About that Abyss that's Gazing Back at Us

According to the editorial board of our student newspaper, "too much homework has real post-graduation consequences," and they respectfully suggest that professors assign less "homework."

The editorial neatly sketches the abyss into which public higher education is teetering:

1. A college education exists to help you get a good job after graduation.

2. Anything you do while going to college that will help you get a good job after graduation is worth spending time on.

3. Anything you do in college that doesn't help you get a good job is a potential waste of time.

4. Most college courses do not train you for a job. 

5. The things that you do outside the classroom in order to learn the content of your courses (e.g., "homework") are a waste of time.

6. Therefore, the work of learning the content of your courses should be subordinated to the things that will get you a job, like extracurricular activities, internships, and part-time paid employment (which also helps to alleviate your student debt burdens).

Of course, as the students point out, the abyss also looks like this:

Often, students must take on extra jobs and excel in multiple internships to be competitive candidates in their desired fields.From a financial perspective, students often need to work one or more part-time jobs. About 30 percent of students at the University work one or more of these jobs because of the high price of college.With the hefty costs of tuition in mind, students need to maximize their time at the University so that their jobs after graduation can pay enough to help repay their debts.

In my current position, helping English and Creative Writing majors prepare for post-graduation employment, I'm often the one nudging students towards this abyss, urging them to pick up jobs or activities that will help them build their applicable skills and demonstrate them to employers. Our alumni generally seem to get good jobs that they like, but it can take them a few years of floundering first, and our students are more likely to get good jobs upon graduation if they do some of that floundering while they are here.

So my dismay is not directed at the students who are trying to live in this world. It's not even directed at the forces (public divestment in education, funding gaps that are increasingly filled by corporate encroachment, exploitative student debt practices) that have created that world. I've been dismayed by those for a long time, as any reader of this blog knows.

Rather, this editorial gets under my skin as evidence of how lousy public higher education in Illinois has been at pushing back against those forces, how little scope we've given the students--even at the state's flagship institution--to recognize that colleges and universities exist to do anything other than train an entry-level workforce. The DI editorial board has internalized an understanding of higher education that the university itself increasingly puts forward. That's the abyss.

Monsters and Mythical Creatures of Higher Education

More on that U of Chicago letter to the students...

Things that pose a threat to "freedom of inquiry and expression" in higher education:

1. declining levels of public support for higher education.
2. the widespread belief that higher education exists primarily to train an entry-level workforce.
3. student debt
4. ongoing failures to give all students access to an equal K-12 education
5. the increasing adjunctification of higher ed
6. increasing reliance on private and corporate partners to foot the bill for public higher education
7. the proliferation of third-party vendors and educational corporations in the delivery of higher education.

Things that don't pose a threat to freedom of inquiry and expression in higher ed:

1. professors' efforts to prevent bigoted students from derailing discussion.
2. the acknowledgment that traumatized students may find some material difficult.
3. events, spaces, organizations that give students who have, as a group, been historically excluded from certain institutions the opportunity--if they want it--to have community and a sense of belonging at those institutions.

Things that don't exist*:

1. institutionally enforced expectations that faculty not talk about certain things.
2. institutionally enforced expectations that students be allowed to opt out of anything that makes them uncomfortable.
3. institutionally enforced expectations that students be protected from disturbing ideas.
4. the large-scale excision of intellectually viable yet controversial subject matter from college curricula.

*At least not in my experience of teaching at a public R1 for the past 12 years and interacting with lots of faculty at other institutions.

Preserving Intellectual Safe Spaces for White People

It's been a couple of days now since that University of Chicago letter to admitted students erupted all over the media, and I'm still trying to figure out what an "intellectual 'safe space'" is. I've been in and around higher education since 1992, mostly at R1 institutions like the U of Chicago (where, full disclosure, I got my BA). Here are the "safe spaces" I've encountered:

1. A so-designated room in the Women's Resource Center on my campus. I was part of a panel discussion on trigger warnings (more anon) and it was pointed out to everyone at the start of the event. The discussion--which was not part of any formal class--was pretty dry and academic, which I gather is not always the case. Anyway, no one made use of it.

2. Cultural houses on my campus where students of color for whom the predominantly white and privileged campus is not itself a "safe space" can spend time with people who share their positionality.

3. (Not on my campus, that I know of): stickers given for faculty to put on their doors alerting LBGTQ students that said faculty member is "safe" to come out to (e.g., won't "out" them to others or try to talk them out of being LBGTQ).

I'm guessing "safe spaces" like these are not what Dean Ellison had in mind. Closing off these kinds of extracurricular resources would just be mean, and the University of Chicago's own Office of Multicultural Student Affairs (which provides them on that campus) seems to be in no particular danger. I'm guessing it was exactly to exclude such instances that Dean Ellison modified "'safe spaces'" with "intellectual."

So what did he have in mind?  I've certainly heard of faculty using the term "safe space" to demarcate rules of engagement.  As Dean Ellison himself points out, "Civility and mutual respect are vital to all of us, and freedom of expression does not mean the freedom to harass or threaten others." Occasionally professors set down guidelines about how what "civility and mutual respect" mean in a classroom; many trust to their own modeling and guidance to convey that message implicitly. It would be really nice if we lived in a world where professors and students alike could be counted on to civilly and respectfully shut down racist comments and behavior as quickly as they would shut down a creationist demanding equal time in a genetics classroom, but any student of color on my campus can tell you that we are not yet living in that world. I have yet to encounter white students who have been censored by heavy-handed efforts to bring it about.

I have also heard the phrase "this is not a safe space" used to signal to students that class discussion is likely to touch on controversial matters in which students may have some personal investment. I'm sure that those applauding Dean Ellison's letter would be glad to hear of it, except that such statements could be taken to be "trigger warnings" and those are, I gather, a bad thing.

The phrase "trigger warnings" seems to be, uh, triggering, to people who aren't themselves in higher education. It provokes a reaction disproportionate to the words themselves, conjuring up nightmare visions of words, phrases, whole realms of inquiry being declared off-limits and pathetic students cowering in dismay. I don't know where this fantasy comes from. I've certainly never encountered it. The terms is, I admit, irritating, but I'm not sure how one teaches disturbing material productively without the concept embedded in it. In fact, I was using "trigger warnings" before they were A Thing. It's just good pedagogy.  When I've taught Eliza Haywood's 1725 novella, Fantomina, for example, there's a scene of sexual violence early in the story.  I've long been in the habit of letting students know it's coming and that we're going to be talking about it in class--not to get them off the hook for reading it, but because a survivor of rape who knows to expect it is more likely to engage with it intellectually than one who gets blindsided by it.  Depending on the nature of the class (I have had the luxury of small discussion-centered classes), I may mention before we start discussion that some students may have personal experience of sexual violence and so connect differently to the scene than those for whom the question, "Is it rape?" is more abstract.

Is that censorship? It may cause a student who has not considered these matters to think twice and look for some textual evidence before suggesting that Fantomina "was asking for it." There may have been rape survivors who choose that day to take one of their allotted absences. Either way, I'm okay with it--I don't see where either outcome vitiates the intellectual process. Acknowledging the intersection between this three-hundred-year-old text and present-day concerns leads to a deeper discussion than does allowing students to uncritically internalize the narrator's assumption that it's ultimately all in good fun--or asking them to pretend that rape is a thing that only happens in the safe spaces of the printed page.

So when I see people applauding Dean Ellison's bold stand for intellectual give-and-take, I'm baffled. Of course, rigorous debate is a good thing in college, as is coming up against ideas that are troubling and challenge one assumptions.  I've blogged about it, in one of my most popular and enduring posts.

It's that one paragraph, though, that undermines the whole enterprise:

Trigger warning and safe spaces are, in my experience, how students of color, LBGTQ students, rape trauma survivors get the support they need to participate fully in the painful conversations that are part of the University of Chicago experience. To take Dean Ellison's words at face value, to assume that he writes out of some rich understanding of the function of trigger warnings and safe spaces would be to sssume that the majority of University of Chicago students are such delicate flowers that the mere acknowledgment that other students come at these matters from different life experience and need different kinds of support constitutes a deadly threat to their ability to engage fully. And one must then echo the many supportive commentators and ask, how are these students going to cope in a world where people of color expect to being taken seriously as human beings? Where trauma survivors expect not to have their experience erased? Where the intellectual enterprise is supposed to take into account the whole of human experience, and not just that of privileged white people?  What a trigger warning Dean Ellison has given!  And what glorious reassurance, that the University of Chicago is a safe place where the world view of white students will be preserved intact and without threat.

But it would be a mistake to take Dean Ellison's words at face value. As I said, above, the "safe spaces" provided by the University of Chicago to its minority students still stand, and I have every expectation that conscientious faculty continue to to frame their subject matter in ways that will encourage participation from all students. All this letter does is make it clear to the mass media and any well-heeled alumni paying attention that the University of Chicago is dedicated to preserving its intellectual-macho brand. The letter also makes it clear to students of color and trauma survivors (both incoming and prospective) that the brand will be preserved at the expense of their access to it.

The whole letter:

Faculty Union Success

Well. After a nail-biter of a day, this evening, NTFC Local 6546 tentatively agreed to a full contract with the UIUC administration. Further details will be disclosed to the membership tomorrow (Sunday) at a meeting where members will vote on whether to suspend the strike; ratification will take place on Thursday (corrected).

Many things can happen, of course, but it looks like we may be back to work on Monday.

Eventually, too, the drumbeat of strike chants will fade away from my brain.  But for now, variations are triumphantly and insistently resounding in my head.

Tell me what democracy looks like? THIS IS WHAT democracy looks like!

Tell me what excellence looks like? THIS IS WHAT excellence looks like!

Tell me what organizing looks like? THIS IS WHAT organizing looks like!

Tell me what leadership looks like?  THIS IS WHAT leadership looks like!

Tell me what improving higher ed looks like?  THIS IS WHAT changing higher ed looks like.

Tell me what saving the liberal arts looks like?  THIS IS WHAT saving the liberal arts looks like!

Tell me what higher ed should look like? THIS IS WHAT higher ed should look like!

Tell me what the future looks like? THIS IS WHAT the future looks like!

If we can do it, so can others.

What Do Lieutenant Governors Do All Day?

Kentucky's executive leadership lives in a Richard Scarry picture book.  

In their Kentucky, every furry creature that earns a four-year diploma ought to wake up the morning after graduation and go to a building where the offices are labelled with jobs people do all day, and where those labels align with the words on the diplomas that they received.  

There are doors--whole buildings even!--that say "engineer," so that's a good diploma to have. Institutions of higher education in Kentucky can go on encouraging students to get diplomas that say "engineering."  

Search as much as you want over the Kentucky landscape, but there are very few doors, buildings, name-tags or even drawer labels that say "historian" or "French literature."  So diplomas that say those things are bad things to have students ought to stop trying to obtain them.  Silly bunnies!

The Richard Scarry world where diplomas and job titles neatly align does not quite track with the life experience of Kentucky's top elected officials.  The labels on their doors say "governor," but oddly enough neither Lt. Gov. Hampton, nor Gov. Matt Bevin have formal education in government or politics.  Lt. Gov. Hampton's  undergraduate degree is in industrial engineering.  She's done a lot of other things that don't obviously get labeled "lieutenant governor": serving in the Air Force as a computer systems operator, working for nearly two decades in the corrugated packaging industry, and earning an MBA.   

Governor Matt Bevin?  Even worse!  He got one of those unnecessary degrees in East Asian studies! Fat lot of good his fluency in Japanese has done him, eh?  Did he really need all that language study to enlist in the Army?  It sounds from his Wikipedia page like he didn't even get posted to Japan. Maybe he used it in that financial consulting he did in between leaving the army and taking over his family's moribund bell manufacturing business.  Those bunnies.  He could have just majored in some kind of engineering that would help him make bells.

However much one may dislike their politics, both Lt. Gov. Hampton and Gov. Bevin have served their countries, worked hard, and improved the businesses that have employed them. Both of them have a rich diversity of education and experience that no doubt informs their leadership.  They've made successful careers in politics without studying political science.

In the buildings where Hampton and Bevin do their work, they no doubt encounter offices with labels like "fundraising," "human resources," "data analysis," and "strategic development." They work with "project managers" and "content strategists" and "speechwriters."  It's hard to find an institution that offers any of those job titles as undergraduate majors.  However, even if the state of Kentucky could exclusively hire human resources managers who had studied human resources and speech writers who had studied speech writing, would they choose to do so? The criteria for selection is often not the label on the diploma, but the cluster of skills and experience for which the label is, at best, a directional arrow.

Much of a day's work gets done in a world that, unlike a Richard Scarry illustration, is rich in words conveying complicated concepts and difficult information. Every organization, including the state government of Kentucky, needs employees who can navigate comfortably in that world, who can manage in the absence of labels, who can adapt to unforeseen contingencies, who use the information at hand to figure things out as they need to and know where to look for additional resources.

Sometimes, the best person for the job is a history major.  Or a French literature major.  Or a, how you say, east Asian language major.  

What English Majors Don't Know

A short list of things that we can convey to our students.

1. It doesn't have to be like this.  Students who graduate without skills they can market to employers may have made bad choices, but majoring in English wasn't one of them.

 

 2. Few people end up working in a profession directly related to their major.

 3. Even fewer people end up doing the same thing for their entire lives. The statistic of "seven careers in a lifetime" may be mythical, but one doesn't have to search far for anecdata that people change, circumstances and values change, the relevance of particular jobs changes: it's highly unlikely that any industry-specific technical competencies that one gains in college will serve all of one's needs over a lifetime.

4.  Employers care about skills, not majors.  Majoring in English (or other "impractical" disciplines) will make you smarter in a number of ways: able to cope with complex information, comfortable with uncertainty, adept at encouraging inclusivity and diversity, talented at communicating in a variety of ways, skilled at hearing what is not said as well as what is said, experienced in framing problems and seeking out information to solve them, and, yes, good at writing.

6.  Many employers don't know that English majors (and their ilk) have the skills they're looking for. It's on us to get that message out and to help our students learn to make the case for themselves to employers.

5. Few employers care if you're good at going to school.  Granted: maintaining a high GPA is key to landing entry-level jobs at some large companies, and students who have their sights set on law school or other elite graduate study should focus on keeping their grades as high as they possibly can. Outside those specialized circumstances, students may be better served by a mediocre GPA that represents a willingness to take risks, struggle with difficult material, or explore the other kinds of intellectual opportunities that a college campus has to offer.

6. College is a great time to flounder. Students who graduate without a clear professional career path may flounder for a few years before landing in a stable and satisfying job. Students who chose narrow "practical" majors leading directly to a career may flounder once they realize that their eighteen-year-old selves lacked the knowledge to anticipate what their twenty-something selves would value. The more purposeful floundering students can do amidst the extensive resources of a college campus, the better: internships, a wide range of classes, volunteer programs, part-time jobs, student organizations, activism of various kinds, leadership roles.

Leveraging Contemplation

(with apologies to W.H. Auden, The Musee des Beaux Arts)

About education they were never wrong,
The crafters of strategic plans: how well they understood
The human condition; how it must be celebrated
While someone else is leveraging technology or enabling potential partners or just
Doing some civic engagement;
How, when the citizens of Illinois are reverently, passionately waiting
For a state budget, there always must be
Corporations who are happy to build their headquarters elsewhere, sipping coffee
In the innovation food court.
They never forgot
That students must get something in return for their tuition dollars
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the instructors flash Powerpoints on a wall and grade papers
in the glow of laptops not paid for by the university.

In The Public's University: A Framework for the System Strategic Plan, for instance: How everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the citizen may
Have heard the system power off, the final "ping,"
But for him it was not an important failure; the lights stayed on
As they had to in the rooms where economic growth gets
Stimulated; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, the life of the mind as a public good,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Skillz in Action! Thinking Critically about Ads Posing as Copy in IHE.

Okay, class, go read this: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2016/02/08/debate-over-liberal-arts-vs-vocationalism-lazy-one-essay

And then go check out this: http://burning-glass.com/

See, with the right technology purchase, you can turn your impractical liberal arts majors into an entry-level corporate workforce. Painlessly. Effortlessly. It won't hurt a bit. You won't even notice.

This approach requires no major curricular overhaul, no fundamental change to how colleges teach the arts, humanities and social sciences. It should not be a distraction from the fundamental role of these fields: to explore the connections across knowledge and evaluate ideas critically.

How's that again? Just a few paragraphs up, Smigelman was pointing out that academic advisors in the liberal arts, being mostly faculty themselves, were out of touch with the needs of a rapidly changing workplace, clueless about the narrow technical skills that can boost a student's employability. How do you retool THAT academic-advising workforce without distraction from the "fundamental role" of those departments? Has Smigelman ever seen actual actual academic departments collaborate on a certificate program? Has he seen how tapped out faculty advisors already are by the multiple institutional gaps they already have to fill? No biggie:

This is where technology can help. Career applications can tell students what kinds of jobs will be accessible to them and what skills they will need to get there, enabling them to pick courses on the periphery of their liberal arts degree that will give them the practical tools to achieve good career outcomes.

Hmmm. Guess who makes these "career applications"? Yup.

Smigelman isn't wrong about his basic solution: liberal arts students need more help than they generally get identifying their strengths, recognizing the kinds of extracurricular involvement that will help they acquire particular competencies, and learning how to get information about possible careers. But we who help them do that need to keep clearly in mind that our duty is to our students, many of whom will change careers several times in the course of their lives, and many of whom just haven't lived enough yet to know what kind of job will give them long-term satisfaction.

Our duty is NOT to corporate employers who would prefer to offload the training of an entry-level workforce on to institutions of higher learning.

The debate over "practical" majors vs. the liberal arts is not lazy: it strikes at the heart of what higher education is for. Is the purpose of our college and universities to educate human beings and citizens, or is it to train students for their first post-college job? Ideally we do both, but many of us in the liberal arts find ourselves desperately trying to carve out room for the former, while multiple institutional pressures tend toward the latter.

Student who know they want to go into human resources (Smigelman’s example) or advertising or sports management can probably work electives and minors into a suitable program--and more power to them. Similarly, though Smigel doesn’t say this, liberal arts majors can find ways to develop skills through their other activities--every serious student organization needs someone who can run Excel (another of Smigelman’s examples), a part-time job in an institutional communications office can provide on-the-fly training in Adobe, internships make it possible for students to sample potential careers, getting involved in a volunteer organization offers ample opportunities to develop organizational and management skills. And yes, faculty in the traditional liberal arts disciplines can do much more than they do now to encourage these kinds of engagement and to encourage students to situate what they learn in the classroom in relation to their overall life goals.

But how many happy human resources managers knew at eighteen that such a career was what they wanted? And how many students have diligently shaped themselves for a first post-college job, only to discover a couple of years in that it’s not what they expected and that their talents seek a different outlet? Most people do many different things in the course of their lives, and few people end up doing a job directly related to their undergraduate study. Much as we want our students to be employed upon graduation, when we spend four years directing them to jobs that “represent compelling targets” and making sure that they acquire “technical skill bundles” along the way, we’re diverting energy away from the fundamental work of our disciplines and making the interests of employers our own.

It's not lazy to see this as a problem worth arguing about within our institutions and departments. It IS lazy to pretend that a software program will allow us to serve our students without inadvertently selling their souls.

Humanities the Sh*t Out of This

Humanities departments don’t just have an image problem, they are stymied by a paradox.   

Any argument for the employability of majors in history, English, philosophy, art history, classics, or the like cosies up to the premise that the goal of higher education ought to be career training, above all else. Greater knowledge and understanding is, for the humanist, worth pursuing for its own sake. Our disciplines lead to no patents and offer few insights with monetizable implications for meeting current needs. Nor should they: while some solid work in the humanities reaches a broad audience, the arc of direct market value tends towards bland truths, false commonplaces, and lucrative lies. Moreover, teaching students to excel at entry-level professional tasks defeats the goal of a liberal arts education: informed and open-ended grappling with the complex truths of human life.

Nonetheless, humanities departments need students to major in their disciplines if they are to survive, and students insist--reasonably--that the credential they earn should pay back the debt they incur to get it. Those not committed to the liberal arts (much less the specifically humanistic ones) will be quick to tell you that a humanities BA is an expensive journey to a career in fast food service. Those committed to the liberal arts may point out that humanistic study equips students with crucial critical thinking and communication skills, but there is no pithy alternative to the fast-food myth. The absence of a linear career path from these majors makes specific examples seem anecdotal to the point of irrelevance.  

The humanities disciplines didn’t used to have to make the argument.  For a while in the early and mid-twentieth century, knowledge of history, literature, and culture was the marker of a mostly elite, mostly white, class status.  A degree in history or English or the classics was a membership card for the applicant pool to corporate training programs and entry-level jobs in a variety of white collar fields.  As the number of students entering college has increased, the array of majors has grown as well, and other pipelines from the academy to the workplace have proliferated.  At the same time, the academic humanities have expanded in the last few decades to cover broader swathes of human experience, and in doing so they have jettisoned their role in shoring up existing power structures. These disciplines have turned their attention to minorities, women, previously underrepresented pockets of experience, and bottom-up narratives: a more accurate and truthful exploration of the world, but one that has diminished the complicity that made the academic humanities valuable partners in stabilizing corporate institutions.    

Humanities departments can assert their continuing relevance--but they also have good reasons not to. Preprofessional course offerings? They draw butts to seats, but not everyone wants to teach grantwriting or build coding opportunities into undergraduate research projects. Extracurricular professional experience like internships and volunteering?  Students get a lot out of such opportunities, but they may legitimately wonder why, if such activities beyond the classroom get them a job, they need to pay for a degree. Lingering remnants of cultural elitism? Well, yes: dwindling state support means that humanities programs flourish best in expensive institutions serving the already well-off students who can afford to attend them.

We can do better.  Another option:

Humanities faculty can recognize that it's skills, not majors, that employers look for. Without changing anything in the curriculum, they can teach students to recognize the capacities they are building in their humanities disciplines. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the top five skills that employers seek are not STEM-specific. Nor are they obviously pre-professional: they are skills that one needs to accomplish anything, from community organizing to building a boat to managing a household.  According to a 2015 survey of employers conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), they are

• ablity to work in a team structure

• ability to make decisions and solve problems
• abiity to plan, organize, and prioritize work
• ability to verbally communicate with persons inside and outside the organization
• ability to obtain and process information

(https://www.naceweb.org/s10022013/job-outlook-skills-quality.aspx.)

These top five skills  are not humanities-specific either, but there is not one that isn’t improved by rigorous study in humanistic disciplines. Consider, for example, “ability to work in a team structure”--a phrase that (along with its associated buzzword “teamwork” appears in many entry level job ads.  It is meaningless out of context. “Teamwork” in an operating room differs from “teamwork” on a political campaign, which differs still from “teamwork” in one of the sports where the metaphor originates.  

Of course the humanities don’t teach deracinated “teamwork” in any formal sense.  Small-group activities are a common pedagogical strategy, but an occasional twenty-minute exercise in isolating images in The Wasteland  with two or three classmates, or even a semester-long project in researching and presenting a historical counterfactual, will hardly prepare students to  tackle consulting problems for a Big-Three firm. Yet we do teach students to fully inhabit viewpoints that differ from their own; to understand their internal logic and coherence and then to step outside them again.  We teach students that this is what it means to listen carefully. Our students get comfortable with disagreement and learn to ride it to a better understanding than they could have produced on their own. They learn to examine a phenomenon from several different competing perspectives and to gather information while living with uncertainty about which one to embrace. They get practice in synthesizing a range of views in order to arrive at their own informed course of action.  These are all capacities that are relevant to “teamwork.”

Each of these five skills can similarly be divided into component parts that students excel at in different ways; each presents ways to recast “critical thinking” in terms that are intelligible to employers, yet also help students understand their individual strengths and interests.

When students learn to recognize what they do in these terms, they gain agency. Not all students will want to work for companies that are large enough to belong to NACE, much less have a recruiting staff to fill out questionnaires about their practices. Still, knowing they have skills that are valued by such employers makes it easier for students to recognize the choices they have. Being able to talk with some specificity about the particular ways they excel within these broad categories positions them for the work they want to do. Moreover, naming and distinguishing these skills provides a framework for students to consider their priorities beyond paying down student debt and becoming financially independent. What sorts of interactions particularly energize them?  What kinds of problems do they want to solve?  What personal trade-offs are they prepared to take on in pursuit of success?  What values do they want their working life to reflect?

We in the humanities need to wrestle better with this paradox: the impossibility of asserting our relevance without validating the increasingly narrow and instrumental expectations for higher ed. We may not be able to communicate to the corporations that increasingly drive higher ed the importance of the alternative we offer to the limited values of the marketplace.  We can, however, show our students how their learning will help them both succeed within a world that needs their skills and resist the devaluation of their humanity.

Do the Math; or, It's Not about the Money

A tale of two majors: English and psychology.  The number of English majors has been precipitously declining; the number of psychology majors has been rising.  It's true on my campus and it seems to be true a lot of places.

But why?

The knee-jerk explanation for the decline of English majors is their putative unemployability, as the memes at the left would suggest.  That canard is a subject for another post.  But it would then follow that the growing numbers of psychology majors reflect an abundance of lucrative jobs for new graduates.

Except that's not what the numbers say.

According to the spring 2015 Salary Survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, there's no starting-salary advantage to majoring in psychology.  None.  In fact, English majors do ever so slightly better.  The mean starting salary for English majors, based on the reported actual earnings of class of 2014 graduates, was $33.236.  The mean starting salary for psychology majors: $33,192.  Granted, among the 45,000 students surveyed, only 763 of them were psychology majors, and only 317 were English majors.  Still, more than twice as many students saw fit to earn low-ball starting salaries with an psychology degree than an English degree, though it's hard to see why from the numbers alone.

The fact that the numbers are equally damning for both majors compels me to point out that liberal arts students of all varieties are less well-served by "first-destination" surveys than are students coming out of preprofessional college programs.  Students emerging with valuable transferable skills often need time post-graduation to figure out where and how they want to transfer those skills.  Their departments don't, as a matter of course, have the resources for corporate engagement and active placement programs.

Still, for students weighing a choice between a preprofessional major and a liberal arts major, the choice of psychology over English is not self-evidently prudent.  So why are so many students making it?

I have some thoughts, but they await a future post.

What's Next?

Everyone around here spent the weekend reading the FOIA'ed emails on the Salaita case, the College of Medicine, and James Kilgore (not familiar with what's going on? backstory here).  Last night, my department head, Michael Rothberg, posted the following question on Facebook: "What’s next?"  

bargaining team in situ, NTFC Local 6546

Though he was crowd-sourcing the question, he also had some ideas to frame the discussion, which I quote in their entirety below, with Prof. Rothberg's permission (which is in no way meant to imply his endorsement of anything I have to say about them).  

I think it is important for those of us at UIUC to clarify what our goals are after Wise’s resignation and the release of the emails. I post these reflections as part of an open-ended, non-dogmatic effort to clarify my own thinking and to invite others to join me. 

For the purposes of this discussion, I’m leaving aside Salaita’s own claims—reinstatement and financial compensation. These are crucial, but I believe they are going to be settled in a legal forum where we have no influence. In any case, in addition to continuing to support those claims, we need to transform our local context: the UIUC campus and the Illinois university system. 

I’m curious to know what other people think our priorities should be. Here’s a first attempt to draft some priorities (I am not proposing that these are definitive or complete, and they are not meant to be in rank order): 

Want to Be My Provost or Chancellor? Quote a Poem I Don't Already Know by Heart.

When I first started blogging about Salaita, one of several questions that baffled me was why STEM faculty seemed so indifferent to the issues raised by his unhiring.  It seemed continuous with a humanities/STEM divide that had emerged in the course of faculty unionizing, but it was also different in important ways: different stakes, different consequences, different collective action.  I expended a lot of bandwidth trying out different formulations: dead canaries, boiled frogs, competing polarities.

A year has passed since the unhiring news broke.  My job duties have changed, and I now spend more time with administrative professionals from various campus units, less with fellow humanities faculty.  The issue now looks much more straightforward to me, but also much bleaker.  The corporate university has won.  The humanities and interpretive social sciences linger on as quaint vestiges of the ways things used to be done, but nobody who isn't us really knows why they're still here or what they're for, apart from supplying certain service courses.

After any meeting with my non-LAS counterparts, I find myself feeling as if I'm living in an inverted, nightmarish, gruesomely distorted version of Plato's cave: my tenure-stream colleagues, inside the cave, continue to watch their shadows on the wall, blissfully unaware that the cave is about to be razed to create a techno-shopping-R&D-corporate park, where a Liberal Arts Museum Boutique will allow some of them to continue to play with their shadows.

No Downside

The dream of an engineering-based medical school on the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois has been around for a while now.  For a long time, my reflections on the issue looked something like this: Sure, some of our aspirational-peer-institutions don't have medical schools (looking at you, Princeton); yeah, it is a little odd to have a state flagship that only houses the offshoot of a prestigious medical program housed elsewhere.  Be nice not to have to travel to St. Louis or Chicago if I or my loved ones came down with some grave or complicated illness. Whatever. Smart folks who know more about the relevant factors than me are figuring it out.

Then I found myself at a campuswide faculty meeting last fall.  Can't remember which one--there were several.  I was there for the debate about the Salaita un-hiring, union issues, and racism on campus, but I stayed for the rest, so I was there when our provost, Ilesanmi Adesida took the stage.  I had anticipated that only my "it's rude to leave a meeting halfway through" instincts would keep me there, but his astonishingly tone-deaf greeting immediately pinned me to my seat.  To a roomful of people seared by the impassioned commentary from the floor that we'd just heard and the impassive response of the administrators they were speaking to, Ade's enormous smile and "It's a GREAT day for Illinois!" were just--unfathomable.  Had he been listening to anything?  Apparently not.  With no acknowledgement of the hostility, anger, and incomprehension radiating from the faculty whom he is supposed to lead, with no recognition that entire departments and programs were reeling from an administrative body-blow, he told us about the plans for the engineering-based medical school.  We were invited to meditate on that term "engineering-based medical school"--and presumably let its glory fill our souls.  

The Waiting Game? Already Lost

"Waiting room icon" by PanierAvide - Own work.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

"We, politically progressive members of universities and college should no longer wait. We should step up our game and move to other more effective modes of action."  I didn't click on the link until about the fifth time I saw it posted on Facebook: "'Waiting in the Neoliberal University: The Salaita Case and the Wages of an Academic Boycott."  This essay from my colleagues Ellen Moodie and Martin Manalansan IV appeared first in Savage Minds, now it's on Academe Blog.   Tl;dr (as the kids say): we need to keep doing what we've been doing, just more of it.

Were we still "waiting" for anything?  The Urbana campus of the University of Illinois is officially censured by the AAUP and Prof. Salaita is off to Beirut for a year.  The outcome of the lawsuit still lies before us, and a few more anger-bombs may detonate as additional FOIA'ed documents come forward, but it's been over for a while.  Moodie and Manalasan gave us some bones to pick over: Is academic freedom inseparable from the BDS movement?  Was the boycott prompted by forces inside or outside the university?  These have been rich talking points on Facebook this past week.

I'm more interested in what can be salvaged from a fight we've already lost.

Writing, or that which Dare Not Speak Its Name

The emissary from the world of business consulting was fielding questions from students in my course on career planning in the humanities.  "Business consulting needs writers, right?" asked one student.  The business consulting expert visibly blanched.  "Well, not writers, exactly, but we do need..." and he went on to describe any number of key tasks--drafting surveys, communicating results to clients, producing "deliverables"--that most people would call writing.

It's no longer okay to call it that.  Spend some time looking at job ads, position descriptions, career counseling sites and it's clear that no one writes anymore: they create content.  Or they strategize content.  Or sometimes they generate those "deliverables."  Rarely do they "write."  It's a useful thing to know if you're an old-school humanities major staring down the job market.  Type "writing" or "editing" into a job search engine and you quickly reach a dead end.  Type in "content"--or prepare to BS your skill set a bit and type in "user experience"--and many more opportunities emerge.

Anyone trained to closely assess language and tease out implications--which I suspect is most of the readers of this blog--can probably spend the next 15 minutes contemplating the differences between "content" and "writing" and arrive at a conclusion about the corporatization of everything.  "Content" aims to get monetized.  "Writing" may or may not.  

"Effective content" may or may not involve "good writing," depending on the strategy in play. Obfuscation, and a warm marinade of corporate terminology, has value in realms of existence that are well above my pay grade, but then, so can wallet-opening clarity and originality.   But one dare not call it "writing" and conjure up the inevitable waste of time that goes into conveying an important idea with precision.  

"Literature is Ha-a-a-ard!" Wails Empathy Barbie

Gary Saul Morson of Northwestern University asks  "Why College Students Are Avoiding the Study of Literature" in Commentary Magazine.  His answer: because we (mostly college instructors, but also high school English teachers) teach it badly.

(Some might point out that students avoid the study of literature because like to get their Gen Ed. credit in ways that require as little writing as possible--and many literature classes involve a lot of writing. They'd also note the widespread perception that college-level study of literature dooms one to a life of penury and irrelevance.  But Morson doesn't go there.)

No--we systematically ruin literature, in three distinct ways, according to Morson: (1) We load up with critical vocabulary so that students can treat the study of literature as a kind of forensic autopsy that destroys the subject in the course of analyzing it.  (2) We encourage students to judge the literature of the past by the moral standards of the present, which leaves little room for enjoying literary works on their own terms.  (3) We treat literary works not as art but as documentary evidence--we encourage students to read literature as a tool for understanding particular historical moments, not as an aesthetic experience.

Guilty on all charges.  Note that accomplishing both (2) and (3) could be considered a feat of intellectual incoherence and sleight-of-hand so prodigious as to warrant at least some degree of grudging respect.  Yes, of course.  Every semester, I fail my students in all these ways, sometimes in the teaching of a single text.

Saving the Humanities One University at a Time

I offer some ideas on how to do that over here.

Addendum on the Dream of Teaching-Intensive Tenure

Over at Bardiac, there's a fine round-up of the blogospheric response to Michael Berube and Jennifer Ruth's proposal for a teaching-intensive tenure-track. (http://bardiac.blogspot.com/2015/06/metablogging-conversation-about.html?m=1) Yes, it quotes the Good Enough Professor, which makes this post meta-meta-blogging.

If anecdotal data like mine suggests a general trend towards creating some middle ground between tenure and rank exploitation, that seems like a good thing.  Non-exploitative working conditions are better than exploitative ones.  There's a bigger problem, though.  Without provisions for academic freedom, shared governance, and  grievance procedures these improvements will hasten the decline of higher education.  Instructors who, however well-paid and professionally validated, are beholden to the administrators who hire them and not the faculty peers qualified to evaluate their teaching and research, will not sustain the mission of higher education as many of us understand it.

On Chyme, K - 12, and the Liberal Arts

"It takes a great deal of conformity to be a happy K-12 teacher these days." says Fie Upon This Quiet Life, in a thoughtful riff on "The number one problem with K-12 education -- the loss of academic freedom."  

The K-12 problem is also a postsecondary education problem: college instructors find themselves not just teaching students the subject material but also acculturating them to an entirely different conception of "education" than the one they bring with them to college.  Students want to be led to predetermined right answers and to be rewarded for demonstrating their ability to repeat them.  It's on us, then to get them comfortable with the idea that getting it right can involve first getting it very, very wrong and that the "right" answer may mean "the answer that most effectively explains the phenomenon, where the definition of 'most effective' may be subject to interpretation."  

Anna Fischer-Dückelmann,
via Wikimedia Commons

A few years back I contemplated a decisive break with academia.  My new career path, however, required me to return to school, so I found myself in a 100-level nutrition class at my institution.  The facts about nutrition that I learned were largely a more fine-grained and detailed version of things I already knew.  The eye-opener was the class itself: Powerpoint slides supplied in advance with key words omitted, so students would have to listen to the lecture to fill in the blanks.  Study guides ahead of each quiz or exam.  Opportunities for student questions that mostly consisted of students asking to have certain missing words repeated or variations of "will this be on the test?"  I sat there and realized that while I had been in graduate school and teaching classes myself, college education had changed beyond all recognition.  The old term, "spoon feeding," no longer seemed adequate, but I did learn a new metaphor for what I was experiencing. This was chyme-feeding (chyme is the mass of partially digested matter that passes from the stomach to the small intestine).  

But who was I to judge?  I was surrounded by earnest and hardworking students.  Well, there was that guy a few rows down from me who spent every lecture surfing the Louis Vuitton website, but mostly they were taking a summer class to speed up their path to careers in health services, they wanted to learn the material quickly and efficiently, and the graduate instructor teaching the class knew how to deliver it in a way that would get them to the best possible grades on the quizzes and multiple choice exams that made up the bulk of the course.  

"I don't believe any of this stuff we're learning," I heard one buff student say to the lass he was flirting with over the break on day.  "Scientists change their minds all the time.  They don't know."  He went on to describe at some length his own nutrition and fitness regimen.  He clearly cared about the subject matter, but saw no possible connection between the things that might be conveyed in this class and his own health concerns.  Though an isolated assignments asked us to keep our own food diaries and chart our nutrition while reflecting on our choices, and another asked us to analyze the nutritional claims of a consumer product, but there was nothing in the design of the course that would encourage this student to see such exercises as anything but hoops to jump through on the way to a credential.

That summer I became viscerally aware that the kind of liberal arts education I had known myself as a student and that I tried to recreate in my own classes could change lives.  Could.  But I also realized why communicating complex humanistic subject matter to students was so damn hard--they had no tools for recognizing complexity and struggle in learning as a good thing.

The liberal arts need to be in solidarity with K-12 educators and to see their struggles against test-driven curricula as part of our own struggle to maintain norms of academic freedom and shared governance within increasingly corporatized higher education.

  

AAUP Censure: Now What?

As I was writing this post, I got word that the AAUP has voted to censure the University of Illinois.

Will it matter?

Among the reasons that the Good Enough Professor went silent for a while in there was a change in my job duties.  I'm now doing less literature teaching, more helping-English-majors-get-professional-experience-and-find-jobs-after-graduating.  There has been a lot to learn, less mental space for blogging.

In this capacity, I've now found myself at various campus-wide events where, if I'm not the ONLY representative of the liberal arts, I'm one of, perhaps, two. Such events lay bare a truth about the university that I realize I've been blogging about for a while now: that nobody apart from liberal arts faculty themselves see the liberal arts as a critical part of the university's mission.

What I have NOT seen is a university eager to starve the liberal arts into irrelevance.  A lot of good people are trying to do right by their students and their colleges: where "do right" means establish corporate partnerships, supply ample opportunities for students to get professionally relevant experiential learning, supply employers with a deep talent pool, and help their students transition into successful careers.

Are these university staff thereby trying to edge out the parts of the University where the primary goal is, say...learning?  No.  They just don't know anyone here might be trying to do anything else.  Many of them don't even realize we're here as anything other than providers of gen ed courses.  "Wow, 400 English majors?" a colleague in career services at another academic unit said to me.  "I thought it was more like 40."

I would feel a bit like the last ibex wandering the Pyrenees, except that I know that I'm not.  That's a lot of majors.  My colleagues are out there--lots of them.  But our habitat is changing, and here the metaphor falls apart.  We don't need to change to survive, but we do need to make ourselves relevant in an environment that is largely indifferent to our existence.  Academics have more scope to do that than ibices.  L'Affaire Salaita has revealed that institutional features we thought would protect us--the university's mission, the academic senate, shared governance, formal procedures--are broken.   While we work to fix them, we need to also be mindful that our efforts may not, ultimately, matter that much.  The university is not what we thought it was, and we in the liberal arts need to find ways to be salient outside those protections.

When I signed up to attend yet another campus-wide event, the second annual University of Illinois Social Media Conference, I felt the pull of these two different conceptions of the univeristy. As someone who continues to follow the fall-out of Salaita's unhiring and who was acculturated to the critical approaches of the humanities, something calling itself a conference, here, on the topic of social media, that doesn't directly address Salaita's twitter feed comes across as risibly out-of-touch.  As someone who manages a social media account to make the work of my department visible to students, potential majors, alumni, other campus units, potential mentors for our students, and employers, this conference exactly as conceived covers topics and issues that can help me do my job better, and derailing it with the Salaita affair would be a pointless exercise.  It's taken me a scant six months to internalize a view of the university where work goes on while AAUP censure is something someone else has to worry about.  Granted, that internalized view is at war with every reason why I ever got into this higher ed business in the first place.  Also internalized.  Some ibices probably lost their footing and died while they tried to migrate to the flatlands while still yearning to stay in the mountains.

I want to be part of a university where vigorous and potentially uncivil debate flourishes--on social media, in student assignments, in classrooms, in conferences of all kinds--not because we're all upholding rules that protect it (although we should be doing that) but because

• our students
• their families
• the communities they come from
• the taxpayers of illinois
• our alumni
• our donors
• the stakeholders in the change we can help bring about

all recognize that such debate matters and that a vigorous education in the liberal arts is necessary to sustain it.  Fighting the AAUP/Salaita battle is necessary, but it's not going to bring that university into being.