Tenure and Teaching

The strong case for tenure emphasizes academic freedom. I share this view (and harbor deep suspicions of those who argue against tenure in our current setting of anti-intellectualism, attacks on the university, and neoliberal fanaticism). But there is another case that can be made for tenure, a case that hinges on teaching.

Before going any further, I should say that I teach undergraduates in a private liberal arts college. Classes are generally small (my classes typically range between 25 and 8 students). It is possible that my reflections don’t apply to large universities. Yet my experience in large lecture courses as an undergraduate and graduate student (albeit in private schools) is one of engaged, dedicated, charismatic faculty. So I think my reflections might go beyond small, teaching-oriented, colleges and their faculty.

Not counting the teaching I did as a I graduate student, I’ve been teaching about 18 years now. And I’ve started to notice what seems to me to be something like a teaching life-cycle. Faculty with more experience than I have confirm this. We don’t stay the same as teachers over the course of our careers. Tenure gives us the space to grow, change, and become better, more responsive, more knowledgeable teachers.

My first years out of graduate school were rooted in trying to separate myself from my students. Some were less than ten years younger than I was. Many were taller. There was the gender issue; some students were inclined to treat young, female faculty rather dismissively, too familiarly, not very seriously. It’s not just a gender issue, though. I’ve talked with lots of faculty right out of graduate school who expressed anxieties about their students not treating them with any respect. I was so nervous before one of my first classes that I persuaded myself to act like a professor, pretend to be a professor, in the hope that the students would treat me like one. At any rate, the effort to distinguish myself from my students made me a bit colder, less generous, and less patient with them. Because I was on a tenure track (rather than an adjunct), I had the chance to get feedback and improve.  I didn’t just lose my job.

The next phase (which came pretty quickly), was evaluation driven. Because tenure at a teaching college requires evidence of good teaching, and evaluations are used as a key factor in measuring good teaching (which, incidentally, they may not be), I used the evaluations to try to be more what the students wanted–more entertaining, responsive, engaging, less confrontational, rigid, demanding. Evaluation driven teaching can be a way of treating education like television programming–whatever people like is what survives, even if it’s quality is negligible. In a world without tenure, more teaching would be evaluation driven. When your job depends on making 18-22 year olds happy, you will do what it takes to entertain and amuse them. I’m grateful that my undergraduate professors did not have an entertainment approach to teaching. I hope my students during the entertainment years learned something despite the fun they had.

After tenure (and the restoration of Hegel and Kant to my syllabi), it was time to develop the distinctive line of inquiry that would mark my approach to political theory. What would Jodi Dean’s reading of Plato be? How would Jodi Dean present modern political thought? On the one hand, I look back at the grandiosity that underlay the reconstruction of my courses with a bit of embarassment–was that really a good way to introduce undergraduates to political theory? On the other, the exercise of creating these readings (really, enough for a textbook at this point) was thrilling. There were always students who were mesmermized, who had the text and the world open into new possibilities. Yet others were like, “um, what did Kant say again?” As I think about these classes, I’m not sure how to think about what the students got from them. The courses were content driven, text driven. The focus was on the key ideas and thinkers. Motivated students, students who already had a taste for theory, got a lot out of them. But might I have reached more students if the courses had been focused on them? Tenure gave me the freedom to develop rigorous courses, change them, and rethink them.

And now my oldest kid has just a few years before he starts college. What would be good for him? I don’t have to worry about distancing myself from students–they already associate me with their parents (which brings with it all sorts of attempts to put me in a nurturing, mommy role). And I’m  not so worried about entertaining the students, although anti-tenure folks who write as if faculty can stand before 18-22 year olds day in and day out without being affected by their attitudes and responses, who presume faculty don’t care if students are bored or inattentive, have no idea what they are talking about.  It’s demoralizing when students fall asleep or play with their portable media devices in class. It’s hard not to fill in the silence that accompanies questions posed to the class, “is the idea of a categorical imperative plausible in a culturally diverse world?” But I think there must be ways that I can do more than show the students political theory and theorizing. I think there must be ways that I can help students come to do political theory themselves.

For the most part, I haven’t found the tricks and devices proferred by the pedagogists very helpful. They seemed designed for a soundbite culture of opinion, not a rich text culture of thinking. One good thing–they can teach not what to do. I hate the feeling that the pedagogists and their participationist questions induce: it feels like one will only be wrong when one answers. I talked about this with a class a couple of years ago. They hate it when a professor has them read and interpret a passage out loud, rightly suspecting that the professor is trying to lead the class in a particular direction and has a very specific idea in mind, an idea so specific in fact that there is no way the student can do anything but provide a foil for the professor’s demonstration of a weak, student interpretation and a strong, magnificent, PhD strengthened professorial interpretation.

My task this fall is to find ways to create spaces for the students to think, gaps that induce them to think. The risk is that I will be lulled into giving them my answers–it will be easier for everyone, filling in the void, the uncertainty. More and more, it seems to me, students want to be told what the text means.

Their next step is to reject all meanings as mere opinion (Paul has a great term for this, the “communicative equivalence” of all utterances). I’m starting one of my courses with Plato’s Gorgias as a way to grapple with this tendency. It’s the first time I’ve read it–another part of my new approach: try to put myself in a position akin to that of the students.  This means assigning material I haven’t read or haven’t read in a long time (over 80 chapters of Machiavelli’s Discourses!!) It means using new books–without all my previous underlining. It means going in without typed lectures. It means being open to something new. Part of this is delusional: I can only put myself in their position because I am not in it; I can only disarm myself of lecture notes and familiar texts because of prior experience (my god, I’ve taught Plato’s Republic annually for nearly two decades).

We’ll see what happens. Fortunately, tenure gives me the freedom to try, to experiment, to try to meet the students where they are. It’s risky enough without fear of losing my job.

As I am reading a bit of Zizek at the moment, it struck me that the figure of Rod Blagojevich is somewhat similar to that of Silvio Berlusconi. For those not familiar, Zizek argues that Berlusconi’s vulgarity and clownishness, TV confessions, and private corruptions are precisely what grants him the power to act with such ruthless impunity. He also argues that Berlusconi may well represent the future of liberal democratic political leadership.

What makes Berlusconi so interesting as a political phenomenon is the fact that he, as the most powerful politician in his country, acts more and more shamelessly: he not only ignores or neutralizes any legal investigation into the criminal activity that has allegedly supported his private business interests, he also systematically undermines the basic dignity associated with being head of state. The dignity of classical politics is grounded in its elevation above the play of the particular interests in civil society: politics is “alienated” from civil society, it presents itself as the ideal sphere of the citoyen in contrast to the conflict of selfish interests that characterize the bourgeois. Berlusconi has effectively abolished this alienation.

While obviously Blago has never held the kind of power or influence of Berlusconi, the collapse of public dignity into naked narcissism and cynical political spectacle seems analogous. It is also certainly not isolated as it has come to permeate the entire right-wing movement in the United States.  One can imagine a Sarah Palin presidency as perhaps the ultimate nightmarish expression of this phenomenon. The “momma grizzly” shtick is representative. The clip’s affect laden anti-intellectualism and strangely inverted feminism is at the very core of what makes Palin so appealing and potentially powerful.

The “big task for the left”, according to Zizek, is to discredit and abandon post-political “pragmatism,” as a first step toward the re-politicization of the economy and the necessity of taking responsibility for power. Perhaps nowhere has post-politics been a bigger failure than in the Obama presidency. Elected largely through charismatic appeals to political possibility, Obama has governed largely as an impassionate and distant gatekeeper for the status quos. If there were any more lingering doubts about the white house’s commitments, they were dashed this week with the statements made by white house press secretary Robert Gibbs who petulantly attacked the “left” for demanding more from the Obama administration. As Moreen Dowd relays “he said the president’s lefty critics “ought to be drug-tested,” would only “be satisfied when we have Canadian health care and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon,” and “wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president”. The underlying assumption is that anyone on the left who makes political demands on the leader that they elected is not fully connected to “reality”. This, of course, represents fatal political cynicism.The problem more directly, as we are painfully learning, is that the centrist liberal democrats do not actually have any beliefs other than this kind of banal “realist” position. This has enabled the right to have free reign to define the terrain of politics. This is how we can have a situation where Rand Paul can openly discuss repealing the Civil Rights Act, or where disgraced serial philanderer and potential GOP presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich, can claim that the Islamic center and Mosque proposed four blocks away from the World Trade Center site was akin to “putting a Nazi sign next to a Holocaust Museum”.   As the left continues to refuse to take responsibility for power, to assert their beliefs, and to engage in ideological struggle, the widely celebrated “center” increasingly resembles nothing of the sort. It is given over bit by bit to the right-wing fundamentalists and populist fanatics.

My problem is perhaps more straightforward than all this, I am just not very good at incorporating my own positionality into the theoretical observations I make. I do not especially want to get lost in the weeds of poststructural validity nor in a kind of ultimately self-serving naval gazing concerning my raced and classed subject position.  The primary problem is that I do not do enough work for the reader–asking questions, contextualizing arguments, personalizing observations.