Previously, I argued that though we sessional instructors give great service and commitment to the University of Calgary, the unfairness of our working conditions has grown to a situation that is now laughable. Every experience is an opportunity to learn, however, and though sessional issues may remain a subtext here, the purpose is to tell my students and their colleagues some things I feel I have learned from this one.
A Seven Year Experiment
In Fire With Water, I argued that a rift in approaches to life had widened in my generation. Building on Jean Baker Miller’s analysis of gender roles, traits traditionally assigned to subordinated women were losing a battle to the characteristics generally inherited by dominant men. Behaviours, such as participating in the development of others and truly valuing connections to them, were losing credence to pursuing self-oriented goals and to proclaiming “I did it my way.”
Seven years here have confirmed two hypotheses. First, as Baker Miller states, “the characteristics… perhaps most essential to human beings are the very characteristics that are specifically dysfunctional for success in the world as it is.” That, in spite of fostering the development of others through their teaching, sessional instructors receive neither a livable salary nor security shows this endeavor is indeed “specifically dysfunctional” for success–certainly at the U of C.
Second, traits such as self-enhancement have flourished. Worse, an overt concern for appearances over reality has clouded our ability to see this. To quote myself (as I ask my students, is there a more pretentious phrase on earth than “I quote myself?”), now it is “only the appearance of women’s strengths that is permitted and it is only because these capacities have the blessing of a profit that even this appearance is rendered acceptable.” Two parts of this relate to academe. Research is increasingly about the self, specifically career advancement. Also, as an institution fosters these aspects and thus serves itself above all, it increasingly invokes a covering facade of “we do it all for you,” the students.
Some Publish, Many Perish
The equation of academic success with self-enhancement may seem unfair. The myth is instructors balance teaching and research–indeed some actually do! More, students understand that individuals pursuing knowledge make a contribution to the common stock of wisdom. For several reasons, students should look closely at the research that is often their instructors’ priority.
As Frank Furedi has noted, what academics produce for advancement is usually not “scholarship,” but “research.” Camille Paglia explains, “A scholar’s real audience is not yet born.” But why take years to write something reflective, lasting and profound when you need to publish now to get a promotion? Thus “the profession is addicted to the present, to contemporary figures, contemporary terminology, contemporary concerns.” Students should be warned also that as new instructors are recruited, they especially must so “produce” to secure positions.
Secondly, often the “professional” elements of academe do not solve problems, but ride on them. Louise Armstrong’s afterword for a later edition of her work on incest, Kiss Daddy Goodnight, illustrates. She saw an “incest industry” form at her first academic convention. “You could hear the gears of specialization grinding, the carving-up of victim populations, the negotiations for turf, the vying for funding, for prestige, for place… the sound of people professionalizing.” After 10 years of this she concludes, “I hate to say we [survivors and those truly caring] made things worse. I guess we didn’t, but I think things are worse.”
Another problem is just which “contemporary concerns” take up the researcher’s time are increasingly determined by, simply, who pays. Our own Professor John Mueller has argued that as “universities have become dependent on federal grants, academics find their promotion and merit reviews depend on buying into the predefined areas of research.” The funded “cause de jour” may well be a fashion, or fashionable support for systems in place only. If this is the case for “arm’s length” funding–wait until you see the effects of money from private sources such as corporations!
Thus, much “research” is less idealistic, more mercenary, more self-enhancing in terms of career and more serving of interests that students cannot see than is generally understood. Real learning would often oppose the very interests served by the research; and at times the research itself capitalizes on or exacerbates the problems students would wish to solve. These problems are not new; thousands of years ago, variants of them caused Lao Tzu to write “exterminate the sage, discard the wise,” and to equate the works that result from self-enhancing pontification to “useless excrescences.”
Students do benefit from the scholarship of faculty members, but they have excellent reasons not to automatically accept a sacrifice of instructor time to the gods of research. Students in classes of 300, who have not yet been greeted by name by an instructor, may be surprised that the first core principle in the U of C’s Academic plan heralds this as a “learning-centred university,” where “the programs and experience we offer must be appropriate to the needs, aspirations, and futures of our students.” As above, whatever the actual practice, the language covering it is beautifully nurturing!
“Not a Partnership”
In Mar. 2007, On Campus reported that Shell Canada announced it would invest $1.15 million with the U of C. On first blush this seems generous. After all, with oil barely up to a measly $110 a barrel, energy companies are clearly having a tough time making ends meet. The money is to support “enhanced learning opportunities for students,” and…oh yeah, to “develop future workforce capacity and advance research innovation critical to industry success.” Quoth President Harvey Weingarten, “this type of relationship is a win-win for schools and industry. Our students get access to industry and real-world experience, while Shell benefits from top-notch research and the best and the brightest that universities have to offer.”
Yet the article contains clues as to who is winning the most. The President of Shell Canada remarks, “we’re working to promote technical education, research and innovation–it is at the heart of what we need as a company, as an industry and as a society.” It can be no surprise if the technical education fostered is good for the company and industry. After all, the goal of most of the money is “to develop a more effective in situ recovery process to extract oilsands deposits that are too deep to be mined from the surface.” But just as “what’s good for General Motors is good for America,” this result is also now deemed what is needed most for society. As Dr. Weingarten has proudly proclaimed, we are offering up our “best and the brightest” to serve this cause.
This story echoes a common theme in U of C press releases: the partnership between business and the school. On a profound level it illustrates, as one of the truly brilliant people I know (my massage therapist, Lola) asserts, “it’s not a partnership, it’s a codependent relationship.” The relationship between corporations and the U of C has become symbiotic, with negative behaviours of each realm exchanged and reinforced.
What corporations get is the artificial credibility that comes with an academic aura. Plato wrote about the “creature who has proved his cleverness in some mechanical craft,” who “is glad to break out of the prison of his paltry trade and take sanctuary in the shrine of philosophy.” They get something far more practical, though. As well as having tax benefits, offloading research and development to the shrine of philosophy truly makes it look like the endeavors served should be at the helm of academic and societal concern.
The university would not want to stay aloof from the real world. Some students benefit from the training they receive while all this is going on, but it becomes clear that the U of C is now a place where (as the President of Shell Canada remarks) “technical education” is king. A look at the U of C’s “priority” areas confirms this: as here, engineering and resource development, and elsewhere, the likes of the business faculty.
The result of all this is of questionable value. The point of an education worthy of the adjective derived from Plato’s Academy is to learn how to question the priorities of the business world, not to receive on-the-job training for it and such “technical” training is often shortsighted. For corporate funding–and the corporate vision itself–often serve only presently perceived needs and are destined to produce cogs, not leaders.
Proust notes that often people engaged in practical affairs laugh at those learning non-practical things. The “disinterested culture” of, for example, a real liberal education “seems to them a comic pastime of idle people.” But ironically, it is so often the very knowledge they dismissed which “brings to the fore men who may not be better judges or administrators than themselves, but before whose rapid advancement they bow their heads, saying: ‘It appears he’s extremely well-read, a most distinguished individual.’”
Learning the wrong corporate games
One might think that being so intimate with the business world, the U of C might learn how to treat employees or the prime consumers (students) with respect, but often it is the worst elements of business the school has absorbed: a sense of entitlement, a cult of the executive, mistreatment of staff, a tendency to forget that the customer–the student–if not always right, at least deserves to be heard and honoured and a reliance on spin to cover things that are wrong.
This school’s treatment of the quarter of its academic staff who are sessionals is not up to the minimum standards a corporation downtown could get away with and from my experience, whether the student consumer is heard at all is an open question.
That the students who organized the “Save Dube” campaign were told that their concerns–not just about a particular instructor but sessionals in general–were off limits to discussion as it was a “personnel issue” was true to form. Through the years, many of my students have written to administrators here. What is disconcerting is not that such letters had no real effect, but that as far as I know, not one has ever been answered.
Students are often shocked that teaching and commitment to them–at least from sessionals–means nothing to the administration. It gets worse. In spite of good student survey results, four SU Teaching Excellence Awards, and an SU Presidential Citation in recent years, how often has an administrator commended me spontaneously for good work? Beyond a rare comment in the hall, encouraging words have come only as reactions to SU awards. Once, I even got a letter of congratulation from the “Executive Suite.” (I kid you not; that was on the address. I still think “I quote myself” wins, but it is a contender!)
More students are questioning the juxtaposition of, on the one hand, the barrage of “we do it all for you” signs and shining happy reports in On Campus and, on the other, utterly dismal results for the school in surveys of student engagement and an experience so isolating that a quarter drop out after one year.
Instead of actually taking obvious steps to improve the student experience such as reducing class size, the administration’s answers are to hire another vice-president and to make students buy “clickers” to give instant survey results in classes–thus providing the appearance their views count, almost as if adding another layer of technology to students’ lives would reduce their sense of alienation.
Then there is the spin. In a Sep. 2006 Gauntlet article, the U of C’s vice president external wrote that “a student who graduated from the U of C even two years ago would be unaware of the 40 student spaces now opening on campus.” Speaking as a student who graduated in 1974, I delight in telling my students just how many of those “new” spaces I happily hung around in avoiding classes before they were born.
Once one sees how much of the rhetoric is a kind of spin echoing the worst of the corporate world, everything makes sense. You know those entry “scholarships” you got from the U of C for good marks in high school? Teaser rates for a sub-prime education.
“Representation”
Students are not alone in being told that the word of great service provision may be taken for the deed–what one might call the Harold Skimpole theory of management. Many have asked: “aren’t sessionals represented by a union?” The answer depends on what one means by “represented.” We are members of the Faculty Association; we pay dues for the privilege and are told people are working on “incremental progress” for us.
An illustration will serve here. Prior to the last collective agreement, we were all sent forms inviting input on issues at stake. There were eleven pages for comment on things, from salary and merit increases to leaves and sabbaticals. On the last page “for sessionals only,” there was an invitation to comment on our salary rates and “other,” with half a page to “explain as fully as you can.” Sessionals constitute a quarter of the membership, yet about 90 per cent of the document concerned things we have little or no part in. The tenor was “how many more thousands of dollars can we award to the best roosters–and oh, as an afterthought, should we increase the prize for best duck from $5 to $6?”
The results of the bargaining confirmed this picture. One reason I had held on as a sessional was I believed the new collective agreement might improve things enough so I could afford to stay. No dice. I hasten to add that I truly admire the officers of the Faculty Association, but as to whether sessionals have been “represented” by the Association in total–as Mr. Spock might say, “it’s representation Jim, but not as we know it.”
A Great Opportunity to Learn
On Apr. 2, I got a call asking me to donate money to the U of C. My first reaction was that the universe was out of kilter–a day late for April Fools’. Why would I donate to support a system that has treated us as I have described? Why would anyone? I feel now the universe, like all of us, just got screwed up a bit more by the time change this year and is unfolding as it should. That call was a punctuating mark in time. Before, it made sense to essentially pay to work here to give heart and soul to my students. The mark itself reminded me that after doing a decent job for years, far from getting a golden, or bronze handshake, or even the time of day as I leave, I could not be mentioned by name as students found when they tried to speak about me to administrators. After, it became clear that the best way to change the world was to eliminate the high-priced middleman–the school. I will continue to love and support my students, but the U of C has now become as much a part of the problems they face as it is of any solutions.
One might think that my conclusion to all of this would have a negative tone–not so. Lifting up mine eyes has entailed looking at those at the top. This university has, as it claims, assumed a leadership role, but too often what it leads in are negative things. Outside, the same problems noted within the institution pervade the world: a devaluation of good human qualities and glorification of self-serving ones, a growing codependent relationship between institutions–universities or governments–and corporations, and an increasing provision of an appearance of good things over their reality. The tenured versus sessional gap echoes a widening division between rich and poor and–as for how well the bottom quarter of the world’s people are represented by those who are responsible for them–well, we lead the way there, too.
Just as I hope I have learned something here, I guarantee my students have and if anyone out there feels that all these developments are appropriate, I have some advice for you: enjoy them while you can. My students are simply not going to put up with this situation. They are too good to think that all these trends and conditions are right; they are too bright not to see through the corporate rhetoric that supports them and they are too politically savvy to be stopped as they begin to make changes–in our country, in our world and even in the university.