The CM Interview: The Contemplative Cynic. Third in a Series.
- What's wrong with the current crop of undergrad students?
They're entitled, egotistical, fragile and have no skills to determine their own levels of expertise or success, so are completely extrinsically motivated.
- What's wrong with the current state of higher education in America?
People think that education is a right rather than something they earn.
- What could regular faculty do locally to improve things?
They should preach social justice for themselves and their part-time faculty who are living below the poverty line. Also: stop wanting to be liked and do the job of passing only people who have mastered the material. Sometimes Admin override our decisions, in which case, we aren't the ones passing students, but the evil Admin are, but I hear so often of faculty who simply cave in to students' bullying and requests to pass a class simply because it sucks to be hated and is easier to be nice.
- What could part-time faculty do to not only improve their working conditions, but also the fate of our students?
They could continue to petition for better working conditions by negotiating with faculty to support them. They're in the least powerful position on campus, so I don't expect there's much they CAN do, beyond finding a chair who is sympathetic to their woes.
@Contemplative Cynic: You're seeming rather cynical these days. Surely you don't believe that undergrads today are "completely extrinsically motivated." This is somewhat unlike you. Perhaps you had a bad week, what with Mr. Shithead Misspellings pressuring you to give him a LOR and the world going to hell in a hand basket?
ReplyDelete;)
How about you take the La-Z-Boy in the compound while I cook you up some sweet chitlins, cornbread, and Billy Beer?
I've been syllabi-ing and that always comes with thinking of the students who need each and every clause spelled out in great detail to cover my ass, so perhaps the Cynic is beating the Contemplative right now.
DeleteI am, however, hard-pressed to find even good students who are intrinsically motivated to learn... but I'm guessing that is not MORE true now than in the past.
Oh, and, yes, please! :) I'm down for some chitlins, cornbread and Billy Beer. Of those three, I know what cornbread is. :)
DeleteBilly beer? Do they still make that? It was marketed during the Carter administration, since it appealed to his brother Billy, a good ole boy if ever one there was. Budweiser will do, if there's no Billy. Chitlins are good: Stevie Ray Vaughan had a song about them.
DeleteRe. answer 1: the first and the second clauses are arguably correct (though maybe overstated, as Bubba said); but I don't see the causation link between them. Maybe the "completely extrinsically motivated" (by praise, the potential of money or prestige) is more of a general societal trend.
ReplyDeleteRe. answer 2: actually education should be a right. Not a particular kind of academic title, but affordable educational opportunities fitting a person's talents and leading to an employable degree.
Re. answer 3: I agree that (tenured) faculty should care much less about
"being liked" and "fitting in". I think if more professors were openly critical and confrontational, and picked department chairs less ready to be bought-off by administrators with promises of "resources", we'd be in a better place.
I linked being extrinsically motivated with not having a clue how to judge one's level of skills because they seem to base their abilities on how much they are praised for it, rather than on how well they did the job.
DeleteI agree that education should be a right; but the model of august and elite intellectuals starring into space as they ponder existence (my advisor's idea of the academy) doesn't really have a place in our current model. If we see the first two years of college as replacing high school (and we should), then it isn't until late college or even grad school that we can finally engage in pushing our disciplines to new levels.
ReplyDeleteFor Answer 4, something I found effective while adjuncting was getting the students and their demanding parents in on the secret. When they come back to an inspirational teacher to ask for a recommendation, only to find out that this teacher was part-time and no longer with the uni, it hurts their future and their education. When parents and advocating students work with adjuncts to create a more reliable and consistent faculty base, then everyone wins.
Tuition-paying students can come together and create a lot more power than poorly-paid and overworked adjuncts, or faculty fearing for the future of tenure.
I agree. Little as I like the "student as consumer" model, tuition-paying students and/or parents *are* buying a (quite expensive) service, and do have the right to get value for their money. We need to educate them about what value would/does look like. I'm not sure we'll ever convince a significant minority that what they're buying isn't an A, or endless sympathy/availability/help, but we *can* point out that things like the professor's overall work load, integration into the university, freedom to choose and revise hir own course materials, etc., etc. contribute to quality. And it's pretty easy to convince tuition-payers that something is wrong when one or two students' pro-rated tuition covers the instructor's salary for the course, and the tuition from the other 20 or 30 or 50 students in the class is apparently going. . .somewhere else. The quickest way to explain the issue is probably to explain that money that should go to instructional faculty is going to administration instead (though that's not quite a full or a fair explanation). They probably don't want to hear that those lovely new dorms and the restaurant-quality dining hall and the extensive sports facilities (for both individual and team use) are other tradeoffs with instruction.
DeleteStill, it's worth a try. At least in my (wealthy, overeducated) neck of the woods, parents know that they don't want to pay for their kids to be taught by adjuncts, though they're a bit too quick to believe "we don't use adjuncts" lines in campus tours that turn out not to be quite true (there's always the unspoken "we call them instructors instead" or "we just hang onto our grad students for a decade or two"). The more we can educate them about what questions to ask, and why, the better (and the more we can push for institutional transparency about percentages of part-time contingents, full-time contingents, etc. in different sorts of classes -- lower-level, where they/we tend to cluster, and where it's rarely good practice to use large numbers of contingents, vs. upper level, where there's an argument for bringing in working professionals on single-class or visiting deals -- the better off everybody will be. If one institution in a group of schools many parents and counselors consider comparable becomes more transparent, then others in the same group will be forced to do the same. There's real leverage there.)
I should clarify: by "Education being a right," I didn't mean that everyone shouldn't have access to Education. I do believe everyone (including the less financially able) should be able to afford it. What I mean is that just because one pays for it, doesn't mean one GETS an Education; it has to be something one LEARNS, rather than BUYS. My unfortunate use of the word "right" misconstrues what I meant there.
ReplyDeleteOh, excellent point, one that my students frequently fail to understand.
DeleteAccess to education should be fair and as inexpensive as possible. Education will require aptitude and effort on the part of the student. Certification should follow the student's being able to demonstrate education. It should not be simply a matter of trading money or effort for grades: learning needs to be demonstrated. Faculty should have the right to decline students who fail to demonstrate proficiency, since the time and resources available to them are limited. All of this has become a hopeless mish-mash these days, I hate to admit.
ReplyDelete#1 on this entry sums up the entire problem. Period.
ReplyDelete