The Link:
In College Turmoil, Signs of a Changed Relationship With Students
The Flava:
"There's a big difference between teaching students and serving customers," said Mr. Schwartz at Swarthmore. "Teachers know things, and they should be telling students what's worth knowing and what's not, not catering to demands."
Too often, he said, "we've given students a sense that they're in just as good a position to know what's worth knowing as we are, and we've contributed to the weakening of student resilience, because we're so willing to meet their needs that they never have to suffer. That makes them incredibly vulnerable when things go wrong, as they invariably do." He was speaking in the context of sharp upticks at many colleges in the number of students reporting anxiety and depression and turning to campus mental health clinics for help.
"I see this as a collective abdication of intellectual and even moral responsibility," he said.
Commentary:
Who is this "we" of whom you speak? Surely not me or my colleagues in the trenches. We're not the ones "catering to demands." It's all you in the Dean's suites. You who build "aquatic centers" and overturn our grades and cave into snowflake desires and allow them to believe that everything is negotiable as if we are all on equal footing in the process. But we're not: teachers know things, students don't.
Yet I now feel some hope. The first steps towards improvement are recognizing that there's a problem, and identifying its source.In College Turmoil, Signs of a Changed Relationship With Students
The Flava:
"There's a big difference between teaching students and serving customers," said Mr. Schwartz at Swarthmore. "Teachers know things, and they should be telling students what's worth knowing and what's not, not catering to demands."Too often, he said, "we've given students a sense that they're in just as good a position to know what's worth knowing as we are, and we've contributed to the weakening of student resilience, because we're so willing to meet their needs that they never have to suffer. That makes them incredibly vulnerable when things go wrong, as they invariably do." He was speaking in the context of sharp upticks at many colleges in the number of students reporting anxiety and depression and turning to campus mental health clinics for help.
"I see this as a collective abdication of intellectual and even moral responsibility," he said.
Commentary:
Who is this "we" of whom you speak? Surely not me or my colleagues in the trenches. We're not the ones "catering to demands." It's all you in the Dean's suites. You who build "aquatic centers" and overturn our grades and cave into snowflake desires and allow them to believe that everything is negotiable as if we are all on equal footing in the process. But we're not: teachers know things, students don't.
---From Ogre Proctor Hep.
It's worth noting that this was written by a New York Times columnist who taught at Princeton "in the spring of 2014" (so, presumably not regularly) and was shocked to discover that student evaluations are now an entrenched part of college culture. So apparently a "crisis" that has been chronicled (manufactured?) in large part in the pages of the Atlantic is now going to be solved in/by the New York Times. As several bloggers (whose posts I unfortunately can't locate at the moment) have noted, meanwhile, the majority of the faculty are teaching students who are too busy trying to pay for their educations to spend much time protesting microaggressions (even though they're probably at least as likely to experience the phenomenon as their more privileged counterparts*).
ReplyDeleteThat said, The New York Times is influential, and what we believe to be true is often as important as what is true, so, yes, this seems like a positive development. I actually record a fair number of Cs and Ds, and more than the occasional F (usually in the form of a "stopped attending" grade -- at least at my institution, it's hard to challenge a grade that resulted from simply not doing the work, and the great majority of students don't; the others beg for a retroactive incomplete, and usually end up earning the F after all).
*I'm a bit surprised to see the mention of so many water parks, etc., at public universities, but I suspect that's part of another phenomenon, whereby flagship/big-name (usually due to football) state Us lure both privileged in-state and out-of-state students through various sorts of state of the art facilities, paid for by exorbitant student fees, that only those more privileged students have the time to use (while their less-privileged counterparts end up paying interest on the fee for the use of the gym, viewing of the football game, etc., of which they couldn't take advantage because they were busy working retail/service jobs at all available non-class hours, and probably a few class hours as well). A few years ago, I had a difficult (and probably somewhat rude on my part) conversation with members of my church who were just thrilled at the level of care their athlete daughter was getting "free" at a flagship u in a neighboring state, and had no idea how the facilities she was enjoying were paid for, or what effect that system had on less-privileged students on campus. From their point of view, the whole thing was a wonderful bargain (and probably helped allow them to keep up the mortgage on their million-plus dollar townhome -- which is a pretty average cost for a very nice, but not as spectacular as you'd think, house in the vicinity of my church (if it had survived the developer's bulldozer, the quite ordinary early-20th-century farmhouse in which I grew up would also be worth a million or more, admittedly in part thanks to the land underneath) . And these are decent, generally thoughtful people; in this case,they just hadn't thought, and didn't want to think, about the larger context in which their daughter's education was taking place.)
This comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteYeah, the whole section on student evaluations struck me as a bit weird, particularly when he cited Princeton's policy that students can't see their grades until they complete an evaluation or formally opt out. Surely that doesn't fit with his thesis that colleges give students everything they want, since most students would presumably prefer instant access to their grades. If anything, it's a marker for how much student evaluations of faculty have shifted from being something students wanted and demanded to something the bureaucracy requires of students.
DeleteI could be wrong, but I'm thinking the 'opt out' is as simple as the process for 'I agree to all terms and conditions' on the average End User License Agreement.
DeleteLike most things with kids, they want what they don't have. As soon as admin gave them the evals, they moved on to something else.
The bureaucracy doesn't want students to fill out the evals because it is good for students; they want it because it is good for bureaucracy.
This comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteI just realized how much the amenities don't matter to a certain fraction of the students. I know that if my alma mater had them, I didn't use them. This was pre-rock-wall, pre-water-park days, but I remember rumours of decent work-out rooms with Nautilus and Universal weights, etc.
DeleteI allowed myself 50 cents per week for the pinball machines in the basement of the shitty student union. The rest of my "leisure time" was spent at the job. It didn't even cross my mind that the "rich kids" were the primary users of all that fancy shit... till now. I realize now that I paid serious interest on loans I took out, in part, to cover fees for stuff that I never used.
Damn it!
Of course, some of those rich kids would counter that the breaks I got on tuition came out of their payments, but I guaran-tiddly-dee you it was mummy and dada's payments, not theirs.
This comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteI teach at a university with a large proportion of first-generation students, many of whom work 30-40 hours per week. But although they have less entitlement and less time to complain than their more privileged peers, they nevertheless accept the customer service model of higher ed as a given. I am also hearing more and more students say things along the lines of, "why do we need college when we have Google."
ReplyDelete"The fact that you think that's a reasonable question shows just why you need more education."
DeleteEd, I teach at the exact same kind of school that you do.
DeleteMy response to your students' question would be, "You need to answer that question for yourself. And if you can't think of a reason why you need college, then maybe you should reconsider your enrollment here."
I'm dedicated to doing everything that I can to help my students succeed. But the truth is that some of them are just not ready, either academically or emotionally, for college. These students would be better off working for a few years until they can figure out why typing queries into Google doesn't replace four years of higher education.
MAM and Dagny: I definitely have stock answers prepared for this question, but some of these answers might lead to complaints to my Chair or Dean. ;-) Not only do I see this attitude from some of our best students, but it is also the attitude underlying Silicon Valley efforts to remake higher ed in their own image. MOST people, even very smart and accomplished people, don't seem to understand the difference between information and knowledge (not to mention that, in relying on da Google, the information isn't even in your head). I try to explain this difference in all my classes, but it's not something that necessarily sinks in the first time. Or ever.
DeleteInteresting. Based on your second post I'm pretty sure that we teach at the SAME school.
DeleteI'm only temp faculty and though I LOVE my job, I'm not the main source of income for my family and because the pay is so low and my position so precarious (not because of my performance but because of variances in enrollment and administrative missions-of-the-month) I tend to throw caution to the wind in favor of brutal honesty with my students. I know that someday that will backfire on me.
I think we should all take a few moments to admire that splendid graphic.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the graphic, Fab. It's been used to good effect on other posts as well.
DeleteHere's a nuance the graphic adds here: the idea of students "shopping" for not only professors, but also colleges and universities, on the basis of "easiness" of grading. Administration plays a huge role---make no mistake, a YUGE ROLE---in promoting grade inflation, if not directly through interfering in matters of grading and academic standing, then indirectly through relying heavily on student-supplied metrics in hiring contingent faculty. The customer is always right, and the customer wants bags of A-pluses, and admin is too often happy to cater to that want.
I know not of its provenance. It's clearly not one of "ours," as it lacks the general crappiness and blurriness.
DeleteI'm fairly sure of two things: I didn't put it here, and I've seen it before (the "always right" made an impression). But I can't find it elsewhere on this blog, or anywhere else for that matter; perhaps where I saw it before is no longer publicly available.
DeleteThanks whoever put it here.
*Eagerly raises hand*
DeleteThe original graphic is from Freepik.com, which is an excellent source of free, non-crappy images. I edited it a little for this 2015 post.
I had gone so far as to track down the unedited source at Freepik or vectoropenstock.com, but Google image search refused to cough up the 2015 post that featured the "always right" make-over. I scrolled back through CM till about September 2015 and then gave up.
DeleteSo, thanks, Frankie. I am honored someone saw fit to use one of your contributions on one of mine. Of course, you realize we are now collaborators, thus you may please add me as an author on your next paper.
Hep, Ogre Proctor, and Frankie Bow. "Catchy Phrase That Has Bugger-All to Do with the Actual Article: Long and Rambling Subtitle That Explains at Great and Painful Length What the Article Is Really About." Melancholia: A Journal of Tertiary Education (2016): 1-2. Web.
DeleteFess up: you've been editing for Salon, haven't you?
DeleteEveryone has ignored OPH's query about the "WE" being discussed!
ReplyDeleteLet's be honest: the ranks of proffies are being continually filled with stooges and toadies who (often simply out of necessity) have learned to kowtow to admin and "customer" demands just to keep jobs. And they are also the ones who often "succeed" when it comes to job searches (especially if they can also bluff their way through research).
I and others would still be teaching (or perhaps even have a tenured position) if we had not been swarmed by "colleagues" who Katied, er CATERED to demands to appease unreasonable student requests, expectations, or exceptions.
Once the number of underqualified (and incompetent) students I oversaw had been allowed to squeak around prerequisites had numbered in the double-digits, I knew my days were numbered.