The Net that Enmeshes Us All

So will I turn her virtue into pitch,

And out of her own goodness make the net

That shall enmesh them all. (Othello 2.3.355-57)

I have been troubled by a recent conversation in which I found myself trying to persuade a more junior faculty member that she should not propose to team-teach because it would increase her workload (since, at our school, a team-taught class wouldn't count as a full class, and there's no way to get a reduction for 1/2 classes). She asked, "But what if the reasons for it are really good?"--in this case, improving the student experience and getting an adjunct faculty member better teaching. Here was a fairly new faculty member trying to take onto herself the burden of improving teaching and learning conditions at a university to compensate for the fact that the administration has recently taken several steps to raise faculty workload and make teaching conditions for the adjunct faculty less rewarding. It was a kind, self-sacrificing gesture. And here I was, telling her it was a bad idea.

I've had a lot of conversations recently about the fact that education in this country--including higher education--only continues to function, despite continued attacks from governments, private corporations in the education "business," and think-tanks, because of the intense dedication and massive self-sacrifice of most educators. To put it simply: if we all just "worked to the contract," it would all fall apart. If teachers really were as lazy and as self-serving as union-busting politicians want to claim, very few students would learn anything.

To give just one example: recently the IRS set guidelines for calculating how many hours adjunct faculty work per course. They recommended counting all instructional hours and all office hours, plus 1.25 hours for each hour in the classroom. In my program, this means that the IRS thinks that a faculty member works 9.75hrs/week for each course taught. Speaking for myself, 9.75 hours covers the amount of time it takes to teach, hold office hours, prep for class, and read minor assignments (journals, pre-writing exercises before major papers, etc.). Any time a paper is due, however, 9.75 isn't going to cover it. Given the number of students in a section, multiplied by the amount of time it takes to grade a single essay, a grading week requires 8-12 more hours of my time. I'll admit that I'm a slow grader (I struggle to grade a paper in less than 30 minutes), but I also provide my students with a lot of quality feedback on their work. If I were to teach only the hours the IRS believes a college faculty member works for each course, I'd have to resort to grading the way many of my professors did when I was an undergraduate: a grade plus  a two-word comment ("Very nice," "Needs work," "See me," etc.). Or I'd have to stop assigning papers, and instead teach through multiple choice, Scantron exams--which is not a great way to teach or assess the critical thinking and communication skills central to my discipline. Instead, of course, I just work more hours, because I don't see the point in teaching if I'm not going to try to do it well.

Or another example: in response to efforts by the school's adjunct faculty to unionize, the president of Point Park University, asserted that adjunct faculty don't require access to office space because, he claimed, they aren't required to hold office hours (a claim some of the school's adjuncts dispute). Imagine if the adjuncts at Point Park were then to teach according to the letter of their contracts (as far as their president understands them). Want help on a draft of a paper? Tough, kid; according to the president of your university, your professor's job doesn't involve seeing you outside of class. Of course, regardless of whether it's required, the adjunct faculty at Point Park generally hold office hours (for which, apparently, they are not remunerated); they want to help their students succeed, and that means giving more of their time.

These underestimates and misrepresentations of the amount of work that faculty are required to do attempt to justify the wild underpayment of academia's most vulnerable workers, adjunct faculty. On the other side, administrations continuously raise the workloads of full-time faculty, both tenure- and non-tenure-track, to extract more labor without a commensurate raise in pay. At my institution, expectations for research productivity are higher than they've ever been; at the same time, the administration just raised the teaching load of the faculty in my division. Since the service demands haven't diminished, there are really only two options for the faculty: simply work longer hours (again, without a raise in pay), or find ways to cut corners, to save time in either research or teaching activities. Realistically (since it's hard to cut corners in research), this would mean assigning fewer papers, meeting with students outside of class less, teaching the same courses again and again instead of designing new ones, refusing to take on independent studies, refusing to advise student groups, etc. I don't know anyone on the faculty who has taken this approach. When news of the workload increase first came down, we threatened (among ourselves) to stop assigning papers and to do multiple choice exams, to resign from our service commitments, to stop taking on independent studies: but no one actually did these things, because none of us are willing to sacrifice our students' education for something that is not, in fact, the students' fault. We won't let the sons pay for the sins of the fathers.

And this is what administrations are counting on. They know that our dedication means that we will work harder, that we will sacrifice personal lives and family and leisure, to minimize the impact of administrative decisions on the students. They know that they can undervalue our work while demanding more of us, and that people like my new colleague will find creative ways to do more with less--at the expense of her time and ability to advance at the university. They know, in short, that our love of the work we do (not necessarily the same thing as a love for our "jobs" but too easily conflated) makes us eminently exploitable.

This brings me back to the quotation from Othello at the beginning of this post. The speaker here is Iago, one of Shakespeare's most notorious villains, and he's plotting to use Desdemona's good pity towards a friend to engineer the downfall of Desdemona, her husband Othello, and his lieutenant Cassio. In other words, he will use Desdemona's virtue--her desire to help a friend--to destroy her and everyone around her. If there's a better definition of "evil" than this, I don't know what it would be. Iago is semi-demonic in the play; his early announcement of his malignant duplicity--"I am not what I am" (1.1.64)--travesties God's "I am what I am" in Exodus (3:14), and situates Iago as a kind of Satan-figure in the play. His intention to trap Desdemona and Othello in a deadly net made of her virtue, to take what is good and use it to evil ends, is the hallmark of this demonic nature, and will be reprised in Milton's Satan 60 years later:

If then [God's] Providence
Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our labour must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still to find means of evil. (Paradise Lost 1.162-65)

The theological aspect of this dynamic aside, it seems to me obvious that the will to take what it best in people and use it to hurt them, to "enmesh" them in damaging, exploitative structures that are sustained only by the very virtue they twist and destroy, is the highest and most disturbing form of villainy. It is, as Milton's Satan knew, perversion, an attempt not just to exploit, but to convert virtues like dedication to others into damaging forces--that is, to destroy virtue itself, by destroying its ability to effect positive change in the world.

It is thus not, I think, over-dramatic to say that the fight against the devaluation of the work of educators is a fight between good and evil. When we fight for the support to do our jobs well--that is, when we fight for the resources we need to help our students learn--we are at the same time setting a powerful example to our students by refusing to accept the perversion of our dedication into a mechanism of exploitation. We are fighting to show our students that virtue should be rewarded, that the desire to help others is a worthy--not a worthless, devalued--endeavor.