Academic Quick Hits
Staffing elaborate curricula, critical vocabulary, work-life balance, and advising
A collection of a bunch of items about academia and academic work that have caught my attention recently that don’t necessarily rate a full post of their own:
— In the most recent round-up post, I linked to Timothy Burke’s Academia: Quality Control, and said I’d try to come back to it. In the post, he talks about campus-wide curricular revisions, and ends up saying this:
The only thing I’m absolutely sure about any general education design that goes beyond open-ended distribution requirements is that it absolutely has to have some form of demanding quality control.
That’s hard to do right; it’s hard to build a quality control system that is itself high-quality, that comes from the faculty and is subject to faculty governance. It’s not a task that can be left to academic administration, who will inevitably pull the system away from its intellectual and pedagogical underpinnings towards whatever managerial trend is sweeping through higher education bureaucracies at a given moment. But it’s also not a job that you can leave to the normally well-functioning decentralized norms of faculty life and just assume everything will turn out for the best.
This resonated with me because we recently went through an extended process of designing and rolling out a new Gen Ed curriculum that is very much a system that goes beyond distribution requirements. As a department chair, I’m hearing about this from both sides now, so the question of how you staff these programs in a sustainable manner is much on my mind.
As I said in the links dump, though, I think there’s a somewhat interesting bit of this that reflects our difference in approaches. Burke is consistently concerned about administrative overreach, and as such tends to emphasize things like managerialism in analyzing this sort of situation. I’m coming at this from a very different place, and would this be more inclined to call this a problem rooted in the faculty.
That is, I think these ambitious systems tend to be created through the efforts of a smallish number of faculty who are really fired up about whatever the core idea is, and they pull along a larger mass of professors who are just vaguely dissatisfied with whatever curriculum has been in place, and are happy to see some change. The fired-up faculty who drove the change are happy to teach the new curriculum for the first few years, but like all faculty, don’t want to teach the same exact courses over and over in perpetuity. And in the manner of academics whose passions run high, they also tend to find something new and different to get fired up about, and go off to do that. Which leaves the ambitious curriculum that they were all fired up about to be taught by… whoever can’t get out of it, really.
So, where Burke sees a kind of malignant managerialism at work in the administration trying to maintain and staff these programs in a bureaucratic manner, I see this more as the result of a kind of faculty flightiness. We collectively end up creating these baroque curricular structures thanks to the passionate advocacy of a particular group of people who by their nature are not inclined to sustain these structures in the long term. And thus even the noblest of intentions collapse back to a kind of bureaucratic box-checking after a few years, until the passionate professors get organized to push through another elaborate system of requirements that will burn brightly from both ends for half as long as it’s in place.
(I personally would favor a straight distribution requirement, in case that’s not obvious…)
— While I’m being somewhat dismissive of my fellow academics, I should briefly nit-pick this piece about the word “critical” from Matt “Dean Dad” Reed, where he writes:
In the vernacular, “critical” usually means “negative.” “Why are you being so critical?” “Stop being so critical.” A student who understands “critical” in this sense is likely to resort to one of two habits: either ducking engagement altogether or fully attacking. The latter is probably the preferable of the two, since it presumes some level of awareness of the text, but it hits diminishing returns pretty quickly. It can devolve into a dispiriting game of “gotcha.” A statement like “that’s problematic …” should start a conversation rather than end it.
Academics tend to use “critical” to mean “nuanced.” An interpretation of a text or an idea can be both critical and sympathetic; the best ones usually are. That involves seeing texts and ideas as flawed products of flawed people but not expecting otherwise. It involves the student, or reader, seeing themselves as peers with the producers of the work rather than either being unworthy of the wisdom or posing as a hanging judge.
I agree with this in principle. In practice, though, I strain to think of any case of an academic colleague discussing anything remotely controversial invoking “critical” in any of its forms (“critical thinking,” “critical stance,” etc.) in anything other than a negative manner.
Whenever it’s actually brought up in the discussion of a proposed policy or whatever, it’s pretty difficult to distinguish from the vernacular sense of “critical” as negative. Any accusation of failures in “critical thinking” on the part of adminsitrators, politicians, or randos on Twitter is always of the form “You are too supportive of this thing that I don’t like.”
In principal, one can do a “critical analysis” of a policy proposal and come away with a favorable impression of it. In practice, well, I’ll believe it when I see it.
— In the category of “people more famous than I am expressing opinions I find congenial,” I’ll put in a plug for Dan Drezner (who IIRC was in the same barely-overlapping-with-me class at Williams as Reed) on academic work-life balance and comparing that to work-from-home in other white-collar contexts. In particular, I like this bit:
The key word in that excerpted section is “trade-off.” The understanding has to be that working on the weekend frees up more time during the week for, you know, not working. Because most academic work is relatively solitary, that’s a viable possibility. I do wonder whether that will hold for companies that keep trying to cajole workers back into the office.
Again, this resonated with me because it hit my inbox on a Sunday when I spent a couple of hours in my office on campus grading papers and prepping slides for Monday’s lecture. And, you know, as I’ve written before, I keep weird hours because that’s what works for balancing my job and family responsibilities.
— Finally, just to have a more positive reference to Matt Reed, I kind of like the idea of an “Advising Day” as mentioned in his piece this morning. Though I do share the concern that any time classes are canceled, no matter how worthy the purpose, will end up being treated as a bonus vacation day by a lot of students. And, as inevitably happens, the students who most need the higher-quality advising that would be provided by this sort of scheme are the ones least likely to show up to take advantage of it at a time when it can still do some good.
(Also, I kind of want to know which of my old physics professors he had the exchange that kicks the column off with…)
So, that’s a bunch of academic stuff, written very early in the morning because this is when I have the combination of time and brainpower needed for even this kind of low-impact blogging. If you’d like more of this, here’s a button:
And if you’d like to argue with me about any of this, the comments will be open:
There's definitely part of the issue that is rooted in the faculty--in particular the inability of many faculties to reach strong shared views that can survive the discontent and non-cooperation of a long-tail group of faculty that just don't want whatever the system is that most of the faculty support. A lot of curricular designs die by getting pecked slowly to pieces over a decade.
There's also the fact that no design really solves the problem underlying general education--we have distribution requirements and nothing much else, and that doesn't lead to students having a robust sense of a common experience, plus it just means that students who don't want to be generally educated spend a lot of time hunting for courses that will get their distribution obligations over with a minimum of effort and engagement. No matter what you come up with, it generally loses some of its coherence when it is implemented simply because some students see it as an obstacle and an annoyance.
Your Gen Ed comments are hitting very close to home, as we just had a multi-year effort for a race/power/privilege/colonialism Gen Ed req (including situating a course in the major) come to a head. So much heat and angst, and so much of what Tim Burke says below.