… in Andrew Hacker’s remarks here. He’s being interviewed about his forthcoming book (August 3) attacking American universities. But UD would take issue with a few things too.
Yes, “there are just too many publications and too many people publishing… And many of the publications are too long. A book on Virginia Woolf could be a 30-page article.” (UD has written about the articles-on-steroids problem, and related over-publication issues, in these posts.) Hacker’s right to argue that undergraduate teaching is as important as publishing (actually, he argues it’s much more important).
His attack on tenure, though, isn’t as persuasive.
Academics typically don’t get tenured until the age of 40. This means that from their years as graduate students and then assistant professors, from age 25 through 38 or 39, they have to toe the line. They have to do things in the accepted way that their elders and superiors require. They can’t be controversial and all the rest. So tenure is, in fact, the enemy of spontaneity, the enemy of intellectual freedom. We’ve seen this again and again. And even people who get tenure really don’t change. They keep on following the disciplinary mode they’ve been trained to follow.
Obviously it’s hard to be anything other than anecdotal about this sort of thing. How do we measure the useless wimpiness of a person? I would just suggest the following:
There are reasons American universities dominate all the world rankings, and these reasons have to do with much more than our country’s wealth. I don’t mean to discount our wealth, but anyone who tells you that American universities dominate the global quality tables merely because we’re filthy rich is simply wrong. Hacker’s right that there’s a lot wrong with our universities, and that trends are downward; but anyone writing about our schools has to reckon with the fact that many of them are spectacularly good. They didn’t get that way by being top-heavy with terrified little weenies. Tenure deadens some people, for sure; others (see Eva von Dassow) it seems to embolden.
Hacker’s right that students should get a liberal arts, not a vocational, degree. If they want a vocation from the word go, they should go to a vocational school (more and more universities are transforming themselves into vocational schools, to be sure; but if students protested this, it might stop). He’s certainly right that big time sports fuck everything up.
At a college like Ohio State … undergraduates pour into the stadium for the big Ohio-Michigan game. They paint their faces red and blue and all the rest. But what are they cheering for? Victory in a football game. Michigan is actually a much better university than Ohio State — its reputation, its medical school, its law school, and so on. It makes you wonder whether Ohio is putting so much into its sports teams because its academics really aren’t so great.
Got to make the best of a bad situation, as Gladys says.
Hacker’s too much of a hippie about grades (they’re evil; toss them), and he’s too random on the subject of admissions (drop applications into a hat…).
But I love his final comment about some students arguably not being ready for college.
Our view is that the primary obligation belongs to the teacher. Good teaching is not just imparting knowledge, like pouring milk into a jug. It’s the job of the teacher to get students interested and turned on no matter what the subject is. Every student can be turned on if teachers really engage in this way.
… I teach at a city college in New York, where we come very close to allowing virtually anybody who applies to walk in. I say, ‘This is the hand I was dealt this semester. This is my job.” Some people say to me, “Your students at Queens, are they any good?” I say, “I make them good.” Every student is capable of college. I know some people have had difficult high school educations. But if you have good teachers who really care, it’s remarkable how you can make up the difference.
I agree. Much of the curricular crap at universities finds its justification in the students-aren’t-ready thing… Students aren’t interested… So we make our professors clowns and have them teach the Harry Potter books… Or we give students laptops and let them play on Facebook while we do deadly PowerPoints in front of them…
Hacker’s right that the only thing that can change this scenario is a real teacher.
July 29th, 2010 at 7:54PM
Although I also disagree with Hacker on tenure, I put up a link this morning to this Atlantic article because I thought it was very important.
I’ve yet to see a really good explanation of why tenure is important. Maybe when I retire, and can be honest, I’ll write one. I don’t feel that tenure has made me risk adverse, in fact the opposite.
And I agree with Hacker about playing with the cards you’ve got. I could teach a high school student organic chemistry. That’s our job. We’re teachers. We’re supposed to be able to help our students to learn difficult material by making it clear and explaining it. And that doesn’t mean putting chemical reaction diagrams in Power Point. A few explosions are much more effective.
July 30th, 2010 at 4:35AM
‘Definitely, yes. Those people were teachers, in the true sense of the word. They were just as knowledgeable about their fields as anyone, but they had playful, imaginative minds. They could go on TV—Carl Sagan could talk about science, John Kenneth Galbraith could talk about economics. They weren’t dumbing down their subjects. In fact, they were actually using their brains. The more you rely on lingo—”regressive discourses,” “performativity”—the less you have to really think. You can just throw terms around and say, “Look, Ma, I’m a theorist!”‘
It is unfair and almost pointless to cudgel people using specialist language on the grounds that there are people who don’t. I’m as thrilled as anybody when scholarship is vibrantly, charismatically continuous with ordinary speech, but terminology is not an alternative to playfulness and imaginativeness, nor an even slightly reliable sign that someone is not using their brain. The second part of the quote tries to fight callow perfunctoriness with callow perfunctoriness, but I guess polemic—like theory—operates with a little bit of irresponsibility.
I agree with much of what Hacker had to say, and probably much of what he and his co-author have written, but that quote was gumph of a low order. The book’s cover is hideous, too.
July 30th, 2010 at 7:27AM
I do not think Hacker is right about getting rid of tenure, but I do think that it does deaden the intellectual spark of fields and leads to a lot of bloated articles in others.
I noticed that when I was working on the dissertation my advisor encouraged me to do something daring and interesting if that was what would keep me motivated to get it done. But I also saw other grad students encouraged to pursue cookie cutter dissertations. The reason they did this was so that it would be easily parted out into articles and quickly shaped into a book manuscript to get tenure. They weren’t particular interesting dissertations, but the students finished and many of them got jobs.
The academy, especially in the humanities, is selecting for the safe and the derivative, rather than the daring and the weird. Part of the incentive for this is a concern about getting a job and later earning tenure. Instead of being scholars we’ve become like 50s organization men (and women).
How can you expect people who are self-censoring themselves like this to be intellectually daring teachers?
Part of the blame lies with the process of awarding tenure and the insanity of the job market. But abandoning tenure will not fix those problems. My guess is that the more insecure the system is, the more it will produce derivative and safe scholarship in the humanities. We will also probably have a lot more scientists beholden to the applied research agendas of corporations and a lot less basic research.
July 30th, 2010 at 9:43AM
“Playing with the cards you’ve got”…true that. Few things are as destructive to the spirit of performance as the encouragement of excuse-making.
OTOH, when there are things that can realistically be done to improve the hands dealt, they should be. And in the case of higher ed, the quality of the hands dealt is largely though not exclusively a function of the effectiveness of K-12 education. Ed schools are components of universities. Most serious people understand that ed schools suck. It would be a good thing if university top administrators, encouraged by a lynch-mob spirit among the non-ed-school faulty, would do something about draining these swamps.
One can always dream…
August 1st, 2010 at 11:09AM
Hacker missed the obvious: in the USA we’re already down to thirty percent of all credits taught by the tenured or the tenurable. If administrations maintain current rates of decline, we should be below twenty percent later this decade.
Tenure-stream faculty who are bad teachers teach a truly small percentage of all courses. Tenure’s not a problem for undergraduate education. The working conditions management provisions for the majority faculty are a problem for undergraduate education.
August 1st, 2010 at 5:58PM
Actually, there was a major American university that handled undergrad admissions by selecting randomly from applicants meeting basic criteria (though I believe they no longer do that): Ohio State.
August 15th, 2010 at 7:25PM
I’ve always been puzzled by the idea (expressed here by Matt L), that it “deaden[s] the intellectual spark of fields and leads to a lot of bloated articles in others”. Everyone laments the ever-more-narrowly specialized journals that reach an ever-shrinking audience of people capable of — let alone interested in — grasping the articles therein. Everyone (e.g., Hacker) also complains that we don’t need yet another article/book/performance about Shakespeare. But isn’t that more a function of the currently widespread publication requirements for receiving tenure, than it is of tenure itself? If, as many (including Hacker) want, far more emphasis were placed on “teaching excellence”, then wouldn’t there be fewer publications?
Hmm. Or would there instead be a proliferation of journals devoted to The Pedagogy of X, with no actual change in the degree of bloat?
August 15th, 2010 at 7:43PM
philosoraptor: Yes, that’s a nightmare scenario I’ve entertained too — A new emphasis on teaching simply generates scads of ed school quality pedagogy journals. Gevalt.
August 18th, 2010 at 6:10PM
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