This is the first December I can remember in my professional life where I haven't been scrambling to prep for spring classes. Some of my colleagues don't have this problem--they teach the same two (or three, four, or five) classes every semester, and they have developed systems so that those classes kind of run on autopilot. They pull out their notes or files or whatever and don't need to do a ton of preparation for them to run smoothly.
I'm much more of a jackass about the whole thing and am usually rewriting my syllabi (sometimes even revising them wholesale at the last minute). I add in new readings and even occasionally things I haven't read, which is super stressful but also a great way to have an interesting experience with your students where you're reading and learning along with them.
But the reason I'm not doing any of that right now is because I took on some extra work this past fall so that I could get what's called a "buy-out" from teaching this spring. I'm doing some administrative work instead, and also ramping up some research efforts.
This is weird and hard to explain to people without sounding defensive or whiny or clueless about the privilege involved in being a professor. Things are further complicated by the fact that I teach in a graduate program rather than in an undergraduate one (for now, anyway) and also that in the back of my mind is always this whole constellation of events, trends, and disasters happening in the swampy bog that is higher education and which feeds in to the exact reasons for why I'm not teaching in the spring even though in everyone's mind that's what we pay you for.
See? Defensive.
You can read much more eloquent scholars than me talk about all this stuff. But I'll just offer a few brief outlines here.
1) Lots of people are really worried about professors who have tenure, because they have probably had a crappy old checked-out professor who was protected by tenure even though they weren't really doing their job anymore. Sometimes that's a problem. Nobody likes the idea of somebody getting paid for work they're not doing or doing well.
But really? Most professors these days aren't even on the tenure-track. We can use the Orwellian term and call them "contingent" faculty, but really they are better called "exploited" faculty. They teach the bulk of undergraduate classes at most universities and even though they often have PhDs and loads of student loan debt they often make less than $20,000 a year, don't receive benefits, are treated as ghosts on the campus(es) where they teach.
And, for the record, tenure itself is increasingly under attack. So it's not really a guarantee of anything anymore, in lots of places.
2) At the same time we have seen the rise of the adjunct class of professors, we have also seen public funding of higher education decimated. Thanks to the cries of smaller government and just a general overall devaluing of providing public goods to the public at affordable prices (and probably also quite a bit of anti-intellectualism) and maybe also because higher education has not always been as quick to change as the "market" would like, most universities without huge endowments like, say, Harvard, struggle to make ends meet. We are constantly threatened with massive and cyclical budget cuts and reminded that our jobs are vulnerable. Few other professions--those requiring advanced schooling, preparation, and geographic promiscuity--face such uncertainty.
3) So universities are forced to make ends meet by a) raising tuition and b) requiring faculty to bring in what are called "research dollars."
4) Therefore, increasingly, those who can afford to go to college a) take out crippling student loans to pay for it and b) demand a sweet "customer service" type experience, where they have sick dorm rooms outfitted with big screens and climbing walls. Universities are thus forced to pour tons of money into pimping out the residential student experience in order to recruit students, whose dollars they need, and must further pressure faculty to secure external research dollars, in order to pay for climbing walls and lazy rivers for floating freshmen.
5) So now you have a system where students often (but not always) want a slick customer-service-type experience, are often being taught by exploited, overworked adjunct faculty and/or the occasional cranky tenured old guy who is working way longer than he wanted to because he needs retirement money like everyone else.
6) Then occasionally those of us who are mid-career also teach, though mostly we are spending our time on many, many committees--which often are important for the health of the university, but are also sometimes used to keep faculty busy, I think. Mostly we spend our time trying to be "research productive." Increasingly this means seeking funding from the federal government or private foundations or donors or businesses who will give the university a percentage of what we bring in. It means we are trying to find ways to supplement our increasingly non-competitive salaries vis-a-vis other professions that also require extensive schooling and debt accrual.
[The thought of not being able to save or borrow enough money to send my own children to college some day gives me fits, and we are solidly middle class].
7) And if we are in a program or a position that also requires our students to be successful--like, say, we work in a small school that values faculty-to-student contact or wants students to finish PhDs of their own--we also spend a lot of time meeting with students and countless (and I mean countless) hours advising.
8) Finally, we always have to be aware of our "national and international reputation." This means frequently presenting at conferences, publishing papers in journals, writing books, reviewing other people's articles, books, and promotion documents, and so on.
All of this is not to say that my job isn't fantastic. It is. I feel lucky most days to get to do this work. It is dynamic and stimulating and I get to meet amazing people, learn fascinating things, and challenge myself to be both excellent and on the cusp of failure all the time.
But it is to say that when you ask me isn't it great to have summer off? Or what I'm going to do with all my time now that I'm not teaching? Or how great is it that they can't fire me now that I have tenure?
I wish I could agree with you.
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