Common-reading grumpage

So, it's time again for the annual round of freshman common-reading grumpage over at InsideHigherEd. Depending on which of the comments you read, the common-reading selections at the vast majority of universities are too new! too liberal! too nonfictional! too lightweight! too depressing!

John Warner's comments in the thread at IHE nail a lot of the difficulties, complications, and uneasy compromises of choosing a common-reading book. (Actually, John Warner pretty much nails everything all of the time, and can we please just make him Secretary of Education already?) Since I seem to have become, much to my own dismay, chair of the subcommittee that is in charge of selecting our university's common reading, I'd like to underline his point that the book has to be acceptable to faculty from across the disciplines. This, by the way, includes faculty who aren't necessarily on board with the whole liberal arts enterprise in the first place. I'm talking about faculty who want to jettison the whole program so they can spend the entire freshman experience course going over the requirements for their particular pre-professional discipline. And faculty who complain that the last few years' offerings have been insufficiently uplifting, and can't we just do an inspirational self-help book instead? And faculty who are Very Very Concerned that the book should not depict white people in our state in a bad light. (N.B., if you're going to have a common reading book about the civil rights era -- and there were several good reasons why our selection this year really needed to be about the civil rights era -- it is going to depict white people in our state in a bad light. If you don't want posterity to judge you harshly, don't behave badly.) And faculty who think it is really too much to expect students to read a whole entire book. (Call me old-fashioned, but I think somebody really needs to tell the students who are unwilling to read books that their choices are a) to become willing to read books; or b) to choose a life-path that doesn't involve college.)

Sigh. If they would just make me dictator of everything, I'd totally pick a classic. Like Lysistrata. Or The Importance of Being Earnest. Or maybe Candide. All of which have the advantage of being fun and short. But if I did that, certain people from the Pre-Professional Discipline That Shall Not Be Named would totally flip out.

Did I mention, we've been asked to start thinking about next year's reading selection more or less immediately after school reconvenes this year? I can hardly wait.

So, tell me about your first-year experience course...

Yeah, I know I've been a terrible blogger lately, and that it's probably bad form to break radio silence by asking one's remaining readers for help. However, I seem to have been handed a committee that is supposed to be redesigning our one-credit, introduction-to-college-life course for first-time freshmen, and it's already turning into a snarl of competing interests and desires, so I have come here seeking clarity.

Tell me, if you should feel so moved, about freshman seminar / college life skills / first-year experience courses at your institution. Do you have one? Is it primarily academic, or primarily orientation-focused? Is there a common reading book of some sort? How are students organized into sections, and do all of the sections necessarily do the same thing? What do you or don't you like about it?

Or, if you feel like playing fantasy course design, what should an ideal course of this type look like and do? (Assume a smallish regional university with students who are all over the map in terms of academic preparation.)

Ugh...

So my department chair wishes to create this mostly-online graduate program, let's say that it's in Advanced Mopery. I don't actually teach Mopery, and there are only two people on campus who do, but the graduate program is intended to be sort of cross-disciplinary, so there are a bunch of literature classes attached to it. (All theoretical classes at this point, taught by theoretical faculty.) The senior Mopery professor wants to list me as one of these potential theoretical faculty on the proposal, so this is where I come in.

I am not wholly opposed to the concept, especially if it means I get to teach less freshman comp, but it seems to me that 1) teaching an online graduate class would be a hell of a lot of work, particularly since the topics for these classes are sort of ... far-ranging. (This is not the sort of program where you can teach a seminar on whatever your dissertation topic was and call it a day.) And 2) we teach a 4-4 load, we don't have a whole lot of support for research or travel or intensive study of new works of literature, and the institution really, really does not have the resources to change this. Nor, as far as I can tell, will there be a pay bump for teaching a grad class. And, in fact, Department Chair and Senior Mopery Professor seem to be working with the cavalier assumption that if you start the program first, the resources will eventually come, and then they will be able to hire new faculty, and compensate the existing faculty, and so forth. Whereas I am of the opinion that if you start giving away milk for free, nobody will offer to take the damn cow off your hands.

Oh, and the junior Mopery professor (who is no longer very junior, being tenured, and who is also well on his way to becoming somewhat famous) ALSO really does not want to teach in this program without some reasonable level of additional compensation, which the Powers That Be have positively refused to give him. At which point he basically washed his hands clean of the whole thing and left them to figure out how to put this program together without him. I am not sure that Chair and Senior Mopery Professor have realized that he is, in fact, the one with the leverage in this situation, and that he has very, very good odds of getting a better job elsewhere. (Let it suffice to say that if you Google his name, the first twelve or so hits are not us, and they include quite a few articles in national media.)

Chair knows how to work systems like nobody's business, so I'm reluctant to say that she and Senior Mopery Professor are being delusional; she is also a seriously awesome and ridiculously hard-working person who basically bleeds in the school colors, but I think that in this case this is part of the problem, because she has a hard time remembering that for the rest of us, this is in fact a job that we are paid to do, rather than the great calling of our life. (And yeah, everybody in academia has a hard time remembering that sometimes, but with Chair it's on a whole other level and most of the time it's great, until she starts expecting it of other people.)

Fuck, I really like and respect all of these people, and I don't want this to turn into a massive departmental feud, but I see almost no way that it doesn't. Meanwhile, I want to be a good citizen, but I really feel like I can't get behind this program and don't particularly want to teach in it, especially if there's no prospect of getting so much as a course release. Because in the end, it is extra work, and work deserves compensation (and grad students deserve faculty who aren't all stretched out like taffy). I said so, pretty much, in the department meeting today, and I feel like I've suddenly flipped the switch from being the Mousy Assistant Professor whom everyone liked, to being a Mouthy Associate Professor who is about to have enemies, and I'm not sure I'm ready for that, either. But tenure means not only that you can speak up about things, but that you sort of have to, right?

in which I cannot resist weighing in

Three idle thoughts, in response to the latest gubernatorial pronouncement about how universities are doing everything wrong:

1) If I had to pick a graduate of Misnomer U to hire for a job of an unspecified nature, and if I had to do this without knowing anything at all about the prospective candidates except their majors, my first pick would be ... Women's Studies. For real. It's not a popular major; the few students it does attract tend to be much brighter and more dedicated than average; and almost all of them have served an internship with Grande Dame Colleague, who teaches them all kinds of useful skills, like grant writing and archival research and conducting interviews and transcribing oral histories, as well as general responsibility and professionalism. I don't mean to suggest that this is true of all gender studies programs everywhere, but in general, it's a grave mistake to assume that you can tell from the name of a program whether it teaches students marketable skills.

2) Last time I looked, math WAS a liberal art. (OK, it's possible that the last time I looked might have been sometime in the fifteenth century, but whatever.) Now, I think all the stuff they do over in the math and science department is pretty darn awesome. But much of it is not inherently any more practical than the things we do in humanities. (Nor should it be, since the university is supposed to be a space where knowledge is valued for its own sake, and where people have the freedom to study things because they're cool and interesting.)

3) People have been coming to universities to study philosophy for a lot longer than they've been coming to study business or engineering. It takes a certain amount of cognitive dissonance to cast yourself as a defender of traditional institutions and social values AND take potshots at the very programs and ideals which are, in fact, integral to the traditional mission of a university. (But then, one of the things I find puzzling about conservatives is that they don't actually seem to be interested in conserving things, most of the time.)

How it went...

Wow, time is passing quickly this semester. We just had our last small-group meeting in Intro to College life. They have one more session in the Big Auditorium, and then final grades are due, and we're done.

It was OK. I'm not sure whether I'm going to do it again. The students were fine, all five of them friendly and participatory. They did most of the extra reading I assigned even though it wasn't tied to any quizzes or papers (although I think I will ask them to respond to it in their journals if I teach this course again -- I don't think they really got that a reflective journal for a class is supposed to be different from a personal diary). They had a bit of a tendency to talk about their personal lives a lot and go off on random tangents, but I think there's supposed to be room for that sort of thing in a course like this, so no worries.

The large-group sessions were ... bleah. I guess the kindest way to put it is "varied," since there were some speakers who were genuinely informative about useful topics, and one or two who managed to be informative and entertaining. But there were also some speakers who were patently disorganized, inept at communicating, or just plain off the rails (as in, presenting as fact a pop-psychology "personality test" with about as much as scientific validation as astrology, and pretending that this was somehow educating students about diversity).

More generally, I'm concerned that the whole slate of presentations seemed to emphasize student life at the expense of saying anything about the university's intellectual mission. I mean, it is important for students to know where to find the counseling center, and how to get their financial aid checks, and what to do if they think one of their friends has alcohol poisoning. No question. But shouldn't someone, at the very least, also be telling them that they should plan to spend a couple of hours outside of class for each hour in class, and that those required gen ed courses can illuminate one another in surprising ways, and that they shouldn't be afraid of going to a professor's office hours? I want someone to tell them, too, that words and ideas matter, that slow reading and deep thinking have value, that skepticism and critical inquiry are necessary tools for living in the world, and that if universities were really ivory towers closed off from the real world, people wouldn't get so damn angry at them.

(I think I may have told my little cohort some of these things. I think I do want to teach this class again.)

Oh yeah, and we talked about the university's common reading book, which was both enjoyable and a little weird. I have a whole different set of reservations about campus-wide common reading programs, but those probably belong in an entirely different post.

a paradox

1) Students whose ACT scores are low enough place into Basic Writing, Basic Math, and / or Basic Reading. Students who are in two or more of the above also take a three-credit Learning Skills course. If they're in all three, that's full-time status right there.

2) None of these classes are considered "college level," so they do not count for credit toward graduation. For this reason, grades in these classes do not factor into the student's GPA.

3) Therefore, it is pretty much impossible for a student who never actually manages to PASS any of these classes to flunk out of college, or even to end up on academic probation.

Something is wrong with this picture, yes?

Nobody asked me, but...

Students deserve the option to attend public colleges and universities that aren't big-box mega-campuses.

I could say much, much more on this topic, but it's hard to get into the sticky details on an anonymous blog, and in any case, I'm too angry and disheartened and worried that I might be unemployed within the next year or two.

Nice to see public liberal arts colleges get a little love, at InsideHigherEd.

Both the Beloved Alma Mater and Misnomer University arguably fall into this category -- or at least they did for many decades -- and I think this type of school fills a vitally important niche. I'm not quite as sanguine as Spellman about the future, because I've seen both institutions suffering under the pressure to become bigger! And more research-oriented! And more cost-efficient! And more vocational! And more standardized! And bigger! They have reacted to these pressures in opposite ways, the Beloved Alma Mater by "trying to become Princeton" as the Laid-Back Medievalist put it when I went back for my college reunion, and Misnomer U. by tipping closer and closer to becoming Yet Another Regional Comprehensive.

I'm also not as enthusiastic about vocational programs as Spellman is; I think they can work as part of a quality integrated liberal-arts program, but it takes a particular institutional culture and a lot of careful advising to make sure that they do. Students like the nursing major who took my upper-level Shakespeare class last semester, who wasn't the best writer in the class but was really talkative and enthusiastic and obviously very much into Shakespeare, even though the course probably made it harder for him to fulfill his program's requirements? Yeah, I want more students like that. But more often, I'm seeing a huge gulf in attitude and intellectual curiosity between the education, nursing, and business students and the ones drawn to more traditional arts and sciences majors, and the advisors in the vocational programs do not seem to be doing much to bridge that gap; if anything, they seem to encourage students to think of the liberal arts core requirements as a series of stupid boxes that need to be checked off. (And, to be fair, the whole structure of the core curriculum reinforces this world-view; I would like to see fewer tick-boxes and a chance for students to pursue work in a few complementary disciplines at a higher level, rather than taking a dozen unrelated intro-level courses.)

But this is turning into a nitpicking-and-grumbling post, and I don't mean it to be, because I do believe my institution is providing something valuable. I believe it is a place where it's easier for students to know their professors than not to know them, and I also believe that the features Spellman identifies as the hallmarks of a quality liberal arts education -- "small class size, close faculty-student interaction, an innovative and interdisciplinary common core in the arts and sciences, undergraduate research experiences, senior capstone projects, service learning and community engagement, and a rich and diverse co-curricular life" -- are the norm for all of our students and not just a hundred lucky souls in the Honors College. And I believe, most of all, that this type of institution needs to be an option within the state system, because for many of our students, going out of state or going to a private college simply isn't thinkable. (And yes, I know some private SLACs hand out financial aid like candy, but you have to apply first, and nobody has ever told them they can apply.)

Yeah. I think I believe in what I do. And that's a good way to feel at the beginning of a new year.