mouseworks

Universities now use contingent faculty rather than tenured faculty to fill most basic classes in the university. One of the thing contributing to this is the move to mass education of people who are permanently never going to be the peers of the people teaching them. James Dickey didn't remember the name of a student he'd just minutes ago examined in orals. Those of us who were TAs at SUNYA knew that many of the professors around us considered us incapable of anything scholarly by virtue of being in a Doctor of Arts program. I was told to my face that the class I was teaching for Judy Sherwin on Emily Dickinson was likely going to be my last literature class. The professor who said this was not one of the few actual working scholars in the Department.

One of my s.f. writer friends said that he wrote at least one master thesis for pay (this was not Robert Silverberg, by the way). Googling finds a site that will "help" you with a doctoral dissertation now.

I suspect that one of the problems comes from the faculty that's happy to teach graduate students regardless of their actual ability to direct graduate work. As my own graduate director said, "It was a win/win situation for us. We got to teach graduate students and we didn't have to teach intro courses."

Do we actually have fewer tenured professors per capita than before the BA became a required credential by most businesses for any administrative or supervisory job? The credentialing institution isn't the same as the institution that is involved with the more complex forms of education useful for writers and scholars.

The issue of plagiarism seems to have made at least one Valve contributor very angry and very much in denial (whether or not my source was lying, and I don't think he was, people can very obviously buy considerable chunks of dissertations on line).

I've talked to one person who cheated on his liberal arts courses and didn't on his technical courses. He saw the liberal arts courses as basically getting his ticket stamped, took them as cynically as they were given, but saw his technical classes as teaching him useful skills.

The classically Marxist position is to assume that contingent faculty are a group that needs to be organized, but the organization is as cynical as the graduate programs these people came from. It may get better pay for the contingent faculty, better benefits (or people may decide to offshore basic comp classes to India), but it makes people teaching the classes a permanent underclass rather than considering adjunct and contingent status as stages toward a tenured position.

Thing is those classes are generally a product of the expanded role universities welcomed, even as some people within academia were concerned that the BA would be considered job training rather than life enhancing (as though universities haven't always had a job training component to their missions). The people doing the more classical work in the liberal arts -- scholarship and training future scholars in various forms of apprenticeships -- preferred not to teach non-majors.

Teachers colleges were what expanded to fit the new role of the university as job training and job screening institutions. Those had always been focused on job training and their students were never going to be the equals of their professors unless they went for graduate degrees. Some of the traditional private colleges didn't expand their enrollments at all -- Davidson in NC hasn't.

The Normal schools became the new public universities.

The people teaching in the expanded programs still were expected to do scholarly work. As the numbers of graduate programs expanded, students were expected to continue on for Ph.D.s.

One of the academics at Albany introduced Louis Simpson in a way that typified the difference between what was happening at elite schools and what was happening at the former normal schools turned university. A passage in Simpson that had been about the respect the Columbia faculty had for their undergraduates became an example of faculty contempt for undergraduates. The SUNYA guy finished this off by saying that Simpson and Hall hadn't edited an academic poetry collection, but one that wasn't the one they edited.

Simpson took it out on the graduate student poets who came to his workshop. In all honesty, none of us became major poets and the ones who became notable enough minor poets were publishing and had reputations before entering the program.

I don't know if there's ever been a pure Ph.D. program, with the ideal being "gladly learn and gladly teach," but I'm more than somewhat cynical about the people who want to blame the contingent faculty problem on the college administrators. If there's a transcendent value to scholarship, then the graduate student isn't just another one of the people passing through who is fodder for one's own job.

One of the things that struck me about what I saw of UPenn's undergraduate creative writing concentration was that even the better freshmen writers were included in the after reading dinners. They were the potential future of the field. UPenn, Princeton, Yale, all have first rate writers working with undergraduates and don't have MFA programs.

The other, more practical problem with treating ones graduate students as a buffer between one's real work and teaching non-majors and basically not paying enough attention to the graduate students to know their names ten minutes after their oral exams is that those students are in a position to treat the whole thing as hoops to be jumped through for one of the better rewards the culture has for people who want to have job security and a reasonable income. The odds on getting a tenured job after finishing a Ph.D. are something like fifty-fifty. This is far better than the odds on an MFA writing enough best selling work to make $60,000 a year for life.

If we had small classes for those basic comp classes, our students would find cheating harder as we would have time to pay more attention to them personally and not be forced to use cheating detection software. For the students who love doing research and writing, we provide job opportunities. They don't just write their own papers; they write papers for their fellow students. My brother did this. One of my foreign students did this. Another foreign student found that his ghost cribbed too much from on line.

People teaching basic courses often find themselves in an arms race with their students over plagiarism. The students need As to get into medical school, business school, and the basic courses are in the way.

I don't know how much plagiarism there is in graduate school, but I doubt places would be advertising on line if it was zero.

If the graduate programs were following the traditional practice of seeing their students as their potential future colleagues, and if the faculty themselves were working active scholars , then the graduate degrees would be more meaningful. If the faculty was working with students and knew from their own work and the work of their colleagues what was significant work and what wasn't, then the students would get pleasures of scholarship beyond the mere credentialing, the publications as valuable only as they got their authors job advancement. Some people love scholarship and would do it without having an academic position.

People who quit working when they get tenure tend to be the least interested in working with graduate students on their own projects -- it's too much like the work they've finished with now that they have tenure.

The good ones don't necessarily stop working even after retirement.

As long as being graduate faculty is so highly prized and teaching ill-prepared non-majors is so boring, then the forces that created the contingent faculty lines will have willing collaborators among the tenured faculty. And as long as publication matters whether the work ever shows that it's contributed to scholarship (i.e. the 90 percent of work that isn't cited by other works) or not (the things that aren't read again after approval like so many master theses and doctoral dissertations), then the system may reward mediocrity that publishes often over people doing work that matters to other scholars.

But I don't think the problem can be fixed in any kind of classical organizing sense. Individual people have to save themselves as they can.