mandy0507

Tenured faculty are a vanishing breed as colleges and universities strive to save money by hiring part-time faculty like "Professor X" instead. These "adjuncts" not only receive considerably lower salaries; they also live without job security and often without any benefits. They are frequently marginalized by "regular" faculty, crammed into shared office space, excluded from department meetings, and denied faculty voting privileges. Because student evaluations play a major role in determining whether adjuncts are re-hired, there can be a significant temptation -- even if unconscious -- to award inflated grades (although Professor X denies that he succumbs to any such pressure). In short, adjunct faculty have plenty to complain about, and Professor X does his share of that. Surprisingly, however, the bulk of his complaints are less concerned with his own inferior status than they are with his inferior students. As a part-time English instructor at two lower-tier institutions (one 4-year and one 2-year), he laments the large number of students who are woefully unprepared and often, it appears, irremediable. They can't construct a coherent sentence; they can't spell; they can't think critically; they have no prior acquaintance with good literature; they don't have a clue about traditional scholarship or the procedure for writing a research paper. Even so, Professor X evinces a certain amount of empathy for these unwashed masses -- folks who are often going to school part-time and struggling to make ends meet. The larger problem, he argues, is that colleges are expanding their enrollments at an unconscionable rate, and consequently, a college education has become a prerequisite for many jobs that have no business requiring one. Of course, the expansion of colleges is a boon to adjuncts like X, since someone has to teach the burgeoning numbers of students (many of whom never make it to graduation). Denizens of upper-tier institutions are doubtless worlds apart from the woeful scenarios that Professor X lays out. I suspect that no Ivy League faculty member -- tenured or temporary -- will ever encounter a student like the one who inhabited an introductory course that I taught some years ago at a rather non-selective university. This student confidently pronounced that Socrates and the Wright Brothers were contemporaries, and when asked to investigate the matter further using the library (this was pre-Internet), he reported that he could find no materials relevant to the topic. In "for-profit" colleges, such an experience would probably be routine. Some of those awful places are actually now under Federal investigation, and while they clearly benefit from swelling enrollments, it's not clear that anyone else does. Meanwhile, the escalating cost of college tuition everywhere results in substantial student debt -- debt that is all the more difficult to discharge from a low-wage job that may represent the end of the rainbow for someone foolish enough in the 21st century to have majored in English or history or philosophy. Despite Professor X's argument that many jobs have undergone unnecessary credential creep, there's a case to be made that this complaint embodies an unduly narrow view of vocational preparation. Computer programmers whose technical studies are supplemented by humanities courses will be better equipped to consider the ethical and social consequences of the code that they write. Military personnel who possess some understanding of archaeology and art history could be expected to take a greater interest in protecting the contents of museums from wanton looting. Employees in service sectors would surely benefit from a background in psychology when they seek to sooth angry clients. And so on. Finally, despite what one might gather from the current political climate, education isn't just about jobs. Given that a viable democracy presupposes an electorate that is capable of evaluating arguments and validating sources of information, colleges and universities are not simply cranking out future employees; they are also inculcating skills that are needed for effective citizenship. Professor X's provocative book is long on identifying problems and short on offering solutions, and he ostentatiously burnishes his observations with literary references that are apparently designed to show how deeply literature is integrated into his own life. Maybe he's counting on his book to serve as an application essay for a better academic appointment. Whether or not it succeeds in that regard, it does offer an insider's view of what contemporary higher education often looks like once one descends below the ranks of the elite, even stopping well short of the "basement".

2022-11-14 13:49