What We Have Here Is a Failure To Communicate

So, when I started this new blog, I was really excited by the prospect of being able to write publicly and semi-officially (though not too officially) about teaching, researching, and so on, in the hope that what I had to say would both help other people who might be wrestling with the same or similar problems and encourage other people to suggest solutions for me.

Well, for the last four months, apparently I haven't actually had anything to say. Well, that's not true. Let's just say instead that expecting to be able to blog about academia regularly while also taking on a load of committee service work, teaching four classes a term, and trying to get an entirely new minor program off the ground in my first two terms as a faculty member was a fool's errand.

My workload is a bit lighter now, but I'm not going to guarantee it's going to stay that way for long. In the meantime, though, I wanted to write briefly about one of the biggest stumbling blocks I've hit in my first few terms here; again, both in the hope that it might be helpful for potential readers to read and in the hope that someone out there might have some solutions of their own that can help me reframe and better understand the issue(s) I'm facing.

So, I'm currently teaching a lot of different courses. In two terms, I've introduced six entirely new courses, and next term (starting in a few weeks!) I'm going to introduce three more classes, for a total of nine new classes in my first year. Logistically, this is a ridiculous amount of work to juggle, but thematically, it's pretty coherent. At least in my head it is.

All my courses, however they are listed in the catalogue, are under the aegis of "the humanities," and this, combined with the specificity of my own training and research experience, means that all the courses have some elements in common. Students read stuff, and write stuff. They work in groups to discuss the issues that arise in the processes of reading and writing. They make arguments, and (hopefully) back those arguments up with evidence, source synthesis, and critical thinking. Whether we're reading novels or poetry or comic books, playing video games, or watching documentaries, our approach to the material is, generally speaking, a pretty straightforward literary analysis one. This is, at least for now, a limitation of my training, but also an expression of my belief that literary analysis gives one the tools to basically and fundamentally analyze and question all works that fall under the rubric of what I call "culturally expressive media." People write novels, film movies, and make video games to be expressions of their personal and cultural experience of the world (sometimes more intentionally than others). By studying these works through this lens, I believe we can simultaneously better understand the creators' cultural situations and how various media can implicitly and explicitly make arguments, while interrogating our own assumptions about society, or what-have-you.

Pretty straightforward cultural-studies-literary-analysis-humanities-type stuff, right?

Well, it's totally not working. Which is weird, because it worked before.

I find that my students are asking variations of "Why do we have to do this?" much more frequently than they ever did at WSU and I'm finding it much harder to convince them (on average) to become invested in what they see as squishy, non-objective, non-quantifiable work beyond the level of "If I don't work sort of hard, I'll get a bad grade and hurt my GPA."

Now, the problem certainly isn't that I'm incapable of addressing the value of the humanities in today's university environment. In fact, sometimes that seems like all I do. Sometimes it feels like 90% of my job is to explain to other people why my job is important. So, I've gotten pretty good at it.

I also realize that when you're teaching at a technical institute, you're going to get a certain kind of student, to whom learning about the cultural significance of The Illiad might pale in comparison to things they do in their other classes, like build robots (no, seriously, they do).

But. I guess it's difficult for me to understand precisely how a student goes from thinking one of those things is preferable to the other to thinking that one is useful and the other one is pointless. I can throw all the statistics I want in the face of many of my students, proving that graduates with humanities knowledge are going to further down their career path than those who don't have it, and thus make more money in the long term. That employers look for critical thinking skills and cultural awareness in addition to your "piece of paper." That many of the professional associations that eagerly await our graduates to fill their open positions specifically contact us regularly to make sure that their future hirees are getting an appropriate education in ethics, logic, critical thinking, and global citizenship. And, yes, that there's really not that big of a gap in employment between those who have humanities degrees and those who have science degrees.

None of it seems to make any difference, though. Which leads me to believe that there may well be a profound shift occurring right now, not just away from liberal arts education, but from education in general. The kind of "education" many of my students seem to want to get at this school is actually what we'd call "vocational training" if there wasn't such a stigma attached to that term. And that's fine, I guess: college has become such an expensive, loophole-ridden process while simultaneously becoming so necessary for employment that it's easy to see why students want to know what they're paying for before they pay for it, and a $70,000/year job at the end of four years is a lot better return on your investment (that lands you in massive debt) than "being a better person" or "understanding other cultures."

So I get it. But, I think there are a lot of hidden costs to replacing universities with huge job-training factories, and if we continue to go down that road as a culture, I think there are a lot of potential dangers specifically in continuing to call what we're doing "education." Because I believe education should extend beyond just job training, regardless of whether students can immediately see the value in more learning more ephemeral subjects and skills or not. And I think every students who can afford it will reap the vast benefits of this broader kind of education throughout the rest of their lives whether they go on to manage a McDonald's or work as the CEO of a corporation, or do anything in between.

But when I say these things to many of my students, they just roll their eyes and settle in to suffer through 10 of their 30 hours of (30 hours in-class, our of four years of school!) of humanities education.

So, I guess my question is: with so little time in the classroom, how do we convince students that there is more to education than just skill-based training and certification? How do we convince students that sometimes it's worthwhile to invest money in something other than getting more money?

I have a lot reasons that I could share convincingly with, say, the audience of The Chronicle, but I don't have any reasons that 18 year-olds  who have already chained themselves to massive, possible lifelong debt, want to hear.