions of higher education have hired faculty members who are not on the tenure-track and, in large part, are hired in part-time positions (see app. for more detailed data on these trends). In 1970 faculty members in part-time positions represented only 22.0% of all faculty members teaching in US colleges and universities; in 2007 they represented 48.7%. Of faculty members who are full time, well over a third do not have access to tenure. When graduate teaching assistants are included in the calculations, barely one quarter of the instructional staff are full-time and have access to tenure. The shift toward a more contingent workforce is occurring at all types of institutions in both the public and private sectors.
Coalition on the Academic Workforce, “One Faculty Serving All Students.”
This is a nice summary of what is arguably the most important set of facts about U.S.education at the university level. It’s presence in a mainstream organization’s report, sponsored by the Modern Language Association and the National Council of Teachers of English, among others, isn’t exactly new, but it does represent the fruits of a decades long struggle led by graduate students, starting just as the internet began to take off in the early 1990s. It’s their voices hidden between these lines.
It’s also a remarkably soft take on the sorts of policies that have led to this mess. Noting that the recession is likely to accelerate these trends, the reports says that universities respond in one of two ways: “Some institutions increase their hiring of contingent faculty members to cover enrollment growth. Others reduce the number, resulting in increased class size and workload for full-time faculty members.” Surprisingly, what follows isn’t a critique or a list of better money saving alternatives.
Instead, the report writers launch into a defense of part-time teachers, as if the issue wasn’t the ongoing destruction of an independent academia, but the “‘dissing of the part timers.” Never mind academic freedom of speech, or tenure, or even the quality of instruction, the problem is respect! I suppose I shouldn’t be so cynical; this is certainly a step in the right direction. But its tentativeness is only going to feed the suspicion, hinted at recently in the MLA Newsletter, that not everyone wants change.
Respect is necessary and welcome, but it’s not even a starting point for the change that needs to happen. Here’s three things they could do immediately. The CAW needs to call for the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act and for the end of university policies, such as hiring union busting firms, designed to prevent teachers from organizing. The CAW needs to call for policies that would either freeze or cut the salaries of the highest paid people, not teachers, at universities under financial duress. That’s respect with teeth.
More Sentimental Education
I’ve long wanted to write about the notion of individual instruction, which I think is a harmful myth, a kind of nostalgia for something that never existed. It’s a scary thing to examine, though, simply because so many teachers hold this myth so close to their pedagogical hearts. This week provides an interesting case in point, in the form of a blog entry by Margate Soltan at Inside Higher Ed’s “University Diaries” (“Professormatronic“). Once agin the impersonal culprit is technology.
In this case, the idea of individual instruction arises from a discussion of a student complaint that professors no longer write on papers by hand. It’s very tempting to simply repeat Derrida’s famous deconstruction of the individuality of the signature, but I don’t think it’s necessary to go that far. I would like to know if the student had experienced this “personal” handwriting before, or if this was simply an idea he or she had about handwriting. My guess is that there are lots of people out there who remember the sharp sting of red ink.
I don’t have any complaints about the idea that students benefit from feeling that they have their professor’s full attention, at least briefly. If you ask a question, well, you want a good answer. I can’t see much practical differance between a professor and student pouring over a written paper, or a student and profesor pouring over a paper on the laptop. Much of this piece, though, seems to sentimentalize the technology of a few decades ago. (See this piece on the myths of online education, too.)
Ironically, the technology bemoaned by Soltan is attractive exactly becuase it’s a tool that many feel (perhaps naively) counters the alienation of U.S. culture by facilitating authentic connections. The myth of individual instruction wrongly sugests to students that because all people are unique, their learning is unique. Learning is social though, not individual; we share more than we differ. That should be a source of strength. Human relationships are the root cause of any alienation, educational or otherwise, not technology.
Madeleine Paige – Teardrop (Massive Attack)