According to the Senate Council’s Resolution of Early Dismissals of Classes, the Faculty Senate “stands in strong opposition” [to] professors canceling classes prior to holiday and semester breaks for the purpose of accommodating early departures from campus. The resolution starts that such conduct is “professionally inappropriate” and “demoralizing to other members of the teaching staff.”
This description of a recent resolution passed by the Penn State faculty marks a small moment in a much larger story University Diaries has been chronicling for years — the physical disappearance of the American university, and various forms of resistance to this process of disappearance.
Physical classrooms with human beings looking at and talking to each other retreat from the national university scene a little more each day, as downloadable lectures, PowerPoint séances , and personal laptop play either empty classrooms altogether, or people them with mentally absent students and robotic, slide-reading professors.
Add to this, at a sports-mad school like Penn State, plenty of skipping for games, and there may not be much going on in some of its classrooms…
So what the hell. Might as well add more room-emptying, and cancel classes three, four, five days before each holiday….
The results of these industrious efforts to make rooms, students, and professors disappear must indeed be demoralizing to the losers on campus who actually schedule, hold, and teach classes. They are the Left Behind, a thin, ragged cohort at the end of days…
January 28th, 2010 at 8:31AM
Nihil sub sole novum, UD. In my first semester of full-time teaching in the 80s, a colleague canceled no fewer than 18 of 40 scheduled classes (I started counting since I had a class in the same room immediately afterward). The same individual the following semester canceled 9 of 14 classes for a seminar.
January 28th, 2010 at 9:02AM
But there IS something new under the sun, tp. Particular professors have of course always done something like this, but I’d argue it’s much more widespread and even formalized in various ways now; and the whole phenomenon of massive numbers of classes in which no one’s really present, even if there’s an event with human beings in it occurring in real time, is new.
January 28th, 2010 at 12:11PM
Rumor has it that there have always been many church services at which a significant % of the attendees pretty much slept through the sermon, liturgy, or whatever, but really wanted be *seen* making their appearance in church…
January 28th, 2010 at 1:29PM
“Add to this, at a sports-mad school like Penn State, plenty of skipping for games, and, well, ain’t much going on in the classroom…”
I’m going to set aside taking offense (and invite you to come to my classroom, if you can keep up), to offer some facts. PSU, like many universities, used to have a Thanksgiving break that started on Wednesday at 5 PM. In a rural area with one small airport and only a few roads out of town, 50,000 people trying to leave town in a few hours was simply chaotic. Not surprisingly, leaving early was common.
Several years ago, a calendar switch moved the Thanksgiving break to a week (removing a fall break, and starting earlier to regain the instructional days). That gave students and faculty plenty of time to get home, if they were traveling. The genesis of this resolution was a meeting between the President and a few students in which some of them mentioned they had a class cancelled. Do we have any information on how widespread this was or if it even is a problem? No, not at all. But, Faculty Senate chose to make what I would call a rather grandstand play.
And yes, I was in class that Friday afternoon before Thanksgiving.
January 28th, 2010 at 1:53PM
I was somewhat over the top, GTWMA. I’m amending the post for less offensiveness.
January 28th, 2010 at 8:39PM
I’m really not offended, UD, just giving you a hard time.