All against All

I was in the faculty workroom doing paperwork when Darrell walked in and slumped into a chair across the table from me.  He looked dejected and worried.

This was unusual.  Darrell, a retired career military man who incongruously wears a utility cover with his customary shirt-and-tie ensemble, normally projects a confident aura.  Whatever was bothering him, I didn’t want to pry.  After exchanging laconic greetings, we sat in silence for a few minutes even though it seemed he really wanted to talk.  Finally, he spoke up.

“I got an email from my department chair.”

“Yeah?  What about?”

“She didn’t say.  I’m supposed to see her Monday at four.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing serious.”

“I don’t know…”

“Did something happen?”

“Well…”  Darrell described the uncomfortable reaction he thought he saw from a student in class.  Like most vets, Darrell is a conservative.  During his lecture that morning he put forth his view that the War on Poverty had failed because of the personal shortcomings of the people it was meant to help.  The student’s demeanor became quietly hostile, though s/he said nothing at the time.  Whatever it was, it left Darrell rattled.

“I’m sure it’s nothing.”

“I hope so.”  Darrell got up to leave.

“Good luck,” I said.

“Thanks.”

Catching up with Darrell a few days later, it turned out the student in question had in fact made a formal complaint.  The ensuing discussion with his chair was awkward.  According to Darrell, she hemmed and hawed and said while faculty have academic freedom we have to be sensitive to phrasing, student sensibilities, etc., etc. 

Predictably, nothing came of the matter.  I’ve been an adjunct instructor longer than Darrell.  I see the department chair’s summons for what it was: A passive-aggressive nonresponse to a student gripe about something which does not merit disciplinary action but still looks to the student as if the college has done something.

While I disagree with Darrell’s views on the subject which brought the complaint, I believe in academic freedom.  These ominous summonses have a chilling effect.  Common sense and good manners dictate a sensitivity to the feelings of others.  However, I have found myself self-censoring and at times avoiding particularly controversial topics even though I teach in a discipline which cannot avoid these completely.  The things I see happening in academia do little to ease my anxiety.

And so I was unsurprised by an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education which encapsulates the strife of the campus ideological wars.  The piece documented an incident last fall at the University of Nebraska.  It’s a story without heroes in which almost everyone involved behaved badly.

It began with a student who set up a table on the campus quad.  The student, a recent alumna of a summer training program for young conservative activists, was canvassing for a group called Turning Point USA.  Perhaps you’ve heard of them; they’re the organization behind the “Professor Watchlist.” 

Turning Point encourages students to identify (or target) liberal and progressive faculty.  Having the temerity to speak against corporate malfeasance, pointing out white privilege and denouncing racism and sexism, favoring reproductive choice and LGBT rights, promoting peace over war, suggesting that human activity just might be responsible for climate change, criticizing the Religious Right, and being “anti-Israel,” among other sins, can get a proffie’s name on the Watchlist. 

Back to our budding young activist.  Having set up her table, a university employee reportedly told her she could not disseminate propaganda in that part of campus and that she would have to move to a predesignated free speech zone.  Fair enough, though the employee’s use of the word “propaganda” to describe the student’s activity could only further agitate the rage junkies who would latch on to the ensuing incident as an example of the lefty subversion of ‘Murican values.

Safely ensconced in the free speech zone, a passing doctoral student and English instructor caught sight of the Turning Point table.  Outraged by its presence on what she would later declare to be “her” campus, the instructor made up a picket sign denouncing the student as a fascist. 

Things went rapidly downhill.  As she had been taught by her Turning Point mentors, the student took out her phone and began recording the picketer.  They began circling each other.  At one point the picketer flipped off the student on camera.  She called the student a “neo-fascist Becky.”  She denounced the student as a white nationalist and white supremacist.  She swore at the student.  Finally, the student began to cry.

This was a bit much for another faculty member who had joined the anti-Turning Point picket.  She walked over and tried to comfort the student and gave the student her email address, inviting the student to sit down later to talk about their political differences.  The student packed up her table and left and the incident ended.

Except it really didn’t.  Turning Point posted the video of the incident to its website, which went viral.  The tom-toms sounded throughout the conservative jungle, and soon angry letters and emails began arriving in the offices of Nebraska’s elected officials.  The university president was summoned by the state legislature.  The instructor, a woman in her late forties, was eventually suspended from her teaching duties as penance for her public overzealousness.  And our young conservative?  She’s become the Right’s darling du jour.

This incident was a set piece with strawpersons on both sides: The shrill social justice warrior shouting hyperbolic slogans.  The emptyheaded suburban Barbie hostile to a multicultural America.  Most people are content to leave it at that.  Predictably, there has been little discussion of what this episode means for campus discourse. 

For me, the Nebraska incident exemplifies what can go wrong when political strife in the larger society encroaches on academia.  Both sides are consumed with a righteous indignation.  Neither acknowledges the right of the other to express their views.   Making matters worse, the instructor’s confrontation with the student escalated from a simple difference of opinion to a situation where a grown woman bullied some poor kid to tears (something for which the instructor was unapologetic).  As a result my distaste for everything Turning Point represents conflicts with my deep-seated revulsion toward bullies, tempered by a sour satisfaction in the knowledge that the student Right has its own snowflakes.   

It’s tempting to blame Donald Trump’s political rise for the seeming resurgence of right wing Know Nothingism and the ideological war of all against all, but the truth is that the current campus wars are an extension of the social polarization of the last several decades.  As an undergrad in the 1980s, I remember the sniping over political correctness and speech codes on the one hand and the monitoring of liberal professors by conservative groups like Accuracy in Academia on the other, though this was more rumor than fact at my politically quiescent regional state uni, 

Even now, most educational institutions are backwaters of social consciousness.  It’s surprising whenever any of the community college students I work with express any kind of informed opinion let alone take a side on an issue.  Last semester I was startled when, during an unusually spirited classroom discussion of current events, a student declared that the only answer to our problems was revolution.  Several students murmured agreement.  No one objected.  I nodded gravely, simultaneously pleased and unsettled.  The discussion moved on.  There were no repercussions afterwards.

Sometimes apathy works in your favor.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

Heads Will Roll

Watching Fox News a few weeks ago, on one of the inevitable year-in-retrospective programs which air the last week of December, an item in the news crawl caught my eye.  “Far-Left Professor Booted,” it read, or something like that. 

I had to think a moment to make the connection, then it hit me.  The reference was to Drexel University professor George Ciccariello-Maher.  I name-checked C-M in a post a while back when he had stirred up a minor media storm by sending an angry tweet after a first-class airline passenger gave up his seat to a soldier in uniform.  That post wasn’t so much meant to discuss the good professor but to mull over the public’s media-conditioned attitudes toward the military and veterans.

Now I find myself asking what Ciccariello-Maher’s firing says about the present state of academia.  C-M had already landed himself in hot water before the soldier tweet by calling for a “white genocide.”   He was apparently suspended by Drexel last October after he blamed President Trump for the Las Vegas shootings.  Switching channels to CNN, I was informed C-M had actually resigned in the face of death threats against him and his family.

I confess I don’t know much about George Ciccariello-Maher in spite of his working in a discipline related to my own.  What I have been able to glean is that C-M belongs to a certain breed of academic whose public pronouncements tend toward sophomoric oversimplifications of complex issues.  Lots of heat, but precious little light. 

These kinds of statements may gain the rapturous attention of coddled undergraduates and the ire of the anger junkies on the political right.  But they make honest progressives like me wince.  As we slip further into a war of all against all in which we destroy the careers and lives of people we don’t like, such grandstanding further undermines the already precarious state of academic freedom.

I teach at a community college (two of them, actually).  I’m employed as contingent, or adjunct faculty.  No tenure.  No job security.  Just a feeble guarantee of academic freedom which will inevitably evaporate into thin air the moment some student with a wild hair up his or her ass and an axe to grind decides to lay waste to my livelihood.

My own interpretation of American history and society is not really that different from that of Ciccariello-Maher.  I just don’t express it in short bursts with my thumbs is all.  I am also careful to point out that there are other perspectives than mine, that there are many caveats and subtleties to any controversy, and that if a student disagrees with my conclusions that’s okay as long as their own are based in fact.

I don’t know if this approach is the reason, but I have had few strong disagreements with students over the years.  Even my openly conservative students seem to be okay with me for the most part.  It could just be that they’re taking the path of least resistance toward collecting three credits and a grade.   Probably so.  My fingers are crossed that that’s the case and that my luck will continue to hold.

Obnoxious proffies like George Ciccariello-Maher make high profile targets for conservative trolls compiling “watch lists” of faculty who don’t wave the flag or embrace the lay religion of American exceptionalism.  However, safeguarding the right of professors to express unpopular opinions is why we have tenure and academic freedom guarantees in the first place.  As someone who has lots of unpopular opinions I feel threatened whenever the ability to openly express them without fear of retaliation is challenged.

Higher education itself is an inviting target, and not just for right-wing media outlets.  This is nothing new; Richard Hofstadter famously laid bare the deeply ingrained anti-intellectual streak in our culture more than a half-century ago.  Even as credentialism has swollen the ranks of post-secondary students, popular skepticism over the whole enterprise hangs in the air.  (Or as a piece in The Onion once put it, school isn’t really America’s thing.  We just play the game to get what we want.)

The levelling of higher ed has resulted in the perception colleges and universities should be little more than elevated trade schools geared to training the public in marketable skills and nothing else.  We’re doers, not thinkers, so why waste time on useless crap like art history and poetry and sociology?  And while we’re at it, why should we listen to a bunch of overeducated jackasses tell us things we don’t like?  Besides, brains aren’t everything.  In the real world, they’d be working for C students.

(Hmmm…It seems I’ve digressed a little.  Apropos of the preceding paragraph, I should say a few things about myself.  Firstly, every paid position I’ve had since age 21 has required a bachelor’s degree or higher.  And no, I didn’t have rich parents to put me through school.  I worked lots of odd jobs to pay for my studies.  Secondly, while I did have to wait until my mid-thirties to actually apply my classroom knowledge in the workforce, at least I was able to make that happen.

Oh, and my major?  Humanities.)

Returning to the topic at hand, the firing (or forced resignation) of Professor C-M underlines the need for stocktaking within our own ranks.  The trend toward treating students as customers and learning as a commodity, a topic I’ve commented upon often in this space, is stifling the sacred endeavor of free academic inquiry.  We are letting this happen at our peril.  As for me, I’m holding my breath waiting for the next head to roll silently praying it isn’t mine.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

Monday, 3:15 p.m.

“Okay, that’s it for today’s class.  Please review Chapter 5 for Wednesday.”

A hand goes up in the front row.  “Mr. Scholar?”

“Yes, Aubrey?”

“Thursday’s Thanksgiving.  Are we having class Wednesday?”

Requiem for a Spectre

If you’re under forty, you were raised to fear Middle Easterners and Muslims.  For my generation, the bogeyman was communism.

This week marks the centenary of the October Revolution.  Strangely, the anniversary has attracted little comment in the media which is funny when you consider how large the U.S.-Soviet rivalry loomed over 20^th century history.

The Cold War was, in retrospect, more about national rivalry and global power politics than ideology.  While it’s true that the collectivist ethos of the former socialist states was inherently antagonistic to Americans’ individualistic worldview, the East-West standoff was really about global hegemony on both sides. 

Still, throughout my childhood and youth my teachers and the media played up the threat evil communism posed to our freedoms.  Atrocities such as the Cambodian genocide were offered up as proof of the ruthlessness of communist rule and what might befall us should they succeed in their goal of defeating the United States.

This statement, which seems overly dramatic from today’s perspective, would have been credible to a number of people when I was a kid.  Once, in a high school history class, the teacher asked us what was the goal of the communists.  A student in the back of the room promptly answered in a loud, emphatic voice, “The goal of communism is world conquest!”  No one disputed him.  The teacher appeared pleased.

This was in the early 1980s, when President Reagan was doing his level best to antagonize the Soviet leadership.  Anticommunism had become conflated with “patriotism,” and the popular rhetoric ignored realities on the ground.  The Sino-Soviet split had occurred twenty years earlier.  The recently concluded Vietnam War was more about national sovereignty than communism, a truth recognized by many scholars from its start though clearly not by most Americans and their poliicians.

We have a tenuous relationship with truth that goes back much further than the current debate as to whether we’re living in a “post-truth” era.  Our thinking tends toward either/or, black and white reasoning.  We categorically reject any evidence which contradicts our narrative, however manifest it may be to a less partial observer.  This tendency becomes pernicious when it results in defining ourselves not by what we are but by what we are not.

This is a recurring theme.  In our first century or so, we were not those corrupt, rotten Old World aristocrats.  During the Cold War our alliance with the Soviets against the Axis was forgotten as we proclaimed to the world that we were most certainly nothing like those godless commies.  Today, we are not those Muslims who hate our freedom, but this is a topic for another time.

Back to the dialectic between a free, virtuous America and a totalitarian, evil Soviet Union.  If you were with us, your country was a “democracy” and part of the “Free World.”  If you were not, your country was either enslaved or untrustworthy.  This fiction ignored two things.  First, many of the regimes in the so-called Free World countries were in fact corrupt and repressive.  Secondly, whenever the people of one of these countries dared assert their right to self-determination the U.S. and its allies would step in to stymie the attempt—witness the examples of Guatemala, Iran, Chile, East Timor, and Nicaragua.

All this sidesteps the question of the merits of the Soviet experiment, however.  Putting aside the chaos of the Civil War and the totalitarian excesses of the Stalin years, there were aspects of it which compare favorably with the capitalist West.  Many of the ills of capitalist economies were less manifest, such as fluctuating business cycles and unemployment.  The regime at least made the effort to attend to its people’s essential economic and social needs.  The state ideology encouraged the collective welfare over narrow self-interest. 

That last item probably doomed the system in the end.  The citizens of the Eastern Bloc were less interested in political freedom than in Levi’s and rock music.  During the so-called Era of Stagnation between the mid-1960s and the advent of Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s economic planners struggled to meet popular demand for consumer goods.  Appeals to the collective good fell on deaf ears when people stood on line for soap and razor blades.  Some Soviet clients, most notably Hungary, managed to satiate consumer demand.  Others, like Romania, were economically inept and politically crooked.

Watching from afar, the fall of the Berlin Wall and its aftermath did seem breathtaking at the time.  The West was vindicated.  It wasn’t long before the downside became apparent, however.  Ethnic conflict in Russia and other former Soviet republics.  Terrorism.  Economic turmoil.  Organized crime.  Vladimir Putin.

The Soviet Union did not fall for the reasons we use to congratulate ourselves.  It wasn’t the absence of freedom or because of the Reagan administration’s military build-up.   It was that our comparatively free market was more efficient than their planned economy.  What was portrayed as a clash of ideologies ended on a disappointingly prosaic note.  Then again, it doesn’t matter as we’ve long since moved along to newer, suitably evil enemies.

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar

My Pal Trigger

An article in the New York Times Magazine this week addressed a frequently recurring issue in the educational discourse of late.

Namely, anxiety and its “triggers.”  It appears our youth are crippled by it.  Competition with peers, pressure to perform and succeed, and the specter of the future have converged to make them miserable.  Their parents and teachers are at a loss to help. 

Then again, maybe they’re doing too much already.  The article went on to say high school students with anxiety fear the prospect of college, which, unlike their schools, doesn’t have “safe spaces.”

Fear not, precious young ones.  At my institution, “Safe Space” decals have proliferated on office doors all over campus.  Guidance emails from the dean on this topic land in our inboxes with maddening regularity at the start of each semester.  The mental health services folks give the same tedious talks on warning signs a student may be in trouble at every in-service training.

Naturally students have taken full advantage of this climate of concern.  The number of them claiming learning disabilities and mental health issues requiring accommodation has soared in my classes and in those of my fellow proffies. 

We swap horror stories in the faculty lounge.  There’s the kid whacked out on prescription pain meds, and the one who suffered violent seizures in class and became hostile when anyone tried to help.  Both were covered by accommodations issued by the college.  I have a young man in one of my classes this term who will get up from his seat from time to time and wander the classroom muttering under his breath before slipping out the door not to be seen again until next class.  Same situation.  At least he’s harmless.  I hope.

Certain afflictions seem to come in clusters, as if there’s a vogue for them in a given school year.  Last year, it was autism spectrum disorders. 

In one section, I had a student given to random, disruptive outbursts and odd, even inappropriate questions in class.  He had difficulty with metaphors and allusions, forcing me to speak in an unnaturally literal, just-the-facts style which the other students found excruciating and made lectures dull and lifeless.  We had several class cancellations due to winter weather conditions; after each one I had to distribute addenda to the syllabus to reflect the changed schedule because he took the original schedule at face value and couldn’t adjust to the changes without a written revision.

When I went to my dean hoping for some kind of relief, she cut me off flat and insisted I comply with the young man’s accommodation order.  The result was that my class of roughly 30 students became a tutorial for just one.  It goes without saying that I took a hit on my course eval.  Because, you know, it was my fault this kid chose to take my class.

After listening to me tell this story, a colleague sympathetically exclaimed, “We have rights, too!”

Yes, but not in the eyes of the careerists in the college administration.  It’s true we’re the adults in these situations.  But it’s not just the kids acting this way.  What do you say to a thirty-year-old who lashes out at you or at classmates and then defends herself with the excuse that she’s “stressed,” practically daring you to challenge her?   

I’m not saying these afflictions aren’t real.  But there has to be a line where faculty and staff have to say, “Enough.”  Anxiety is a fact of daily life.  I’m anxious, too, and so are my colleagues.  But there are ways of handling such situations which don’t involve acting out or whining to the higher ups.

Not long ago, I was working in my office while evening classes were going on.  An EMT course was using the hallway with the student teams assessing accident cases on practice dummies.  The team nearest my open office door were working the problem of a victim who had suffered a serious injury very closely resembling the one which hospitalized me for nearly two months and left me physically disabled for life. 

I was disturbed by the reminder of it.  I was triggered, if you will.  It got to the point where I could no longer concentrate on my work.

So, here’s what I did.  And, more importantly, what I didn’t do.  I did not run into the hallway demanding the students stop what they were doing.  I did not confront the instructor.  I most certainly did not make a beeline to the dean’s office seething that my rights had been violated.

Instead, I calmly got up and quietly shut the office door and went back to work.  Problem solved.

I don’t consider myself a particularly strong or resilient person.  And yet, I was able to handle my emotions in this situation.  I see and hear things that disturb me all the time, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at me.  How is it that I can manage this and you can’t?

Students with disabilities and issues ought to be accommodated within reason.  However, if the accommodations hinder the instructor’s efforts to instruct or the student poses a threat to others then it’s time for the instructor to draw the line.

Sadly, no administrator would ever allow this.  Enrollment and retention concerns have led to a customer service mentality. 

There is also a rising tendency I’ve noticed which takes advantage of the customer is always right principle, both in and out of the classroom.  Some people, rather than seeking satisfaction politely and rationally, instead take the bull in a china shop approach of angry, accusatory confrontation. Catch your opponent off guard.  Make him question himself whether or not he’s in the right in the heat of the moment.   

It’s bad enough when some jerk pulls this crap to grift a meal or a discount from a hapless manager.  It’s worse when professional standards are lowered as a result of such behavior.  When used to get unreasonable concessions from college administrators at the expense of other students, it casts a shadow of skepticism on those who legitimately need help.

I’ve encountered situations like this a couple of times in my career, and I expect to face more before it’s over.  Worse, colleagues, and damned good ones, have walked away from college teaching because they’re sick of the bullshit coming at them from both ends.  For my part, I’ve come to question our administrators’ commitment to quality. 

Naturally, they would hotly deny this and cast aspersions on my character into the bargain.  Like my friends who have left teaching I’m just a name on the schedule to them, my many years of service notwithstanding.  Here today, gone tomorrow.  If any of us quit, we’ll be promptly replaced and forgotten. Only administrators (and the dwindling number of tenured faculty) are forever.

Only administrators, and the hordes of students with no shortage of angles to work.

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar

The New Normal

When the headline first hit my newsfeed, I’ll admit I ignored it.

I ignored it until a cascade of related stories made it clear that this was no run of the mill mass shooting.  It’s been almost a week, and the media furor over the deadliest gun violence incident in U.S. history so far has yet to subside.

The Las Vegas shooting has many of the hallmarks of such incidents, and a few baffling twists.  All the usual tropes have been invoked—heroic law enforcement, firefighters, and EMTs, equally heroic vets who ran toward the gunfire as everyone else ran away, devoted couples tragically meeting with the death of one or both partners, and family members wringing their hands awaiting news about the fate of loved ones.  And, of course, the endless speculation over what made the shooter do what he did.

Stephen Paddock fits some of the stereotypes of the mass shooter.  He’s white.  He’s male.  And, he’s been described as a loner.  So far, so good. 

But, he was older.  Affluent.  Successful at business.  He had no past history of violence.  No known mental health issues.  No extreme political or religious convictions, either.  All this has us scratching our heads, because there was nothing at all to lead anyone to believe Paddock was capable of such an act.

Unsurprisingly, rumors and conspiracy theories hang thick in the air.  The ever-opportunistic Islamic State took credit for the shootings, claiming Paddock had converted to Islam months ago.  Even though the FBI quickly debunked the claim, that didn’t stop a couple of my students from using it to argue in class that them Moozlems are a threat to ‘Murica and they should all be rounded up and deported. 

Such reactions are par for the course.  Americans are prone to hysteria, and not just over the jihadists hiding under every bed.  The shooting has brought the never-ending debate over guns, always simmering, back to a rolling boil.

One of the few sensible gun laws we have forbids private ownership of fully automatic weapons, though there’s a grandfather clause which means that such weapons obtained before the ban are available for purchase albeit at a steep price.  Not to despair, though.  The so-called bump stock device can enable your inadequate semiautomatic weapon to produce a similar rate of fire to that of a full auto.  Hence, the particular lethality of the Las Vegas massacre.

For once, congressional Republicans and Democrats appeared open to a discussion over gun laws.  The NRA, which seemed similarly open earlier in the week, retreated to form and has since come out against an outright ban on bump stocks.

The Second Amendment argument is weakest when it comes to private possession of automatic weapons and conversion kits for legally sold semiautomatics.  Automatic weapons are not practical for target shooting or hunting.  Even the military has very specific uses for automatic weapons and machine guns, and most members of a standard infantry squad are riflemen trained in making well-aimed single shots.  Anything else is a waste of good ammunition.

If I haven’t made the point clear by now, it’s this: Automatic weapons have no logical purpose except to indiscriminately kill large numbers of people quickly.  Which then begs the question: Why would any rational citizen want an automatic weapon?

The discussion now returns to the logic, if you can call it that, of gun politics.  I am partial to the argument that it is not so much the presence of firearms in our society, but the culture surrounding them that is the problem.  To put it bluntly, guns are a phallic symbol for certain males insecure in their manhood and eroding socioeconomic status.  They’re basically a substitute dick. 

This fixation expresses itself in its mildest form in the lobbying for liberalized concealed carry laws.  Essentially, it’s an argument rooted in the man-as-protector ethos.  It goes something like this: If only I had a concealed gun, I coulda stopped that maniac shootin’ at everyone. 

This assertion doesn’t account for the likelihood of the would-be hero being mistaken for a bad guy by yet another would-be hero packing heat.  Or by the police.  It also doesn’t account for situations such as last Sunday’s where a handgun is a useless countermeasure against a guy firing a rifle from a 32^nd story window.

The fixation’s most troubling manifestation arises from our cultural celebration of violence.   A real man teaches his enemies a permanent lesson.  And the thought of apocalyptic vengeance is appealing.  It’s the ultimate form of dominance over other, lesser people.  It’s like playing God.

Most of us sublimate these fantasies by watching action movies or playing first-person shooter games.  NPR this week profiled a venue in Las Vegas which offers patrons the simulated experience of firing an automatic weapon.  A soundbite featured a couple of them telling the reporter how exhilarating it felt.

How did Stephen Paddock feel as he fired into the crowd of concertgoers below him?  If it was anger, it was an anger no one had noticed until then.  He carefully planned and methodically prepared for the shootings, and thus can be assumed rational enough to have known what he was about to do was wrong.  Had he not been cornered in his room at the Mandalay Bay and forced to commit suicide to evade capture, Paddock had planned an escape from the scene further demonstrating he was compos mentis.

Maybe he did it because he could.  Capability is motive enough for some people.  We probably will never know for sure, and it really doesn’t matter. 

The one certainty is that another mass shooting awaits us in the not too distant future.  Get used to them if you haven’t already.  It’s the new normal.

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar

Once More into the Breach

It’s the week before classes begin and I’m in the faculty workroom at my “other” college, Verdant Fields, when my colleague Jesse shuffles in looking just a little depressed.

Actually, he looked thoroughly, disconcertingly abject.  Jesse is normally an outgoing, even charismatic guy.  His students love him, and last spring he received the college’s annual excellence in teaching award.  Trying to engage Jesse, I ask about his summer. 

Shrugging, he tells me he taught a summer class.  He mutters something about not being ready for summer to be over before sinking into a chair at one of the workstations, putting in a set of earbuds, pulling a sheaf of papers from his briefcase, and commencing to type into the computer.  I don’t take the rebuff personally.  My outward affableness aside, I’m in a similar mood.

I typically feel a sense of loss as the fall semester begins.  I used to jump into the new year feet first with hope and anticipation, but now it’s with a sense of regret that maybe I hadn’t used the passing summer to better advantage. 

Like Jesse, my summer was as much work as vacation.  My academic year officially began ten weeks ago with an online summer class at Snowflake College.  This virtual class allowed me a couple of getaways which should have reinvigorated me, but it wound up with one of those incidents that have made me dread something I once loved.

Back in June, I was at once self-congratulatory and apprehensive.  The last academic year had been trouble-free, even pleasant.  There wasn’t a single troublemaker in any of my classes at any of my campuses.  Verdant Fields gave me a teaching award of my own last spring, albeit division level, and it assigned me an additional section for the fall.  I wondered how much longer my luck would hold.

Not for long, as it turned out.  There were 39 students in my summer online class at Snowflake.  Of those, 37 passed with a “C” or better.  One failed for not participating in the class after the first week.  The other neglected to submit any of the required writing assignments, which made up 1/3 of the coursework and therefore 1/3 of the final grade.

A week after final grades were posted, I get a panicked email from the latter student, whom I’ll call Devin.  Not surprisingly, Devin’s singing the blues.  He claims he uploaded all the writing assignments.  He said Whiteboard gave him a successful upload message each time.  He just can’t understand why the Whiteboard gradebook says the assignments are missing, he just can’t.  He’s transferring to Big State University, and I just have to give him a good grade.

Ah, to be young, lazy, and entitled!  Luckily for Devin, he’s just the kind of student Snowflake College nurtures.  And so, the following exchange ensued:

I answer Devin saying it was his responsibility to make sure the assignments were in. 

Devin replies that he meant to have them in, reminding me, with no proof of course, that he had uploaded all the work on time.  He closes with a gratuitous assertion that he doesn’t want me to think of him as a dishonest person.  (Too late for that, bud.)

I email Devin with a vague promise to look into available options, informing him that submitting late work for credit after final grades were in was, well, a trifle unlikely.

And then, silence.  For a day or two, anyway.  The next email missive came not from Devin but from Regina, the administrative assistant to our academic dean.  She informed me young Devin has submitted a grade change.

Now I’m beginning to see red.  In twelve years, no student has ever had the gall to challenge a grade I’ve issued.  I consult the Snowflake College faculty guidebook concerning the grade change policy.  My blood pressure ratchets even higher when I find that a grade change is issued only in cases of instructor error, bad faith, or incompetence.

I shot Regina a reply telling her in no uncertain terms that none of those criteria apply to my assessment of Devin’s efforts.  

Regina was unimpressed, though as a classified employee one can excuse her indifference to the spirit rather than the minutiae of academic regulations.  She answered with a tersely worded request to send her the corrected grade when ready.

The college allows a full year for grade changes after the end of term.  Young Devin is in for a wait.  While I’m sure I’ll catch no end of flak for dragging my heels, I plan to hold out against that lying little shit for as long as I can get away with it.  Screw him and the cayuse he rode in on.

If you’re unfamiliar with contemporary higher education, this story might seem confusing.  If you’re like me, you believed you got the grade you earned.  No more, no less.  So why is Snowflake College siding with a student who’s so obviously in the wrong?

Retention and completion rates, that’s why.  These are the excuse for any number of depredations committed of late by college administrators.  They will do anything to gain and keep students, even if it means condoning academic dishonesty and besmirching the motives and reputations of faculty.  (Well, the motives and reputations of adjunct faculty, anyway.)

We adjuncts have to take it because their jobs are secure, and ours are not.  Snowflake has been on an institution-wide quest to maintain enrollment and boost graduation rates in the face of a declining college age population in its service area.  In furtherance of this end, some clever grant writer managed to finagle a seven-figure dole to create a program to do just that.

Of course, any new program needs staff.  And so, Snowflake has created two new executive dean positions, touted as “temporary” even though everyone knows goddamn well they’re here to stay, to streamline its academic and job training programs.  And where you have administrators, you have to have a bevy of classified staff to do their bidding.

This push has been in the making for the past couple of years, supported by a public relations campaign to get faculty buy-in.  Last spring, the college even condescended to invite several part-timers, myself included, to brainstorm potential pre-packaged academic tracks for students who don’t know what they want to be when they grow up. 

We submitted our recommendations and were politely thanked by management.  A few weeks later, they released their initial plan.  It bore little resemblance to any of our recommendations.  I doubt if anyone bothered to look at them.

The implications for us in the trenches are grim.  We’re hanging on by torn and bleeding fingernails as courses and programs are cut or whittled down.  Meanwhile, the bureaucracy gets larger, or at least it’s holding ground.  No wonder Snowflake’s administration is so imperious.

They see themselves as the good guys, naturally.  More than few of them take pains to create rapport, or its simulacrum, at any opportunity. 

It doesn’t fly with me.  Nothing peeves me as much as a dean or vice president who rushes to point out that s/he too was once a part-time instructor.  I don’t care; the operative word in that statement is “once.”  We are not friends, and we have nothing in common.  I am labor; you are management.

The strange thing, and the saving grace, about the situation is that my best moments in the classroom and my successes in motivating students to learn still make up for any resentment and frustration.  There are lots of days when I find satisfaction and even pride in my work.  Sadly, those days are becoming fewer.  It’s like I’m locked in an abusive relationship where my abuser constantly reminds me of all the good times we had together to keep me from leaving.

Observing my friend Jesse, this sense becomes even more acute.  Finishing my prep work for next week, I try to wish Jesse a good day as I leave.  Engrossed with the computer monitor and lost in whatever sounds were coming through his earbuds, he doesn’t hear me.  I wave my hand in front of his eyes to get his attention.

Turning to me with a morose expression, Jesse merely nods.  I go away with a heavy heart.  Classes start Monday.

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar