By Edward Schlosser
I'm a professor at a midsize state school. I have been teaching college classes for nine years now. I have won (minor) teaching awards, studied pedagogy extensively, and almost always score highly on my student evaluations. I am not a world-class teacher by any means, but I am conscientious; I attempt to put teaching ahead of research, and I take a healthy emotional stake in the well-being and growth of my students.
Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones.
Not, like, in a person-by-person sense, but students in general. 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.
What it was like before
In early 2009, I was an adjunct, teaching a freshman-level writing course at a community college. Discussing infographics and data visualization, we watched a flash animation describing how Wall Street's recklessness had destroyed the economy.
The video stopped, and I asked whether the students thought it was effective. An older student raised his hand.
"What about Fannie and Freddie?" he asked. "Government kept giving homes to black people, to help out black people, white people didn't get anything, and then they couldn't pay for them. What about that?"
I gave a quick response about how most experts would disagree with that assumption, that it was actually an oversimplification, and pretty dishonest, and isn't it good that someone made the video we just watched to try to clear things up? And, hey, let's talk about whether that was effective, okay? If you don't think it was, how could it have been?
The rest of the discussion went on as usual.
The next week, I got called into my director's office. I was shown an email, sender name redacted, alleging that I "possessed communistical [sic] sympathies and refused to tell more than one side of the story." The story in question wasn't described, but I suspect it had do to with whether or not the economic collapse was caused by poor black people.
My director rolled her eyes. She knew the complaint was silly bullshit. I wrote up a short description of the past week's class work, noting that we had looked at several examples of effective writing in various media and that I always made a good faith effort to include conservative narratives along with the liberal ones.
Along with a carbon-copy form, my description was placed into a file that may or may not have existed. Then ... nothing. It disappeared forever; no one cared about it beyond their contractual duties to document student concerns. I never heard another word of it again.
That was the first, and so far only, formal complaint a student has ever filed against me.
Read the rest here.
In an organization that has abandoned the most powerful communication tool ever discovered, it is not surprising that one of its members would be so profoundly confused. Without voluntary price discovery between consenting adults there is only power politics. Profs like this are getting their just desserts or I might say what goes around comes around. But this prof. won't understand these ideas unless he knows my "social standing."
ReplyDeleteBeing that I hate both liberals and conservatives it always amuses me when they suffer and eat their own
ReplyDeleteA conservative professor friend of mine reports similar fear of student criticism in terms of career advancement at his Christian conservative college. It seems the reality of identity politics gone mad is universal and not just subject to liberal professors at liberal colleges. It is a shame the professor who wrote this piece does not realize this. Also, like the commenter above pointed out, they are reaping what they sow.
ReplyDeleteThe new kids coming up are quite frightening indeed. At my sister's high school graduation, the valedictorian's address highlighted the pivotal moments of said generation's shared experiences, which were the release of a Beyonce album, Obama's inauguration, and the coming of marriage equality. The rest of the speech was largely generational narcissism, with her saying that the question was not whether her generation was ready to go out into the world, but whether the world was ready for them. I mean most people are kind of stupid and unprepared coming out of high school, but this takes it to a whole new level. Eventually reality's going to come crashing down hard, and it'll be up to the few of us who are still sane to pick up the pieces.
ReplyDelete