Fight or Die

This week has been a rough one for faculty in the liberal arts division of my university. Administration has come for our budgets, feeling that we aren't pulling our share of the weight, and in particular they are interested in having the full-time faculty teaching more classes (without any indication that we will get more pay, less service work, or reduced expectations of research output). This is not surprising. I've seen my division face one raising of course caps and two workload increases in the less-than-a-tenurable-number of years I've been here. We've been upset and angry, we've rolled our eyes and made lots of sarcastic comments, we've told each other why this is ridiculous, etc. Once we even wrote a strongly-worded letter. But ultimately we've just accepted our fate, as if our school were run by Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos themselves. There are lots of reasons why we often respond with frustrated resignation, but I want to lay out the reasons here why we should not continue to do so.

Here's what I know. First, I know that the university needs the liberal arts. It needs us both from the perspective of its mission--like most 4-year universities with pretensions to greatness, it holds itself forth as one that provides a well-rounded education--and, more importantly, it needs us because of its core curriculum, the majority of which is carried by the liberal arts division.  While the professional and pre-professional schools may be pulling in the most of the money right now, we are the ones that allow those schools to grow while maintaining the university's identity as a university, rather than an expensive vocational college. That fact alone should mean that the university is happy to subsidize the liberal arts through the lean times. 

Investing heavily in career-oriented divisions at the expense of the liberal arts core is furthemore short-sighted and likely to end badly. The healthcare professions in particular, which have been popular because they offer high job placement rates and decent starting salaries, are not going to continue to absorb the workforce universities like mine are pumping out indefinitely. In 10-20 years, these divisions are unlikely to keep attracting students like they do now; and when the enrollments start to drop, the university is stuck with a less-lucrative faculty that draws down much heftier salaries than those of us in the liberal arts. As far as "job training" goes, the liberal arts offer transferable skills--that is, again, why we carry the bulk of the core curriculm--which means that, while our enrollments may ebb and flow, we're never going to outlast our utility--which goes far beyond the vissitudes of hiring markets. We've been around at least since the 5th century: we're not going anywhere.

All of this leads to the second thing I know: administrators need us more than we need them. Without a liberal arts faculty, there is no university. Period. But if all the administrators suddenly disappeared tomorrow, I'm guessing the faculty could pull together and get the work done--which is the way it used to happen, before the rise of the professional administrator class. This means that the liberal arts faculty has power. This is ultimately true of every faculty, and there have been some important examples of faculties being able to reverse administrative decisions by coming together and expressing outrage in a coordinated, organized way. Both UVa and UT-Austin faculties successfully saved presidents from the actions of their boards of governors, and a recent article out of Harvard details several successful initiatives by the various faculties that halted or reformed badministrative decisions. So faculty can fight, and faculty can win. And because the liberal arts are necessary to the running of the university, liberal arts faculty are particularly well-positioned to exercise some measure of power over the running of the university (though an ideal situation would simply be total-faculty solidarity, where we all recognize that we're in this together and an injustice to one division of the university is an injustice to all divisions of the university).

That doesn't mean that every fight will result in victory, and certainly some prudence is necessary in deciding which battles to fight. But picking one's battles means that one actually has to fight a battle or two--otherwise, one is not "picking" battles, but running from them. This is, I think, where we tend to cripple ourselves, and what we need to change if we want not just to make our jobs into the kind of jobs we want to have, but--more importantly--if we want to save the university from its administrators, if we want the university to be the kind of place that helps students learn not just about what they want to do, but about what kind of people they want to be. As academics, and particularly as a liberal arts faculty, we are trained in careful, considered, critical thinking. As I've discussed previously, we therefore are skilled in finding problems with just about any idea or plan that can possibly be imagined. And so we are reluctant to spring into action, because we can imagine myriad ways in which we can fail. This has to stop. If we aren't willing to act, to take a stand and say this is our battle, we will not only see our jobs turn to shit; we will stop serving our students the way we know they are best served--with a well-rounded education provided by faculty who have the time to develop both their teaching and their scholarship, in order to keep bringing new insights into the classroom. If we're not willing to fight for ourselves, we have to at least be willing to fight for our students.

Make no mistake: it is fight or die time. The foreseeable future of the university will be shaped by the decisions of a largely non-academic administration who thinks only in terms of FTEs  and enrollment numbers rather than quality of education, unless faculty start to stand up and fight. At this point, doing anything is better than what most of us continue to do--which is nothing. If we're not willing to take a stand, if we're not willing to stand up for ourselves and our students, the corporate managers will win. And because the corporate manages are so badly wrong, it will mean the end of the university, at least the kind of liberal education this country has prided itself on providing since the 19th century. We have the power to reverse this trend because we, along with the students, are the university--not the administrators. And it's time we started acting like it.

Tech vs. Teachers

(I've taken a long hiatus from this blog, in part for personal reasons, and in part because I'm just kinda lazy. I hoping to get back to writing more regularly this semester--in part by learning to write shorter posts, like this one.)

In my Facebook feed yesterday morning, I found a link from the Badass Teachers Association to this article about Pearson (aptly named "Everybody Hates Pearson"). The article examines Pearson's reinvention of itself from a publishing house to "get all your education needs here" monolith that seeks total domination of all aspects of education in this country and abroad, while also peeking at high-stakes testing and Common Core fall-out. It's worth reading in its entirety. But it was one quote in particular that caught my eye yesterday morning: 

Today analysts think Pearson controls some 60% of the North American testing market. “From 30,000 feet, the strategy makes sense,” says Claudio Aspesi, senior research analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. “If you believe in the societal pressure to drive improvement in educational outcomes and there’s not money to put more teachers against students, the next best strategy is to try to use technology.”

Aspesi's comment implies that technology is a viable alternative to teachers because, apparently, technology doesn't require money--or at least it requires less of it. Earlier in the same article, however, we get this bit of information:

The business of assessing students through high school has grown 57% in just the past three years, to $2.5 billion, according to the Software & Information Industry Association.

The graph presented just below in the article shows an increase in the "testing and assessment market" from $1.6 billion in 2010-11 to $2.5 billion in 2012-13. That's an increase of $900 million in two years. If the technology Aspesi refers to is this testing and assessment software (which, from the context in which the article places the quotation, seems to be the case), then it seems a bit of a mistake--a nearly billion-dollar mistake--to claim that technology is an affordable alternative to teachers.

The real issue here, of course, is that assessment and teaching--and assessment and learning--are just not the same thing. Investing in assessment instead of investing in teachers is like investing in sommeliers instead of investing in grapes and grape growers. If you want specific outcomes, it makes very little sense to invest heavily in testing those outcomes if you haven't also--and first--put the time and money into cultivating those outcomes. In education, that means investing in students and teachers. This can't be an either/or situation. Every time we put money into assessment before putting money into teaching, we're short-changing the part of the process that actually matters.

Aspesi's comment stood out to me not just because it seemed so obviously confused, but because I've heard it before: from administrators, from voices on my television. There seem to be a lot of people out there who think that technology is a viable replacement (as opposed to a supplement) for teachers. And a lot of the time, we are told that technology is better because it's "cheaper." But it's not: if it were, these massive profit-seeking entities would seek other markets in which to do business. What technology is--at least from the perspective of administrators and legislators--is easy. It comes pre-packaged, with its own tech support (no doubt for an ongoing fee), and--best of all--it doesn't talk back, doesn't disagree, doesn't engage in contract disputes, doesn't organize against (mis)management. This is, I think, the real appeal for those (largely non-educators) who think working with companies like Pearson is appealing. "Education industry" mononliths don't provide a cheaper way to get things done in the classroom; they provide ease of management. That's an "educational outcome" that has exactly nothing to do with the good of the students.