Support NeoGAF

[MHWilliams]

Someone asked me to break this out into it's own thread for discussion. In the original thread, we discussed this article by a midwest liberal professor writing under the pseudonym(?) of Edward Schlosser. In the article, Schlosser contends that there are issues with the current generation of college students and their ability to bring complaints against their professors.

The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that's simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher's formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best.

I have intentionally adjusted my teaching materials as the political winds have shifted. (I also make sure all my remotely offensive or challenging opinions, such as this article, are expressed either anonymously or pseudonymously). Most of my colleagues who still have jobs have done the same. We've seen bad things happen to too many good teachers — adjuncts getting axed because their evaluations dipped below a 3.0, grad students being removed from classes after a single student complaint, and so on.

And these and other passages, the professor touches upon larger problems - consumerist leanings in education and adjuncts fearing poor evaluations - but he prefers to stick on the subject of identity politics and extreme liberalism.

Vox has followed up that article with another article by Amanda Taub: I was a liberal adjunct professor. My liberal students didn’t scare me at all.

I covered sensitive topics in my courses, including rape, capital punishment, female genital mutilation, and disputed accounts of mass atrocities. Our classroom debates were contentious, and forced students to examine their own biases. I kept an "on-call" list that pressured students to participate actively in those discussions. I did not use trigger warnings.

I never had any complaints.

I bring up my own experiences as a reminder that if the plural of anecdote isn't data, the singular of it sure as hell isn't either. The fact that I enjoyed my time teaching doesn't tell you anything about the state of education in America — and neither does the fact that the pseudonymous author of this Vox article is a liberal professor who is terrified of his liberal students.

In fact, a closer read of the article shows that the actual problem the professor faces isn't the rise of a scary new breed of students. Students, after all, have been complaining about their professors and just about everything else since time immemorial.

Rather, if university faculty are feeling disempowered in their classrooms, that's because they do, in fact, have less power at work: the shrinking pool of tenure-track jobs and the corresponding rise in the numbers of poorly paid adjuncts means that many university teachers are in a precarious position right now.

That means that, as Vox's anonymous correspondent wrote in his article, "the academic job market is brutal. Teachers who are not tenured or tenure-track faculty members have no right to due process before being dismissed, and there's a mile-long line of applicants eager to take their place."

In that context, it's hardly surprising that non-tenured university lecturers would take an extremely conservative approach to any perceived threat to their job security. As the "liberal professor" wrote, "in this type of environment, boat-rocking isn't just dangerous, it's suicidal, and so teachers limit their lessons to things they know won't upset anybody."

That is a real issue, with real implications for education, and for academic freedom. But pinning the blame on students' embrace of identity politics is a mistake. If adjuncts and junior faculty members feel insecure enough to censor their teaching or work, then that's a problem in their relationship with their universities, not in their relationships with their students.

Indeed, in that academic environment, it wouldn't matter if liberal identity politics disappeared tomorrow. Some students will always be unhappy about something, and if faculty are this nervous, that will influence their teaching. Indeed, the article itself notes that the only actual complaint the professor ever received was from a conservative student angry at his "communistical" tendencies because he refused to blame poor black homeowners for the 2008 financial crisis.

The problem isn't the substance of student complaints, the problem is that university lecturers are so terrified of the effect student complaints could have. That's a problem to be solved by universities having faculty members' backs, not by somehow silencing the debate over identity politics.

Which is to say, there are larger issues within education that needs to be fixed and focusing on small subsets of those issue do nothing to fix the problems.

 

[The Technomancer]

The rise of the adjunct is a major problem just in its own right. Hands down one of my top three professors at college was an adjunct, and I'm pretty sure he's unemployed now when he absolutely deserved to be full time staff

 

[Mumei]

This topic has been something of a hobby horse for Rebecca Shumann over at Slate for awhile now (and deservedly so), most recently here and here.

 

[MHWilliams]

This topic has been something of a hobby horse for Rebecca Shumann over at Slate for awhile now (and deservedly so), most recently here and here.

And that's a huge issue. From the first article.

But let’s leave aside the fact that ballooning tuition does not, I repeat, does not, go to professors’ imaginary $200,000 salaries. Faculty are by and large co-victims, along with students, in the cratering of the American university system. Scaring the beejezus out of professors is largely redundant, and the GOP’s thirst for their blood is ideological.

But college students are not customers. That analogy needs to die. It needs to be drowned in the world’s largest bathtub. It needs a George R.R. Martin–esque bloodbath of a demise.

But let’s ignore all this, and just reductio to some absurdum. If a university is a customer-service-oriented business—like, say, a restaurant—this means that the customer’s pleasurable experience (and thus continuing patronage) is the sole aim of the university. It does not matter, then, how much or how little the customer learns about a given area of study, because she is “always right.”

By the very nature of what they are signing up to do, college students are not always right, and since customers are always right … well, you know how a syllogism works. Thus the nonprofit university should not be acting like a corporation. That even today’s public universities do act like corporations should be infuriating to state legislators. Instead, they are doubling down, using these blatant category errors as an excuse to run professors out on a rail, all in the name of “customer service” to students who do not yet view themselves as customers.

 

[ibyea]

Yeah, this has been an issue of privatization of higher education all along.

 

[charlequin]

Yeah, this has been an issue of privatization of higher education all along.

In part, certainly, although I think overall economic conditions and the shifting role of a college education are big contributors too.