I read Invisible Adjunct’s blog regularly, and I used to leave comments there but quit bothering to compose elegant, finely-crafted arguments after I never won the Weekly IA Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence (No Cash, Just Glory). (No, not really.) I am accountable to my many, many underemployed colleagues, and IA helps keep my feet to the fire.
I have to make an untimely, unwelcome observation, though. In all my reading of IA and the other sites of underemployed academics, the writers identify themselves as good (or “very good” or “excellent”) teachers and scholars. Now, I know from years of studying from and working alongside academics that a reasonable proportion of full-time, tenured and tenure-track faculty don’t teach very well. Some are solid, adequate teachers; if I loved the subject, I did well, and if I didn’t, I learned a few things and moved on. Some were not adequate, and the less said about them, the better.
I have never heard any of them cop to being a mediocre teacher. I have never heard another colleague say in public that Prof. X isn’t a very good teacher (indeed, I’ve heard colleagues publicly laud teachers whom they privately excoriate). Every teacher I’ve ever known who was denied tenure described her- or himself as a strong teacher (sometimes they even identified that as the problem — that they were “good teachers, but not research-oriented”). From what I read, everyone unjustly relegated to adjunct status is a popular, diligent, effective teacher, and many are strong researchers; are all the best teachers laboring as adjuncts (or in exile from academic), leaving only the schlubs in actual academic positions? I like to think I’m a good teacher, but in an atmosphere such as this, how would one know? How do we ask observers from outside academia to make sense of a grimly exploitative economy of adjunctification, when the rhetoric of the discussion rings so oddly flat?
Here’s what I suspect:
I don’t see an obvious remedy for academia’s sins and wounds from within academia. That doesn’t obviate the need for candor about our strengths and weaknesses, though. Not all disappointed teachers have been wronged by cruel fate, not all who teach (or would teach) teach well, not all who occupy tenured or tenure-track positions are flabby-butt timeserving frauds; all of us need to look resolutely into the deep, dark truthful mirror and live with what we see there.
But until non-academics value academia’s contribution to common life, I fear we’ll be left with self-deceptive, self-destructive, partisan, hollow rhetorics of jilted entitlement. I don’t think that helps anyone.
Posted by AKMA at February 4, 2004 09:49 AM | TrackBackI think every field has folks in it like those you describe. I have an idea that there are some pastors who may not have been as perfect as they felt before the congregation “turned on them.”
Who was it who said “Don’t accept your dog’s admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful”? I wonder how many pastors have contented themselves with the idea that they are wonderful preachers because people say “Good sermon” on the way out the door.
There was an interesting article awhile ago Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. That’s probably part of the problem, but isn't the bigger problem (which you mention in your post) the fact that we do not give honest feedback to people?
I think this also ties in with the topic of evaluating teachers that you mentioned the other day. I never liked the anonymous aspect of it either, because it was too easy to blast someone who was a difficult professor. I know someone who was denied tenure at Allegheny College basically for asking a lot of his students. There were a lot of students who took his class because they thought it would be interesting (meaning they wouldn’t have to work hard, because, after all, there can’t be any right answers in religion class, right?!?) and they were upset when he started challenging them.
When filling out an evaluation for a course which had been truly terrible (one of the few bad courses I had run into), I wondered if my feedback (which was negative on many fronts) would be dismissed as “obviously someone who had a problem with the professor” rather than someone who was getting a decent grade in the class, but had still been disappointed in the experience.
How do you tell someone that they aren’t gifted for something they have their heart set on, or something they have spent a lot of time, energy and money pursuing?
When I was going through the ordination process in the Presbyterian Church, it was described to me this way: “The first step in Inquiry and basically anyone can become and Inquirer. It basically means that you think you might have a call, and plan to attend seminary. I’ve never heard of anyone being denied status as an Inquirer. Then you come back after either a year or two, and say that you are ready to become a Candidate. At this point you’ve spent either a year or two of your life at seminary, plus the cost of tuition, books, etc. If you are passing your courses and are able to say something about your ideas about God which aren’t blatantly heretical [which might be hard to define these days], then it is difficult for the committee to deny the request... and then once you’ve graduated and passed your exams, there’s really no way the committee could say, ‘Look, we know we’ve supported you for the past 3 years, but....’ So there’s not much chance that the average person couldn’t be ordained through the process.”
Barring failing classes or ordination exams, I’d say that’s true. Neither seminary nor ordination exams fully prepare someone for ministry, so the real test comes after the exams are over and you get out into the church... and what ecclesial body is going to step in and tell someone who is ordained and has served a church that perhaps they just aren’t very good at it?
I don’t know how much of that relates to becoming an adjunct professor, but it seems entirely possible that there are people who could go through that process of classes and exams, and come out the other end as someone who just doesn’t have a gift for teaching.
Then what do you do? Try something else? (Perhaps the ministry?)
Reform can't come from within academia. We outside academia are supposed to shut the f*** up.
Explain to me what's going to stop the spiral downward?
Posted by: Dorothea Salo at February 5, 2004 10:04 PMMost graduate students--indeed, most adjuncts, tenure-track, and tenured faculty--have essentially no training in how to teach or otherwise manage a classroom. Some have a natural gift for it, some learn by long practice. Some are lousy, and will always be that way. My own perception is that so few of the poor teachers get told they're poor teachers because students just don't care, their colleagues don't know, and their superiors assume they'll improve.
On the other hand, I'm deeply suspicious that going through "teacher training" at any level makes you a good teacher, or even a competent one. I myself would happily teach in a public secondary school, but for the regrettably idiotic "educational foundation" requirements (e.g. public speaking, "writing for teachers", and duplicates of courses I took as an undergrad and grad student). I'm not interested in sinking my family further into debt so that I'm "prepared" to earn an execrable salary as a full time teacher. Then again, I'm an adjunct myself, so my career satisfaction needs have been pretty well beaten out of me.
Posted by: MisterBS at February 6, 2004 10:54 AMIn some places adjuncts do have to prove their teaching skills more than tenure-trackers (being hired one year at a time, if they're unpopular with the kids they're immediately dispensed with and replaced--and it's their teaching, not their scholarship, that's considered for the job in the first place). Certainly I've seen situations where the adjuncts are by far the best teachers. It happens a lot in the sciences.
But beyond that, I'm curious why you choose to hang the general question of self-evaluation on the necks of the people who are working hand to mouth, at piecemeal rates and often without benefits. The structure of your argument is that since a lot of tenure-track teachers are manifestly not so good, it only stands to reason that most of the people who can't get tenure-track positions are even worse.
Never took you for an invisible-hander, AKMA.
Posted by: T. V. at March 4, 2004 07:58 PMTV, that makes perfect sense — and by no means should one infer that I think less of exploited adjuncts than of their even-less-competent full-time colleagues. I emphasized the part-time teachers only because seeing the particular testimonies triggered my reflection.
Had I thought harder and better, I would have recognized that I’ve known as many or more marginally competent full-timers as I have adjuncts. More, probably, sicne one of the lessons to me from this conversation is that the theological fields may differ significantly enough from other disciples (history, at the very least) that my experience doesn’t connect well with others’ experiences in other fields.
But no invisible hand for me -- the knowledge workers control the means of production. . . .
Posted by: AKMA at March 4, 2004 10:04 PM