josh blog
Ordinary language is all right.
One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.
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Since the pandemic, everything has collapsed. No one’s enrolling, no one’s finances are good, adjuncts were the first and easiest cut to make.
A friend vacating a long-reliable institutional perch at yet another liberal arts college drops my name to lend me a hand. But it’s not my area, not even my discipline. That’s OK, political theory, political philosophy, they’re practically the same, besides, I can teach anything, right?
As it turns out, I can. But with this job comes a reminder that what I know or who I am may not matter as much as where I am.
Between semesters, national controversy over what on campus they call ‘the incident’ or ‘the thing’ rises to a crest. Academic freedom, scholarly knowledge, sacred community values, labor politics—it’s got everything. I’m actually kind of rearing to use it in the classroom in the spring.
On the first day, I try to talk about it; but students are not sitting easy with it. Some are testy, some wary, some quiet. An issue of real pertinence and it’s too close, too raw, to be treated using a teacher’s casual, almost opportunistic way of intellectualizing everything. I don’t know that they trust me with this, that I can pull it off without sacrificing the good will I will continue to need as their teacher. I envision my course being derailed, my carefully plotted schedule being ruined; I back off.
Things get better with time as we return to academic routines, but from my perspective they never get a lot better; the campus doesn’t, I would say. The students are sticking in there as best they can but I—mind full of the social contract theorists we’re reading—feel like I have never truly addressed them as one group, never succeeded at eliciting from them, with what I say, a collective consent to be taught. They’re not relating to each other in the ways I need.
Eventually, what I think is: I don’t know that they trust each other with this. And there’s the lesson I’m looking for. My responsibility for the structure in which I work is often purported to be total, comprehensive. But that’s a fiction we’re encouraged to embrace under the institutional arrangement that exploits my labor.
The reality is that the university sets the background conditions under which I work, and ‘the incident’ is just a particularly exposed instance of the steady erosion of trust in education that comes of adjunctification, the corporatization of university administration, the ceding of shared governance, all of it.
How can the students, becoming aware of this, muster any trust or shared enthusiasm for the stuff in the admissions brochures? They are cows for the university to milk, and they know it.
Adjuncts mythically teach ten courses at once at four or five different schools, but I’ve never found work to be all that plentiful. My next job at another liberal arts college really marked the first time I was first ever in a position to combine teaching assignments into a closer approximation to a whole job, making up for missing courses at one institution with one or two at another.
Looking back on my assignments now, the courses I received don’t seem all that much. I suppose walking on a campus, standing in a classroom, makes all the difference; these have more reality to me than several years of asynchronous online courses. The students have more reality.
But things changed. During the pandemic, the school demanded synchronous teaching to mollify students and parents anxious about paying for college without a true campus experience. Students would zoom in from vacant dorm rooms, or wearing masks alone in study rooms, or from their cars, or while waiting in line to pick up takeout.
You could see how painful and awkward it was for some of them. They needed contact, friction, relation. Zoom left them adrift, mute. In one class, I tried most to teach to one student, more advanced than the others, who knew what to do in our circumstances and even modeled it for her classmates. Every time she got on camera, she ignored it and sat like a person who was intent not on looking but on listening.
When taking myself on walks between zoom sessions, scripting future sessions in my head, I would ask myself: what are they listening for?
After several years of teaching well outside anything that had originally been my area, to students often wholly uninterested in ethics or philosophy, it only took one course to remind me of the difference between instructing and teaching.
I threw this course together quickly to meet a sabbatical replacement need by fusing two of my research interests, the ‘philosophy as a way of life’ model promoted by Pierre Hadot and others, and the aesthetics of film.
And it all came together. For two semesters, philosophy mattered. From class to class, I was positively inspired. My lectures were captivating, our discussions thrilling. Students formed community, made friends.
And yet. Several months later I was sitting in the atrium of a skyscraper downtown, and one of my students, who had since graduated, passed by. She was a working adult, on the way to her job upstairs in a call center, her grown children about to graduate college themselves.
She had just been trying to finally complete her degree. She had enjoyed the class, though she hadn’t had a great interest in philosophy, or in academics. One of the highest points in my classroom career was only a pleasant episode in her life.
But I didn’t rue that; I liked it. Philosophy could stand to learn more about how to let people be.
My next job is ‘where’ I became, irrevocably, an adjunct. But I wasn’t ‘there’ there. I was hired to teach asynchronous online courses. I had set foot on campus a few times in the past, but I never saw it during the five years I taught there.
’There’ was really D2L, Outlook, my web browser. The cloud. Educationally speaking, I considered this institutional malpractice: my first semester, I was expected to spontaneously adapt whatever face-to-face classroom pedagogy I had to the apparatus of the discussion board, the PDF file, and the blind-CCed group email, with negligible technical assistance and zero preparation time.
This was normal and still is; most faculty who had to adapt in haste for pandemic teaching several years ago got a sharp taste of it. And this was before everyone zoomed. It’s not that I had no resources to fall back on; I had been using the internet, even living on it, longer than my students had been alive. But the fact remains teaching in a room is not the same as teaching in a web browser, especially for students still maturing academically.
Serious institutions would build supportive training for their teaching staffs to do their best work under these conditions, reflecting the precarious reality of the labor market for adjunct teaching, with its high turnover and weak institutional ties.
Instead, my radical isolation mirrored that of my students. Looking back now, I find a note from one, whom I’d reached out to in order to get a missing paper. Most professors wouldn’t even go to the trouble, he says. I received a lot of similar notes, tokens of gratitude for routine teaching work from students utterly deprived of attention from their professors.
Teachers like to say how much they learn by teaching, but in my experience asynchronous online teaching was especially bereft of those sorts of lessons, which must only come from a genuine act of teaching, as a product of actual, undeferred interaction. Although once, a student went to Walden Pond on spring break, and brought back pictures of Thoreau’s pond for us.
The next one-semester stint, cut short by a five million dollar budget shortfall, was my introduction to abandonment. After a shorter, slightly less crushing interlude of unemployment, I lucked into some logic and critical thinking courses at a community college. Two courses got me paid at the rate my colleagues enjoyed, with bumps for credentials and experience. A friend hired the same semester to do only a single course was less lucky—anything under the two-course minimum was paid at scale. That sort of cost-cutting corporate management ethos infused the place.
As the semester began, a colleague warned me—I couldn’t expect to complete a standard logic course with these students, so I should halve the syllabus, just propositional logic, no predicate logic. This turned out to be accurate, not because the students couldn’t handle the material, but because the requisite pace couldn’t be sustained. It was a large class, two or three times bigger than the best size.
There were typical students, nontraditional students, working mothers, recovered addicts, students with criminal records. They had a lot going on. There were students as able as any I’ve had in logic, but there were also students with pronounced learning disabilities. Everyone could learn how to do a deduction but some needed more time and care to get there—and I couldn’t just run them all through it and consign stragglers to the bottom of the grade distribution.
So we took more time. As much time as I would give, there would be someone eager to use it. This was a real difference from typical student attitudes at most other schools I’ve taught at, up or down the scale, where calculated disengagement has prevailed (in service courses, most naturally).
Another problem: word was that local university faculty were now rejecting our logic course for transfer credit because its content fell short. Somewhat unfair, we thought. So when it was over, I taught the students who were planning to transfer, not coincidentally also the best students, how to finesse the system: read a little more about predicates and relations, do a few problems, and if anyone asks, give them the (complete rather than revised) syllabus.
When my friend and I were cut loose at the end of the semester—that five million dollar shortfall—he had seen enough; he went back to teaching high school, his career before the Ph.D. Higher ed’s loss. I think I would probably be happier now if I had gotten the same message he did, that there’s no place for teachers in this job.
After a crushing interlude of unemployment subsequent to my first teaching job, I was fortunate to pick up some courses for my old department, giving an intro course I had refined repeatedly and a moral problems course I was not at all prepared to teach.
People often have the mistaken idea that, when teachers themselves go to school to become teachers, they are taught everything they know, and then go on to re-teach it to their own students. But there is often a deep gap between the things faculty in higher education cover in school, and the things they are expected to cover to make a living. In reality the work, especially early-career work, is a constant struggle to create and refine the courses and their materials, starting from almost nothing.
These were larger than any courses I’d taught before, or since, and I found that the format pushed me to lecture more like a lecturer. I’ve never liked to be observed while I teach, but during these courses I also had five different TAs—another first—and I learned from them how to trust the presence of an appreciative ear, one that could hear more than a student would understand just then.
This was where I first started to teach Thoreau; I tried to learn something about how to do it from his insistence that ‘the volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement’. There’s a way to tease out an astonishing implication from that if you lecture a little bit about spirit and speech and breath and evaporation and the etymology of ‘volatile’. Once when I did it, I actually saw a student in the back of the lecture hall open his mouth in astonishment.
It was a great stroke of luck to land my first position immediately upon graduating with my doctorate, at a small liberal arts college, even though it was ‘only’ a what academics classify as a ‘visiting’ position (one year, temporary). Now, almost fifteen years later, it seems idyllic. Nowhere else have I been as welcomed as a colleague; nowhere else was there such collective enthusiasm among students for philosophy, indeed for college in general.
Having seen many years of students since, I have learned to connect this to the just-recent financial crisis; the group at this school didn’t yet know the crushing anxieties that would set in in higher education, and could still manage to approach their college experience in some spirit of exploration and experimentation.
One of my students went on to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy; her career is now better than mine. It is bittersweet when she tells me: your ancient philosophy class was what made me think I could become a philosopher.