Quit
I cleaned out my office over the past two days. No more teaching. Today's the first day that I'm not a college professor. I've been teaching a dozen years, the last 6 at a medium sized state university in the northeast.
I tell my friends outside the academy that I just got tired of babysitting, and that's as close as I can come to explaining it to anyone.
When I was in college, it never occurred to me that I was there to be placated and entertained. I wasn't brought up in a time when every spelling bee contestant got a ribbon, and where every soccer team went home at the end of the year with a 4 foot high trophy. College was tough, and it was worth something.But something happened - or so it seems - between the end of college and the end of grad school. As soon as I started teaching I was pressured in minor and major ways to ease the students through the big educational machine. Low student evaluations - always a result of tough classes or "honest" grading - resulted in ominous visits to the chair's office or the Dean's office.
And so I slacked off like my colleagues had done, became popular, and taught less and less. I won a teaching award 2 years ago. We have 350 faculty members and I was chosen professor of the year. I'm glad I didn't have to make a speech because I would have choked. I knew I wasn't a good teacher. I had become an entertaining facilitator and that was all. That I was good at that brings me nothing but unhappiness.
And so I got sicker and sicker of it. Sicker of the entitlement and the low expectations of everyone around me. My colleagues have drunk up the Kool-Aid and they look at me like I have two heads when I say I can't do it anymore.
I don't have a job, but thankfully my wife has worked a long time in the bio-tech world and I can probably have a year to figure out a new career. But it won't be teaching. At least not in a traditional college or university. Those places are now - by and large - jokes. So little is expected that drunk and horny students make the Dean's list, and we all smile and pat ourselves on the back for making it so.
I guess I shouldn't say "we" anymore. It's your problem now. I quit.
A couple of years ago I was teetering on this same spot.
ReplyDeleteWhat brought me out of it was just giving up on the notion that I owed anyone anything with my teaching, not the Dean, not the students
I returned to doing exactly what I thought was right, damn the consequences.
After that I could live with myself. If I'd not made that breakthrough, I'd have quit, too.
LOVE this post, and it was one of the final "Ring of DistinKtion" entries. Before my time on the page, though.
ReplyDeleteWhere is the author now? If he or she is "listening," send us an update. Did it work out? Hope so, cause I'm following you out the door in a few months.
ReplyDeleteThis is where I am right now. Teetering on the brink. Thanks for posting it.
ReplyDeleteAye, I'm right there as well, and it's not just the students. Things have changed in the way we treat our fellow faculty.
DeleteAs soon as the dust clears I'm going to put up a post about my absolutely insane campus interview earlier this month. Nothing like sitting in the hotel room the morning of, trying to decide if you should just get right back on the airport shuttle let them figure it out that you've withdrawn.
This is the sort of post I really miss from RYS, the bitter rage-filled "fuck thIS SHIIIITTT!!!!!" missives where the writer has already given up on teaching or is five inches from stealing a rifle and going Charles Whitman on the campus.
ReplyDeleteWhy, you might ask.
Because I feel that these little digital pipe bombs say a lot about where the academic culture is in America, just as the gutter Viennese press of the 1890s said much about what was really going on inside the heads of the average German-speaking Austro-Hungarian. The truth is the average teaching academic is being asked to do the impossible: to teach well, but pass all the nincompoops no matter how inferior those students are as students. The people doing the asking (the deans and other administrators) have decided that market forces are everything and that market models have to be followed, i.e. the student as customer. This model is flawed to the extreme and badly damaging to the Academy, but the ideology of the 1980s-1990s (The Market is God, Never Question the Market) has somehow become the ideology forced on the Academy. I think it says a lot about the "elite culture" of the United States that such slipshod incompetence is allowed.