Most People Are Doing the Best They Can

One of the more pleasurable byproducts of the release of Why They Can’t Write and The Writer’s Practice is that I’m being asked to present at faculty development events.

August is a busy time for this kind of thing, so I’ve been on the road a bit, and I’ve noticed something at every stop: Everyone really is doing their best to create the most beneficial experience possible for their students.

I shouldn’t be surprised, given that this has been my experience as an employee at four different institutions of higher education over the last 18 years, but getting to spend a day or two with faculty at unfamiliar places reinforces my belief that teaching is the most important and rewarding work I’ve ever done and there are legions of people who feel similarly.

Forty, fifty, sixty, even more people show up at these events during their summer “breaks,” unpaid to hear some dude talk for a few hours, to consider their own work with an eye towards enhancing their approaches to teaching. They are curious, eager, dedicated, thoughtful people who, I’ll say it again, are doing their best, often under less than ideal circumstances, circumstances that seem to get worse every single year. 

This is why the findings of a recent PEW survey on public attitudes towards higher education so bum me out. A record low percentage of Americans (50%) believe that colleges and universities have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country. While some of this is driven about concerns over debt and cost, much of it is rooted in Republican beliefs that professors are engaging in overt attempts to indoctrinate students to the professors’ political and social views. Fifty-nine percent of Republicans believe colleges and universities are having a negative effect on the way things are going in the country.

Republican attitudes have essentially flipped since 2012, when a majority (53%) held positive views on the impact of colleges and universities.

So what’s changed? Not what’s going on at the vast majority of colleges and universities, I promise you. Yes, some cringeworthy things occasionally occur on some campuses, but it seems as though the same incidents are cited over and over, with no statute of limitations attached to their applicability. For example, writing in the Wall Street Journal, former dean of Yale Law School invokes an incident that happened at Oberlin nearly eight years ago to illustrate his concerns over institutions privileging diversity over his view of “excellence.”

I would call this guilt by association except there is no association between an Oberlin and the average public university or community college.

Eight years ago, something happens at a selective liberal arts college known for its unique and particular campus culture, and somehow it is supposed to represent what the vast majority of us are up to? I don’t know what to do about it, but I resent it. 

This is not to say that minds aren’t sometimes changed on campuses. College campuses should be the sorts of places where these debates play out as new approaches are tried and old structures challenged. Knowledge is not fixed. Lord knows how true this is as I consider how much my own views of teaching and students have changed over the last eighteen years.

And you know what, I’m better for it. As an instructor, I am experiencing what University of North Georgia professor Matthew Boedy calls “kenosis” a process for “unlearning” where we make ourselves “nothing” in advance of becoming something different. 

Boedy describes college for students as a period about “questioning, critical thinking, and rethinking. If a college experience merely affirms, it is not learning.” I think this holds equally true for me as an instructor. My own beliefs are challenged constantly by being among others who are engaging in a similar quest, particularly students.

Perhaps this is the root of some of the Republican discontent with colleges and universities, that institutions are indeed set up to foster this process of unmaking and remaking. There is an obvious tension between kenosis and training for employment and credentialing for the marketplace. When one chooses to become nothing what form they will take when remade is uncertain. 

Personally, I find this thrilling, both as an individual who has had to re-invent himself several times over the years and as an instructor who gets to witness students forming themselves. The thought that I might be interested in indoctrinating them into becoming some kind of mini-me is anathema since that would ruin the whole process and I don’t like myself nearly enough to desire to create more of me. The fun is in seeing what students become under their own initiatives.

There are many problems with institutions – I write about them often – and instructors are not infallible – this guy, for example, seems to be up to some questionable stuff – but the vast majority of us are trying their best to do right by their students, regardless of who those students are and where they come from.

I’m sure this is entirely unconvincing to some. There is great investment in the myth of nefarious socialists brainwashing generations of students to hate America and its little dog too. I don’t know how to convince these folks otherwise. Do I point out that a lifelong Republican found no evidence that conservative students face no grade penalty from professors?

Do I tell the story of how I was invited to speak at a Cru (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ) dinner by two students who were convinced I was a believer (I am not) because of how often we spoke comfortably and at considerable about issues of faith in a contemporary literature class?

Nah. Those that are invested in the myth of a run amok faculty will not have it challenged. It is too useful, too convenient. I think it harms us all, but I’m an idealist that way. You might even call me a conservative since I think institutions of higher education are worth preserving, even as we invite more people who have not traditionally had access to them inside.

My only remedy is to just keep doing the job as best I can.