Professional Ethics I

This is going to ramble a bit, so bear with me.

This morning I finally caught up on the phone with a very good friend, who teaches on another campus.  He is a real scholar and intellectual (much more than I am) and in the past we have spent many late nights talking about important stuff over wine.

Today he reacted when I said it seemed to me that many of our colleagues were punishing their students because they themselves were not teaching at top ten universities.  I told my friend I believe there is a pathos in higher learning  -- I'll talk more about why I think this is -- that leaves many Ph.D.-holding instructors feeling they deserve a better job than the one they've got.  After all, we trained at top schools and want that academic high-culture to be at play in our jobs here.  This very understandable desire, I suggested, ends up punishing our students because they are not Yale or Harvard students, and causes some of us to lose sight of the mission of our institution.

"Are you saying we ought to dumb down what we teach?" my friend asked.  I said no, of course not.  But then he said something I hadn't thought of and am still working over.  "We have a duty as faculty NOT to reflect the cynicism of our institutions," my friend said. He went on to say that to teach any differently at one university than at another would reinforce what he quite rightly called "an academic caste system."  

He's right, of course.  But so am I.  Hmmm. . .

"I feel we owe it to our students to give them the best possible education we can," he said.  I pointed out that my colleagues's words here "the best education possible" reflect promotional material promulgated by this and other universities.  But I know what he meant and agree that good teaching is a matter of finding and drawing forth (educing) what is best in our students.  Still, I said his notion of "dumbing down"  our curriculum took my comment in one very absolutist direction only.  I've been teaching one of my classes Bill Reading's book The University in Ruins, and his idea of "The University of Excellence" is stuck in my head.

I've been brooding on this all day.  Here is some backstory:

Sue is currently in her second year as a graduate student in literature at FAU.  Part of her fee-remittance contract involves her teaching freshman composition, which normally is a very important part of graduate education since it prepares you for the classroom.  But at FAU the graduate instructors teach two sections of 22 students each semester.  That's 88 students per academic year, times four or five papers each, times draft edits: that's a shitload of work.  When I was a graduate instructor at Berkeley classes capped -- and this by California State Law -- at 17; so, imagine, I had 34 students a year to her 88.  

It gets better.  Last month, Sue and the other GSIs (graduate student instructors) were called into a big pow-wow with the Department Chair, who told them "You are IMPORTANT!  You do the most IMPORTANT work on this campus!"  (Thanks, you're doing a great job. . . love you. . . blah, blah, blah.)  Then the chair went on to say that all the ink, toner and paper had been removed from the copy machines in the GSI office and that they would have to get their course materials copied out at Kinko's.  The university is in a terrible fiscal crisis and is cutting corners wherever it can.  Later that week, the Palm Beach Post reported that the FAU trustees had voted unanimously to give the university president, a 10% raise -- from around $360.000 to $396,000.  The university is also building a cinema multi-plex and a new football stadium -- so there's money, even if it isn't going to the most "important" jobs on the campus.

The question that comes up for me here is not only "What is my job?" but "How do I do my job?"  Now, besides the 88 students, Sue and her colleagues are running to Kinko's and struggling to get onto paper the course materials that in this digital age still need to be on paper.  But, and here's the important part, these students are all currently taking full graduate academic loads. So now tell me what "the best education" might be for them.  

Add to this the fact that many of the students in the M.A. Program in Lit at FAU are mid-career teachers in the Palm Beach County School District who are trying to get a pay bump or to refresh their teaching or to enable some sort of career move, and you have a situation so different from Yale and Harvard students that -- and this was my reply to my friend today -- it would be cynical and, to use my word, "punishing" NOT to take it into account.

My friend would no doubt argue that the answer here is clearly to lower the caps on teaching for graduate students.  But teaching loads are established by the administration, not by the faculty.  Nope.  The only thing faculty can control is their own syllabi and expectations of their students.  Clearly -- and I'm sure my friend would agree with this -- the answer is not "dumbing down" or even reducing the work load.  But somehow faculty have to integrate the needs of their graduate students into their own curriculum, if not into their very teaching philosophy.  What would "the best" be?

This notion of academic caste systems haunts me and I am now trying  to think about my own teaching in another way.  If you play the hand you're dealt, you risk -- as my friend points out -- compromising your own professional ethics and falsifying the education you're supposed to be giving your students.  The message to our students cannot be that they cannot achieve their goals, that they cannot get into the best programs, contribute in the most meaningful ways to the academic conversation, realize their personal ambitions -- all because they're at FAU and not the Ivy League.  But how to context the right message without mixing it with a more pernicious one?

The academic caste system in this country reflects and perpetuates social and economic (and racial and gender) castes.  Yale and Harvard draw their students from different demos than FAU and, even if many of us with Ph.D.s once were students from those demos, we have a responsibility now to to base our pedagogy if not our expectations on the skill sets our students bring to the undergraduate curriculum from the Florida Public School system of the F-Cat and No Child Left Behind.  To fail to account for this, even in the name of "the best education possible" smuggles in another message to the curriculum: you are not Yale students!  Yale students are BETTER!   Underneath this is another: I went to Yale myself;  I worked hard there and I'm smart and I deserve better students than YOU.

Of course, neither my friend nor I would ever want to send such a message to students.  And what's worse, as my friend pointed out to me in a later email, if you make alterations in a graduate curriculum because you're working the students too hard the net effect is to lose any sense of street cred for the curriculum itself.  But this can't be the whole story.  The notion of giving students the "best education possible" can't rely on trends in the profession or on an imaginary set of "standards" the faculty is here somehow to enforce or uphold or inculcate.  (Go to Ratemystudents.com and see how often the word "standards" comes up in the complaints about how bad, lazy, insouciant, dumb, bored, haughty, and hopeless students have become today.)

There has got to be another way to think about this, but I don't know what it is and don't think my friend does either.  For now, we're both pretty much doing the same thing.

But -- and here also I borrow from Readings book -- to think differently about this would then also be a matter of thinking about institutions as something other than cynical.  If FAU isn't cynical it is perhaps lost, stuck in the middle of an identity crisis and unable to be either a Level-One Research Institution or a Community College.  The President here operates as more of a CEO or even at times as a mascot, which is why the raise is even imaginable in a time of crisis.  (I think he made a mistake taking the raise, but, hey, maybe I'm wrong.)  But FAU is not unique in imagining itself as more corporate than academic in these times.  Thinking the professoriate can put an end to, or even effectively resist, a caste system that is at work in all our institutions, is like imagining that one professor can single-handedly end "grade inflation."   Or that your corner gas station can "roll back" the prices to the good old days by charging a buck a gallon.

There's more to say here, of course.