At one point I had plans to think and write more about working in a university. It’s been a minute since I’ve done anything on that.
I’ve recently had a few experience I thought I’d jot down a few notes on. I’ve been surprised at the opposition voiced on occasion when I say I’m all for grade inflation. The primary argument against grade inflation as far as I’m concerned is that if one does it individually then one may get in trouble with the boss. If everyone does it, though, or if a big enough group of people do it, then what’s the problem? Harry Cleaver says it better than me, read this. This has been a major bone of contention with friends of mine who seem to think there’s something accomplished by giving students poor grades. It’s particularly funny if we’ve just been talking about some complicated theoretical matter, because in this context it’s usually words like “fairness” that get brought up, and a lot of “just”, as in “I just think that…”, in order to avoid giving an argument. It’s also pretty explicitly a matter of work - “if they haven’t done enough work”, as if making someone work is laudable. (The myth being that the work done in universities is without fail of another order - not productive for one, and good for you for another - compared to other work.) This was a sticking point with professors I got to be friends with as an undergrad. I went to college partially on scholarships, partially with some money from my parents, partially from working and paying a portion of my own tuition up front, and a lot of student loans. My financial aid was contingent upon a certain level of grades. I went through a pretty severe depression for a while in college, and I was generally not clear what I was doing there (I would have benefited from taking some time off school after high school and working elsewhere), which meant there were several occasions when I was close to losing my aid. Had I lost that I would have been financially forced out of university, with my tuition money wasted and my loan payment a debt burden with absolutely nothing to show for it. (I still feel that way about the loans sometimes.) Several faculty really didn’t understand this, among other things being ignorant of the policy linking financial aid to grades. I get the impression this is a common thing.
I was chatting with a friend recently about some of this. My friend’s like me in some respects - took a few years out before winding up in university. In my case it was between undergrad and grad. In my friend’s case it was between high school and undergrad, then straight to grad. He’s got somewhat similar activist and workplace organizing experience, and is a lefty. Recently he’s been having what he called half-jokingly an “existential crisis.” Basically, what in the hell am I doing in grad school? He’s nervous that it will prove true that we become what we hate, that is, turn into the things that are rightly criticized about many folks who work in the university. If one takes a certain marxist idea seriously then this is a risk that is more likely than not - work has an impact. (For instance, my partner has noticed that particularly since going back to university I ask less questions than I did when I was organizing full time.) He asked me about my experiences working as an organizer for one of the business unions, as he was wondering if that would be a better route.
Several thoughts about this.
The university is not meritocratic, as I argued in the comments thread here. Full stop.
One of the things that people with experience like my friend and me, in going back to the university, is essentially an attempt to capitalize on knowledge and abilities picked up in other sectors - activist stuff etc. Both idea level knowledge (materials read, discussed, argued over, in some cases written) and capacities (holding meetings, speaking in front of groups, having certain types of one on one interaction). There’s not a totally neat fit between these - that is, some things don’t fit as well, and there are certainly many things I have no idea how to do in university. But there’s other stuff I’m rather good at as a result of those other experiences and which make it easier in university. Like taking over a meeting, for instance. Planning with others to do so, when necessary. Or a class, rather than a meeting. So going back to school is like getting a staff job in an organization - an attempt to take unpaid activity and turn it into a paycheck. The paycheck’s wicked lower now, but the workload’s lower. It’s also more or more obviously/directly narcissistic - I read stuff for me, not for anyone else (in the sense of choosing what I want to read, classes to take - some things are required still - but any good that my reading accomplishes is strictly private, not something good for the rest of the world). There’s also a common tendency toward vertical thought - delegating power to other structures and positions above one’s own location, and toward trying to step into that role with others perceived as below one’s location (mostly in teaching at this point).
I’d really like to read more about the role of staff etc, I know Glaberman’s got some stuff on this particularly in relation to union stewards. One of the reasons many folks go back to university is to spend their time in waged labor on something worthwhile. That’s understandable. I’m now fully convinced that this worthwhile-ness is solely individual, personal, moral. One does not get paid to make a substantive collective difference, in the sense of changing the inertial direction of society at a local or any other level. At least some folks who work in universities don’t agree, which leads to attempts to sketch things as being more valuable - in terms of communist content - than they are. This also leads to an ideology of “we’re all on the same team” between different levels of management and employees, which people buy into at a rate which is I think higher than many other workplaces. (It was similar in the NGOs I worked at.)
“One of the reasons many folks go back to university is to spend their time in waged labor on something worthwhile.”
Wow. They must have a definition of “worthwhile” far beyond any conception I’ve encountered before. I guess they must be defining it to mean something that will benefit themselves personally; unless they’re so delusional that they imagine academia serves some progressive function in society.
Comment by John — November 3, 2006 @ 10:10 am
Thanks for this, Nate. I find myself having some of the same reflections.
But I dn’t know that the worthwhileness of being in the academy can merely be articulated in terms of pure individualism. There’s something to be said about the resources a university provides, and the capacity to redirect some of those resources — conferences to which you invite friends who live far away and pay for their travel!
Comment by az — November 3, 2006 @ 1:52 pm
John you’ve clearly not gone to uni in the US! There’s this whole idea of being a ‘public intellectual’ and so on, ‘intellectual responsibility’ etc. It’s like the implied idea is something like “I’m a communist - I teach Marx!” and that that’s making some great difference. I think it’s actually a constitutive element of the labor process in self-styled left leaning departments, just as it is in the labor process in NGOs etc.
Az, I agree that it’s not a purely individual or purely private thin. I think of it as being often collectively private, the way a reading group is. Also, just so it’s clear, I’m not trying to say that there’s nothing worth doing in the university. I generally like working here. I’m more trying to say that there are worth while things which don’t have any communist content - I think some folks seem to want to take whatever it is they enjoy and say it makes some big difference in terms of having a communist content. Even that said, you’re absolutely right that resources can be redirected and so on. We had a great event this summer using some very nice facilities at the university that we got because of our connections, and we’re forming a student group to be able to do more of that in a consistent way. So I certainly don’t think there’s nothing to be found in the university. Basically what my concern is boils down to this: for a while when I worked in the ‘nonprofit’ ’social justice’ industry I believed that by doing my job I was doing this very radical thing. There’s a similar dynamic around parts of my university. I’m now convinced that doing one’s job - while this one or that one may have ethical value and be very satisfying, I certainly respect that - will only ever reproduce the world of jobs, bosses, etc. It’s a pretty basic point, but one that I’ve felt the need to repeat a lot since going back to uni.
cheers,
Nate
Comment by Nate — November 3, 2006 @ 2:56 pm
Having been free of any students for over two years, I’ll be teaching - this time as instructor and not as T.A. - in the winter. It’s a course in the law (=legal studies) department called something like “Law and Regulation.” In previous years it has been taught as either Marxist political economy or as Foucauldian “moral regulation” (or, indeed, both). I’m co-teaching it with a friend (incidentally, we’re both in third year in the same PhD programme in Toronto, but we’re teaching in Ottawa where we both live) and we’ve decided to re-organize it somewhat. It’ll be Durkheim followed by Foucault followed by Agamben. Two “theoretical” and one “empirical” week for each. The thought of teaching it has filled with me with dread, even if I’m only responsible for six and a half of the lectures. As does the administration of the course - for a variety of structural reasons unique to schools in Ontario, it is largely accepted that standards have slipped on account of student quality slipping. (High school, for those who were going to university, had a “thirteenth grade” and that was recently cut. The result was that students entered university at the same time who had either graduated high school in grade twelve or grade thirteen. The problem was that universities were structured around the nineteen year old - legal drinking, etc age is nineteen in Ontario - and, suddenly, half or more of the new students were eighteen, seventeen and, in some case sixteen. Structurally, the universities weren’t prepared for this; all they did was build new residences and classrooms and computer labs, despite this being a massive cultural change. At the same time, the high school cirriculum had not updated itself for those students graduating in grade twelve - that is, their grades nine, ten and eleven were designed with the expectation of a thirteenth year. People got shafted all around. Plus, there were the universal concerns: online plagiarism, widespread illiteracy, a generation of drugged kids, etc.) Essentially, I stopped teaching when they arrived because I didn’t want to deal with it and my scholarships were large enough that I didn’t need the money from teaching.
I’m not sure how to go about marking the course. It’s pretty much the case that none of them, unless they took second year social theory because of a double-major, will have ever read a “theoretical” text. And, yet, the course is structured around them. Given that this is possibly the only time they’ll ever read something more complex than a policy document, I want to ensure that they do well enough with the texts and, accordingly, I expect few of them to be able to write very good papers. I hope to be surprised, but I won’t hold my breath. At the same time, I can’t give them all the same mark for the reasons you mention above. Generally, I’d prefer getting rid of letter grades for pass/fail - either you did it, or you didn’t. At the very least, all graduate classes should be marked that way, but it likely wouldn’t go over well with undergrads.
Comment by Craig — November 3, 2006 @ 5:55 pm
Thanks for this Craig, and sorry your comment got sent to moderation, I don’t know why it did.
I TA’d last year, this year I’m not teaching. I found teaching writing to be really enjoyable. I’d done a bit of that before as an adult ed volunteer in Chicago. That feels satisfying to me, when students’ writing genuinely improves. I tried to use grades as something of a tool in that - harsh grades on papers along with notes “come see me!” When they did I was pretty conciliatory about the initial grade, told them it was done mainly to get them to sit down with me. Then we’d work out a plan to revise and write more. There were several students whose writing got a lot better and who were very excited. That was the most gratifying part of being in school so far. With those students I gave them really high grades and had an argument as to why I could so. The other students I gave as good of grades to as I thought I could, under the circumstances.
One of the things I tried to do was to walk a line between having my authority be arbitrary and having it be meritocratic. The former was simply a matter of “do what I say, I hold the grade book” in the effort to make students write better who clearly were able to do so. Some of them produced essays in the end that they were really proud of, and some of them got excited about ideas and about having their own ideas taken seriously. All of that was very cool, though it was a fair amount of work. (That’s the main thing that sucks about teaching, the time it takes.) This only worked because people didn’t know I’m a paper tiger, not being actually willing to really penalize them much if they don’t do what I say. The latter, the merit stuff, was an attempt to trick them into thinking they could what seemed insurmountable (write a long paper). It was like “trust me, I deserve to be in charge, and the reason I deserve it is because I know better than you” (a pose I’m not at all comfortable with), “and since I know better than you I can say with all confidence that this method of writing a paper will work like a charm” in the attempt to get them to trust my judgement of their abilities over my own. Same thing, in some cases that worked pretty well and felt good to see students get excited. This also only worked because the students couldn’t see through me. I wasn’t teaching any really difficult material like Agamben in any of this, though. I’m not sure how I’d do that.
There’s a guy in my department who taught an intro class, full of first years, that consisted of nothing but Hegel’s Philosophy of History book. The first week students were like “only ten pages of reading?! Awesome!” They came in totally stunned the next week, I think people got maybe 3 pages in max. He tried to use that shock productively, to push folks to read what they could. He ended up getting some people to really read and wrestle with chunks of that book, which is impressive. I think one of the things he did was have the class collectively parse sentences and paragraphs outloud. I also think he did lose a fair amount of students who just completely checked out in the face of such an impossible task.
Comment by Nate — November 3, 2006 @ 10:08 pm
I’ve had a number of students (and I’m not the only one here) who do poorly on an assignment and come to see me. It’s usually students of the same sort: they are used to getting A- or B+ and they were one grade below that (i.e., B+ or B respectively) on their assignment. These students are the hardest to deal with as they expect the same grade as a matter of course, especially when their scholarships are in the balance. They are often the ones (especially the girls - it is hard to call them men or women) who cry. I mean with actual tears. My usual solution to this problem (and this confuses them to no end) is to let them choose the grade they think they deserve: “You can choose a D or an A+, 50% or 100%, I don’t care! Clearly you think I made a mistake and you have an idea of what the fair grade is, so choose it and I’ll change it to that.” They usually quickly calculate (in part because they’ve already done so in advance) how many marks they need to move up to the accustomed level and they take that as their new mark. It’s reminiscent of the “moral economy” that Thompson talks about, especially in relation to bread riots and the fair price.
Comment by Craig — November 3, 2006 @ 11:30 pm
Great post and thread. Thank you all.
I teach intro. writing and communications courses at a public Canadian college and at a publicly funded but autonomous aboriginal college (as a sessionalist in each instance).
I strongly identify w/ Nate’s comments on the ‘rewards’ of helping students develop basic writing skills and such. In particular, the best feeling comes from working with recent immigrants and/or ESL students, who inevitably, and out of necessity, WORK VERY HARD.
This week, at the non-aboriginal college, we read an essay (from the silly over-priced reader I was thrown into using) by Judy Rebick on “The Culture of Overwork.” It was discussed more enthusiastically than anything we’ve read thus far (meanwhile the short Naomi Klein piece was met w/ baffled silence). For the better part of an hour students in certificate and degree programs discussed the dictates of labour (waged and unwaged), employment,and capitalism.
I admit there are moments–flashes I see in students and in discussion–where I feel that teaching at this level, as opposed to teaching theory at a research university, does occasion minor but real moments of intervention or–for shame–”consciousness raising.”
Meanwhile, at the aboriginal college, I was hired to teach nothing other than “Business English.” And the moments I attempt to critically discuss and counter the notion of unmarked, business-like English propagated by the text are the only moments of real resistance from the students, who want instrumental knowledge, not discussion or critique.
If merely instructing is to occupy the manager/employer/overseer position (and it is), grading is the higher/fire, raise/demote moment. And all this as exploited sessional labor. I am umemployed as of Xmas, working my ass off teaching 4 courses on three different campuses (w/o benefits, etc), all the while trying to get grant and school applications in to do my PhD next fall. Meanwhile, some friends already doing PhDs (w/ secure funding) look at what I do w/ unspoken disdain.
Arg, I say. (sorry to descend into bitching)
Comment by Andrew — November 4, 2006 @ 3:02 am
hi Andrew,
That thing about looking down on comp teaching etc is really interesting. I’ve not taught actual comp so I’m not totally sure what it’s like. Here’s my thoughts and experiences on some of that.
One of the experiences I had before I went back to school was as a volunteer for this program in Chicago for low income adults. People got free humanities classes (reading Plato, Kant, Blake, Shakespeare, Aeschylus [sp?], real canonical stuff) and free books. The students generally were quite poor writers, so the program set up a writing tutor program where volunteers would come in and work on basic writing stuff, I think we were supposed to focus on nuts and bolts of grammar and sentence structure and paragraph/essay structure. We did a lot of that, but we also ended up talking a lot with the students about their ideas and stuff, the conceptual pre-writing stuff. Several of the students ended up writing pretty good essays which they were really proud of and excited about, both in the quality of their writing and in the ideas and thought process that they worked through in doing the writing. That was really fun and exciting to be part of, though a bit weird at first cuz I was way younger than all the students. I’m not at all trying to give this a radical content, it’s an ethical matter but I found it really satisfying as far as job type stuff goes and as a result of that experience I’m convinced that teaching writing doesn’t have to be separate from or shorn of more ‘high’ type thinking and conceptual work.
I’ve also taken a lot of language classes since my final year of undergrad to the present, both in university and out. I’ve found that those classes have been among the most satisfying in the long run, though in the day to day they’re often a bit dull. They’re also generally the most free of professorial and student ego and jockeying etc. (If I could I would take nothing but those kinds of classes, as I really love learning languages.) I can see how teaching a class like that would be less exciting than teaching a class on one’s pet theorist and problematic. I’m not convinced that that kind of class (a language class) is less worthwhile, though. Ditto for writing classes. I think some of the dis on writing classes etc - attitude of not wanting to do that work and looking down on it - is motivated by a fair assessment of those kinds of classes. They’re probably more work to teach, and they’re not as focused on the teacher and the teacher’s interests. That’s pretty reasonable I think, and if folks don’t get excited about trying to get students excited about writing or languages, then they should try hard not to teach comp or languages. What’s ridiculous is the idea that the ‘content’ classes are automatically more important than these classes. That’s simply false. It’s much easier to believe this falsehood if one holds to the type of myth I (maybe clumsily) attacked above, that teaching radical ideas is radical. I think that’s part of why left leaning folks in schools can sometimes be among the worst of folks for looking down on others. (”I’m a communist in my teaching, you’re not.”)
I have an intuition that this stuff also relates to how academic workplaces function, but I’m not really sure. I found a piece by Mark Bousquet, from the Workplace journal on academic labor, which at least loosely relates to this.
http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns58/bousquet.htm
cheers,
Nate
Comment by Nate — November 4, 2006 @ 5:14 pm
I just had another thought, which is that the “my teaching is a communist practice (and yours is not)” thing (god that’d make a terrible pop song title) can be mapped onto the politics/police distinction in Ranciere’s work. This sensibility is one of counting who is in and who is not, and in way which reinforces the counts involved in academic labor.
Comment by Nate — March 17, 2007 @ 6:36 am