CUNY and salvaging the "doomed project"

And just like that pedagogic expertise is crushed by economic and political efficiency. At CUNY Queensborough the administration has sought to reduce composition to a 3 hour course, instead of its traditional 4. The faculty refused, on the grounds that composition requires 4 hours. Apparently, to increase systemic efficiency, the state has adopted what they call the Pathways plan, "designed to create a curricular structure that will streamline transfers and enhance the quality of general education across the University." In short, from what I can tell, this requires any course to have the same number of credits and class hours from school to school.

When faculty refused to adopt this change, citing student need, they were hit with a letter from Queensborough's vice-president, which made its way to the Internet via the Student Activism blog. The letter threatened to freeze all hiring, terminate all adjuncts, and cut up to 19 of the departments 26 full-time faculty. A shot across the bow.

Today, the Chronicle reports that the president has stepped in and called off the dogs of war:

That message set off alarms that continued sounding over the weekend. On Sunday, however, the college’s president, Diane B. Call, said in an e-mail to faculty and other leaders that Ms. Steele’s letter was meant as a “worst case scenario—one we are prepared to work mightily to avoid.”

“It is my belief,” Ms. Call wrote, “that through continued communication and collaboration with our faculty, a constructive resolution to ensure student learning will be achieved.”

Of course, another reason for the president to soften the situation is that the vice president's threats clearly overstep their legal limits. But, as Aaron Barlow of the Academe Blog put it:

None of this would be happening had the CUNY administration shown respect for the faculty and had worked to build a Pathways program with the faculty, instead of in spite of the faculty.

For those who believe Universities should operate like businesses, (top down hierarchy, competitive environment), the faculty probably look out of touch. For those that believe Universities should operate like educational institutions (bottom up development, cooperative environment), the administration look incompetent and draconic. Given our economic woes, it is natural to expect Universities to look for cost cutting measures. But cutting credit hours and increasing class sizes should be the last thing on the board. Working with faculty to develop solutions should be the first.

The incident reminds me of the discussion of professional University administrator's in Academically Adrift, particularly their assertion that "contemporary higher education administrators experience institutional interests and incentives that focus their attention elsewhere" (11). In CUNY's case, their president has educational experience, but one has to realize that reducing the credit hours for a composition program that serves a large number of underprepared writers is disastrous. Even under the best of circumstances, FYC can be considered a doomed project (Sirc's essay comes immediately to mind, but I know there are others out there too). Teach students, many of whom come from secondary systems that almost entirely reduce writing instruction to a formulaic five-paragraph essay, to write lucid, structured, supported arguments in the span of 16 or maybe 32 weeks. Throw in research methods, citation styles, grammar, and, increasingly, new media technologies. A difficult, if not impossible, task indeed.

Last week, in my graduate class, we read Heidegger's essay "The Question Concerning Technology." In a class lecture, I claimed that our educational system, from kindergarten to graduate school, is increasingly realizing one of Heidegger's worst nightmares--that we would become so overwhelmed with the technological spirit, the desire for profit, efficiency, and utility, that "he comes to the brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve" (332). Grist for the mill. Raw material for the factory. I skeptical that education can find any way off of this path, especially given the rise of the for-profit University and disappearing industrial economy. But those of us who teach, and especially those of us who teach a vitalist, complex art such as writing, know that learning is a messy, inefficient process that takes time--time to try, to fail, to try again, to talk, to muster up the courage one more time.

Teaching a Philosophy of Life

Today's snippet comes from a student's paper defending the value of his liberal arts major. One of the questions I posed this semester, while reading Academically Adrift and Not For Profit was whether Universities' missions included teaching values, or whether teaching values was the province of other social/cultural institutions (family/church). For the most part, my students resisted discussing this question. But one student took up the question in his paper, and noted how research points to a decline among students in prioritizing values; he cites a 2000 study by Pace and Connolly ("Where are the Liberal Arts?"):

In 1966 the percent of students saying that ‘developing a meaningful philosophy of life’ was an essential or very important goal was 80%, but in 1996 it was down to 42%. The materialist goal of ‘being well off financially’ was regarded as essential or very important by 45% in 1966, but in 1996 it was up to 74%” (Pace 54)

I'm looking forward to reading the whole article because I am especially interested in the parameters of those numbers. Of course, the social demographics of college enrollment have transformed significantly since 1966, especially in light of Vietnam spikes in enrollment. And our economy has transformed as well, such that now there are fewer career options available to those without college education.

Ethical Learning, Responsibility, and Assessment

A long time ago, when I first became enamored with the possibilities of digital communication and deconstruction, I remember constructing a piece on spectrality and student work. I was proud when the piece won a Parlor Press award at Purdue for Best Multimedia Project, and a bit disappointed when it was rejected for publication at Kairos (though I can't blame them, the thing is a mess). Essentially, the piece emphasized how rhetorical practice involves more than a knowledge of and ability to enact Aristotelian tactics--that interacting with real, responsible (que Levinas) human beings requires a pathetic sensitivity and strength, and that the only way to gain that strength is engage in situations that leave us "weak," out of control, beholden to a spectral other/future over which we can have no mastery or assurance.

I remembered this piece today reading over a Chronicle piece on Assessment and Ethical Learning. One cannot materialize ghosts, nor can one accurately measure an individual's response to the affective rush of alterity, the traumatizing experience of facing an Other that calls a self into question, the infinity that interrupts totality (etc), outside of the radical encounter itself. Recreating that situation is (virtually?) impossible. I'd link to think--in the best cases--that the blogging pedagogy I've been working on approaches the problem; but I certainly wouldn't claim it solves it, or that it in anyway ensures ethical responses. Rather, it makes possible this kind of encounter, and aims to cultivate a responsible (que Levinas again, in this case a response that weighs the other to the neighbor while recognizing the inevitability that violence will occur) response. As the article intimates, there is an issue of kairos to ethical learning largely irrelevant to critical and epistemological pedagogies:

"It is really hard to measure ethical learning because it's not declarative or semantic knowledge, but, like any expertise, it is knowing the right thing to do in the right way at the right time," says Darcia F. Narváez, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame. In her research, she has found that intuition plays such a big role in moral decisions that she argues it is a mistake to ignore its influence.

As the article further complicates, such attempts run into trouble once they begin to determine what/whose particular values are right. One reason I enjoy Levinas so much is that his work doesn't articulate a morality (hence, it does not belong to logos). Rather, it attempts to establish, via pathos, a mood from which we can hospitably approach those impossible, but necessary questions. Levinas' phenomenological account of subjectivity dis-posess us of any claim to a spontaneous, autonomous foundation, thus, I hope, generating an embodied dis-position from which we can ethically approach argumentation (remembering that we dispute with other people, rather than with mere ideas). Ethics, when I deploy the term, doesn't mean to signify a list of truths, or even an accepted collection of moral laws. Rather, it speaks to the cultivation of a spectral subjective attitude, a pre-condition to productive human encounters. Referring to yesterday's post on Tim Morton, it is the cultivation of a dis-position both open and weird. Irrational though it may be, argumentation is not a matter of simply deploying proper arguments or upholding the proper morality.

As I continue to work on my Nussbaum article, its articulation of post-pedagogy, and the emphasis of ethics over critique, I am caught up in contemporary will to assess. I am trying, hard, to avoid adopting an intellectual position anti-thetical to standardized assessments, especially after reading Academically Adrift such a move would feel reactionary and stupid. Thinking about the kinds of qualitative assignments in Academically Adrift, I am beginning to have new appreciation for the CLA test they endorse. I feel much more obligated to acknowledge and endorse such maneuvers; if we do not cultivate more sophisticated forms of assessment, then we could be burdened (in the post-Spellings Commission, hyper-attentive, economically-crisised-driven University) with something much worse. In my article I deal with recent "reforms," by the CollegeBoard, in Florida's primary and secondary schools--they are now driven by a scripted, day-to-day program accompanied by standardized tests leaving little room for kairos and invention on the part of teachers. To say that such rigid policing could not come to higher education is, I believe, a dangerous stance.

And, if you haven't read Academically Adrift yet, and you teach writing, then I cannot emphasize enough how important this book is. Sure, there are methodological issues with their study (I remember Pat Sullivan emphasizing how, when people want to reject a conclusion, they begin by attacking the methodology), but the picture they paint of learning on contemporary campuses warrants attention and response.

Blogging Pedagogy & Academically Adrift

Today is the final day of my summer Expository Writing class. I build all of my classes around themes; this semester was dedicated to blogging. Mxrk, Ryan P. Weber, and I will be putting together an article dedicated to the class in August (did you know that Ryan? Mrxk and I will bang out a draft and send it to you once he gets here). I constructed a pretty rigorous course site for the blogging class, with almost daily notes. One of my colleagues, Carl Herndl, will use my site and syllabus to teach Expository Writing later this summer; I think that will be a great test for the pedagogy since Carl is an admitted techno-novice and has never taught blogging before.

On a side note, I required us to read two books during the course: Nussbaum's Not For Profit and Arum and Roksa's Academically Adrift. I'm writing an article responding to Nussbaum, so I'll hold off commenting on that one here.

Arum and Roksa's book is a worthy read for anyone working in higher education. It is by and large and empirical study documenting just how little the majority (80%) of today's college students are learning. They use a comprehensive and (by my limited judgement) reliable qualitative test to measure students' gains in writing, complex reasoning, and critical thinking during their freshman and sophomore years. They acknowledge that many students might be learning other things, particularly things geared toward their majors. They openly acknowledge in several places that the importance of their study lies in the reader prioritizing writing, complex reasoning, and critical thinking as central to University learning (and they show that the professional sector is calling for increases in these abilities, so there's a rhetorical element to this prioritization).

One point: many of us working in rhetoric and literature would not identify what they call "critical thinking" as critical thinking. For instance, one of the qualitative assessment tests asks students to read ten documents dealing with a specific kind of plane and its likelihood of crashing and then write a memo to their boss arguing whether s/he should buy the plane.

Arum and Roksa spread blame for the lack of learning on students, faculty, and administration:

• Students simply are not studying enough. The average student studies around 12 hours a week, with much of their remaining time going to socializing activities (data collected via self-reporting).
• Faculty are too committed to research. Less than 60% of students at selective and less selective schools reported having to read more than 40 pages a week for a class, and less than 50% reported having to write more than 20 pages for a course over an entire semester (the numbers were 75% and 95% at highly selective institutions, respectively).
• Faculty, however, aren't solely to blame for their focus on research and slighting of teaching. Arum and Roksa note that administrators--increasingly drawn from outside of academic ranks to focus on recruiting, branding, investment, and publicity--have increasingly edged tenure requirements toward publication and away from the classroom. I think a naive reading of Academically Adrift would frame it as an argument against tenure. I do not think this is the case. Rather, I believe they advocate for the transformation of tenure to place a greater emphasis on teaching. This argument deserves more time than I can give it this morning--but, recognizing how much of our research goes unnoticed or uncited (90% of Humanities scholarship),, I don't have a problem with such a move (I address this directly in my response essay on Levinas, metaphysics, and D. Diane Davis' Inessential Solidarity, currently in process with JAC, but there I argue for institutional recognition for inhabiting dialogical spaces rather than solely for individual publication). This is not to say that research and scholarship aren't important. But it is not the only important thing. Whether it is the most important thing is a question I am honestly not ready to answer today.

To reiterate, this is a book worth your time, and probably your students' time. I anticipated that my class would be a bit hostile to the book. But they weren't. And when I started to talk about how my blogging class stems from a recognition of many of the book's arguments, they were not only receptive but (dare I say) appreciative. There's always going to be the bottom 20% students who are unprepared, unmotivated, and unteachable. But, following Arum and Roksa's advice (the way to get students more invested is simply to raise expectations and assign more work), I think we can all acknowledge that we aren't teaching as much as we could (...should?), and we can do better.

P.S., my summer blogging course asks students to write 550 words a day (not counting in class writing) and a final 10 page paper. That's about 55 pages of writing in 6 weeks. So, while I'm always failing at something, at least I can tell myself I'm assigning a lot of writing. Now if only I could get a teaching assistant to grade it all...