Archive for the 'Pasadena City College' Category

Ph.Ds at CCs: a reflection

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 5, 2007
in Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 13 Comments

I generally try and keep up with the very interesting Confessions of a Community College Dean blog, hosted at Inside Higher Education.

This week, an interesting piece by the unnamed dean on his preference for hiring Ph.Ds for full-time teaching positions at the community college. Dean writes:

Certainly, the single clearest criterion we look at is teaching ability, especially in the areas we need taught. I’ve seen Ph.D.’s fall flat here, and the degree won’t save them. I’ll grant that good-faith observers can differ on the relative performance of one teacher as against another – that’s one of the reasons that we have search committees. But a demonstration that fails to show, say, mastery of the subject matter, or the ability to speak clearly enough to be understood, is the kiss of death.

All of that granted, though, the preference for doctorates isn’t just arbitrary.

Although our degrees top out at the two-year level, our students don’t. A gratifying number of them go on to four-year degrees and beyond, up to and including medical school, law school, and grad school. I believe that part of the job of a cc is to prepare those students to succeed at the next level(s). To the extent that we can give the students exposure to the same faculty they’d get at the next level, I think we do them a service. (Honestly, in many cases, I think we do better than some of our four-year competitors at teaching intro courses. The four-year schools sometimes treat intro courses as afterthoughts or grudging obligations; they’re our bread-and-butter. Our intro classes are small, and taught mostly by full-time faculty. That certainly isn’t the case at, say, Flagship State.)

The sentence I placed in bold is an argument I’ve never considered.

As I’ve written before, I didn’t start graduate school at UCLA intending to teach permanently at a community college. I hadn’t ruled out the possibility either. My late father was a professor at UCSB, my mother a (now-retired) instructor at Monterey Peninsula College. Throughout my childhood, I had both parents as role models — and each taught at a different level in the state system of public education. When I started the pursuit of the Ph.D., I certainly expected to follow more in my father’s footsteps than my mother’s.

It was only when I started working as a teaching assistant (back in early 1991) that I realized that being in front of a classroom was electrifying and thrilling; doing research and writing was dull by comparison. I’d always known I was more of a performer than a deep thinker, and doing research and TA work at the same time made it clear that my future preference would be for a job at an institution where good teaching was the sole criterion for success.

When I was hired full-time at Pasadena City College in 1994, my dissertation adviser told me I would be “a fool” if I took the job. He had invested a lot of time in me as his protege, and wanted me to continue to do the research I had started to do on late-medieval English church history. I assured him that I would finish the dissertation I had started, but that teaching was my first love. He, a two-time winner of UCLA’s distinguished teaching award, pointed out that research excellence and outstanding teaching were not mutually exclusive. And I admitted he was right — but the shot at “instant financial security” that the PCC job offered was too tempting to decline, especially as I was about to get married for the second time.

Slightly fewer than half of my full-time colleagues at PCC have their Ph.Ds. I certainly didn’t have mine when I started. Though I was ABD (”all but done”, or “all but dissertation”) by 1994 when I started on the tenure-track, it took me another five years to finish the doctorate. It wasn’t until August 26, 1999, that I walked out of Powell Library with a little slip in my hand indicating that all the requirements had been met, the dissertation signed and filed, and the Ph.D at last in hand. Teaching full-time, going through a divorce and two severe mental breakdowns in the mid-1990s had slowed the pace of my writing.

When I finally got the Ph.D., my colleagues threw me a small party. My friend Marc Dollinger (now a professor of Jewish ethics at SF State, and himself a Cal undergrad, UCLA Ph.D.), put up signs all over the department — including the men’s restroom — saying “Hugo is Phinally PhinisheD.” It was very sweet. The congratulations I got from my mother and father and brother — all Ph.Ds themselves — were of course the sweetest. I felt as if I had finally gained membership in the one club to which I had most aspired to belong.

But my teaching didn’t change as a result of my getting the Ph.D. My students called me “Hugo” when I was a fresh-faced 27 year-old; most still call me “Hugo” now as I head into middle-age. The plaque on my door was changed by the college from “Mr. Hugo Schwyzer” to “Dr. Hugo Schwyzer” but that was not at my behest, and it seems to have had no impact on the respect I receive from my students. While “phinally phinishing” the Ph.D. felt good emotionally, it had very little connection to my work in the classroom.

I don’t think most PCC students know which of their professors have doctorates and which don’t. I certainly see no evidence that they have more automatic respect for those of us with Ph.Ds than for our colleagues with terminal M.A. degrees. Because my dissertation topic (the role of the bishops of Durham and the archbishops of York in providing for the defense of northern England during the reign of Edwards I, II, and III) has nothing to do with anything I teach at the college, I very rarely reference my own work while I am teaching.

The dean’s point in the blog that community colleges ought to offer future transfer students exposure to the same sort of profs they will encounter at the next level is a valid one. It makes sense, too, to counter the argument that the two-year colleges lack the academic quality of four-year institutions. Whether or not the Ph.D. means much in terms of improving teaching, it certainly means something to the public. My college, as far as I can tell, likes to tout the relatively high percentage of Ph.Ds on the faculty. To the extent that that assuages the anxieties of parents and students about the quality of the two-year professoriate, I’m willing to believe that possession of a Ph.D. ought to be a tie-breaker in hiring — but only when all else is truly equal. Beyond the “PR value”, I’m not sure the doctorate means much at our level.

I’m glad I have my Ph.D. (My diplomas are all in a box somewhere, mind you. OKOP never put degrees on the wall, after all; it seems showy and aggressive.) If a student comes to visit me and tells me that he or she is considering a Ph.D. in history, I’m very encouraging. I make it clear that the road to a doctorate is long and challenging. I tell them that though I personally loathed doing the research I had to do to produce my dissertation, I was elated when I finished. I did feel validated as a scholar and an intellectual, and even if I intended to walk away from the ivory tower, I knew I carried with me everlasting evidence of at least a basic level of skill and tenacity. I tell my students that a dissertation of hundreds (even thousands) of pages is written a sentence at a time (in my case, over nearly five years). And I do tell them that if they intend to teach at the four-year level, the Ph.D. will be indispensable. Going through the hoops to get that highest of degrees does, I tell them, prove something to those who make hiring decisions. It establishes credibility as a scholar in a way that few other things do.

The subjects I most enjoy teaching these days (ancient near eastern religion, contemporary gender studies) are more than a little far afield from my dissertation work. If those three little letters after my name increase my credibility in the eyes of my students, I’m at best ambivalent. If that increased credibility for me is linked to doubts in the skills of a colleague with a terminal M.A., that’s troubling.

Many of my students, I think, don’t know I have a Ph.D. unless they scrutinize my nameplate outside my office or look in the college catalogue. And though I am moderately proud of what I was able to do, that pride is almost entirely private.

Sowing seeds but never harvesting: a polemic about teaching and an attack on the educrats

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 27, 2007
in Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 12 Comments

The older I get and the more traveling we do, the longer it takes me to get over jet-lag. Some aspects of traveling have gotten easier with age (I have far fewer problems with my ears on landings, for example, than I did when I was young), but the jet-lag issue seems to get worse and worse. I’ve tried all the tricks and the remedies, and so far, no luck. We got back on Monday, and the last three nights I’ve had trouble getting through the night. I’m pretty beat this morning. Of course, I didn’t help my own cause by jumping back into a regular work-out regimen.

One advantage of being jet-lagged was that I woke up early enough to watch most of the women’s World Cup semi-final between Brazil and the USA. I’d been rooting for England in this tournament, of course, but once they were ousted I came back loyally to the Americans. Today’s game was a bit of a stunner; though the sending-off of Shannon Boxx was uncalled for, the USA was outplayed in virtually every aspect of the game by the creative Brazilians, whose women’s team is on the verge of being as dominant as the men’s. The decision to bench the wonderful American keeper, Hope Solo, for a frankly over-the-hill Briana Scurry was mystifying. Still, it was entertaining enough to watch.

On Tuesday, the college held its twice-yearly faculty “in-service education” day. The theme: “improving student learning outcomes” as part of the transition from a “teaching institution” to a “learning community.”

For the last decade, the administration has been eager to impress upon the faculty that we are not merely teachers but “learning facilitators.” Learning, we are told, is a collaborative process, more rich and democratic than the top-down method of traditional teaching. Few of us unblessed by graduate degrees from Schools of Education have any real idea what that means, and so the powers-that-be decree that we have these regular indoctrination sessions. The untenured faculty among us are advised to attend and feign earnestness, while the tenured folk hang around to see what sort of a free lunch will be put on. It’s rarely any good.

On Tuesday, I was handed a little yellow binder stuffed with handouts of articles from various education journals. I got a free pencil (alas, already sharpened) which had “PCC Flex Day 2007: The Passion for Learning” emblazoned upon it. In my folder was a little self-survey, so that I could discover my own unique learning style, and then share it with my colleagues during the stimulating “break-out sessions” that were sure to follow. After all, the educrats opine, we can’t really be effective “learning facilitators” until we become aware of our own learning styles — and how our own “ways of learning” may be obstacles to understanding the needs of students (sorry, “fellow learners”) who have different styles.

On the agenda for the day, the following:

Lunch (12:00-1:00)

Turn in your program assessment form at your food station to get your meal!

The Ed.Ds were on to us! They knew we came for free food, and so a crackdown had been implemented: no ticky, no lunchie. No self-assessment, no stir-fry over rice. Luckily enough, I had packed some trail mix, a nectarine, and a vegan protein bar, so the blackmail didn’t work on me.

Seriously, of course, the real reason for all of this wallowing in self-congratulatory edu-speak is that the community colleges, like most public institutions, are worried about accountability. Accountability is the buzzword of the decade; the taxpayers (and their duly elected representatives) want to know that they’re getting something in return for their billions. That’s not unreasonable; I’m no longer inherently opposed to being held accountable. (This is a new development in my life, as my parents, siblings, and ex-wives will tell you.) So the educrats have decided that the best way to prove accountability is to create measurable, testable, “student learning outcomes” (SLOs).

The longer I teach, the more convinced I become that worrying too much about assessing learning is one of the chief enemies of inspiring our students to want to learn. Look, I want all my students to pass their final exams, get good grades, and remember what it is that they’ve learned. But I’m teaching history, not providing a certificate in refrigerator maintenance. While my final exams assess what, on one given day, a student has managed to memorize, they don’t assess learning because real learning happens long after the student has left the class.

Especially in my gender studies courses, I know full well that it will take many of my students years and years to connect what they’ve learned in class to their own lives. Often, the epiphanies and break-throughs that matter will happen long after students have left this campus, long after they’ve moved out of reach of the educrats and their assessment tools. I always compare the job of a good teacher (I’m not a learning facilitator) to a gardener or a farmer. I know it sounds patriarchal, deeply Western, and unfashionably hierarchical, but there it is: I sow seeds in the soil of students’ hearts and minds. (Some of the time, my seed falls on rock, other times it ends up in the thistles, but some of it ends up in nice, loamy earth.) And here’s the thing: I don’t often get to see what blossoms and what doesn’t, because whatever flowers do bloom will generally do so months or years after the student has left my class.

So if the politicians and the educrats want to assess my skills as a teacher, they need to do more than look at my students’ test results. We all know that students can cram in information for a December final — and most of the facts they memorized will have vanished from their heads by Super Bowl Sunday. But a new way of seeing the world, of seeing, say, gender roles and relationships in a new light — that may well endure even though there are no reliable ways of assessing that sort of internal transformation. The most important things my students learn in my classes can’t possibly be measured by any government-provided instrument. I’ve been teaching long enough to have students come back years and years after taking a class; some just mouth platitudes such as “I really liked your class” but a few say wonderful, heartening, reassuring things; they tell me in detail how something I taught them helped change the direction of their lives. Most of the time, they’ll say something like “I didn’t realize it at the time, but when you said X, it started a whole new way of thinking about the world.”

There’s no SLO that can measure that.

Look, I know who pays my salary. If the state legislature and their Ed.D flacks want me to tweak my syllabi to emphasize the vocabulary of accountability, I’m happy to do it. But I’m still going to teach — primarily through lecture in an ancient, top-down, one-sided way. I’m going to pour out my enthusiasm and my passion, laboring in a field filled with rocky soil and pockets of rich earth. And for the most part, I won’t be around to see the harvest. That’s what it means to teach.

Urinal chat: UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 28, 2007
in Men and Masculinity, Pasadena City College and Stuff
. 23 Comments

This morning in between classes, I slipped into the third floor faculty men’s room for a quick pit stop. We have just two old-fashioned urinals there, and one of my least favorite senior colleagues (I’ll call him “Manuel”) was stationed at one of them.

I’m not fond of this man; he and I have waged several ideological and pedagogical battles over the years. Nonetheless, I’m a cheery ENFP, and as I joined him to do my business, I said “Hey, my friend! What’s up?”

My colleague zipped himself, flushed the urinal, turned to me, and replied in a cool tone: “Why are you calling me your ‘friend’, Hugo?”

A bit stunned (and still busy with the task at — or in - hand) I slipped into the standard WASPy mode of cheerful, teasing, aggression: “Why, Manuel, are you saying we aren’t friends?” I threw in a wink.

Manuel made his way over to the sink to wash his hands, saying sharply as he did so, “I haven’t got time for your insincerity.”

As he headed out the door, I couldn’t resist an even-more exuberant, “You have a great day, buddy!”

Sigh. It’s true, I do address virtually every casual acquaintance as “buddy” or “my friend”. (My close male friends I call “my brother” or “brother man.”) I picked this habit twenty years ago, while spending two college summers working with the Public Works department in my hometown, hanging out with plumbers and carpenters and janitors. I suppose it does come across as frightfully insincere to some folks, and perhaps even aggressive to others.

And perhaps Manuel is right. I can come across to some folks as glibly insincere. And my standard response to hostility is to become even more polite and jovial (it’s violence, OKOP-style). I need to work on this.

UPDATE: Some folks have suggested that my use of the phrase “my brother” or “brother man” borrows from black culture. I picked up the former from all-white coworkers more than twenty years ago, and “brother man” has been in my vocabulary since I first read “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof” in high school — where it is used by whites to refer to an affluent white man.

Similarly, when we were kids my brother and I affectionately called each other “boo”. (My mother called me her “little boo” starting around 1967.) My brother and I started doing this in the 1970s, and were both stunned to find out, years later, that it was a standard African-American term for a lover! My brother is and always will be “my boo boy”; I will always be his. And we’re as white as can be and trust me, the use of “boo” in our family has damn all to do with cultural appropriation!

First day of school

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 27, 2007
in Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 4 Comments

I’m sitting in my office on a warm Monday morning, ready for the first day of fall semester classes.

I’ve been in this same office — at this same desk — since 1994, when I was first hired as a tenure-track instructor at Pasadena City College. In 1994, I didn’t have a computer on my desk. In 1994, I had very different framed photographs to gaze at. In 1994, I had a very different office mate (my newest colleague, Lynora, just moved in last week.) I note, however, that I have the same darned office phone — an ancient plastic contraption that has been dropped dozens of times but still somehow survives.

I can’t think of many peers of mine who’ve had the same full-time job since 1994. I was 27 when I was hired full-time (I’d already been teaching here as an adjunct for a year); to have the same job at 40 is increasingly rare. Many of my peers have had three, four, or five different serious jobs in that same time span.

When I was hired over thirteen years ago, I said to everyone who would listen that this was my “dream” job, one I would have “forever.” (I wrote at length two years ago about my reasons for preferring the community college environment.) The danger in getting security so young is obvious: if not careful, one could stagnate very easily. There’s no “publish or perish” pressure at the community college, and few tenured professors are ever let go here, even in cases of serious incompetence.

Because I’ve had tenure and stability, I’ve had to push myself very hard to develop new courses, explore new avenues for writing and for public service. I have to remind myself not to settle for “good enough”. Ambition, in my case, cannot be about material comfort or security (though those are lovely things for which I am very grateful). Rather, tenure is an island on which to stand, a foundation on which to place my feet while I explore new opportunities (like rescuing chinchillas, writing books, finding novel venues for youth ministry). Indeed, those of us who have tenure — especially at a non-research-oriented place like the community college, have an obligation to use that “gift” of lifetime job security wisely and responsibly. For some, that wise and responsible use will come in the form of political activism; for others, it will come through exciting innovations in the classroom. But we waste this precious gift if we keep on doing the same thing, over and over and over again.

I will, howver, be talking on the same phone and sitting in the same seat that I was talking on and sitting in around the time the O.J. Simpson trial began.

Reprint: A long post on tradition, virginity, success, feminism, and a nonsensical double bind

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 15, 2007
in Class, Pasadena City College, Sexuality and Teaching
. 18 Comments

We’re in the last throes of summer, so I’m reposting some of my old favorites. This originally appeared on March 10, 2006.

Yesterday in my women’s history class, we began making our way through Joan Brumberg’s The Body Project.  I’ve been using the book for years and years, and it’s a huge hit with my students each semester.

It is Brumberg who first drew my attention to statistics about menarche, marriage, and the loss of virginity.  She points out that a century ago, girls menstruated for the first time at an average age of 16 and got married at an average age of around 21.  Today, girls menstruate at an average age of just under 12 and get married for the first time at just over 25.

(A quick note about statistics.  The problem with teaching statistics — especially with something like menarche — is that very, very few folks end up being "average".  Almost every girl seems to have a sense of herself as being "early" or "late"  — a Goldilocks effect, I suppose!)

Here’s where it gets interesting.  A century ago, the time between the onset of puberty and marriage was but five years; today it’s close to fifteen. If a contemporary young woman is trying to "wait" until marriage to lose her virginity, she is waiting — in a very real sense — three times as long as women did in her great-great grandmother’s era!   She’s got three times the frustration of coping with unexpressed sexual feelings and longings, three times as long to struggle to live up to a cultural and religious standard of purity.  Forget trying to live up to the standards of one’s ancestors; today’s young women who remain committed to virginity are trying to accomplish something that has, from a demographic and physiological standpoint, never been achieved before.

Continue reading ‘Reprint: A long post on tradition, virginity, success, feminism, and a nonsensical double bind’

Reprint: the final lectures, a note on wrapping up courses

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 24, 2007
in Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 0 Comments

This post is a bit over two years old, but since I’m giving my final summer school lectures today, it’s worth a reprint on the assumption that relatively few of my current readers remember the original.

Ever since I started teaching, I’ve been convinced that a course needs ‘wrapping up’ at the end of the term. I never liked profs who finished by saying “Well, that’s it, good luck on the final!” I’m convinced that it’s my job as a teacher to tie as many loose ends together as possible, summarize the material, point out the overarching theme of the course, and then exhort the students to apply what they’ve learned — somehow.

I know my students will soon forget most of the facts they’ve memorized. Five years from now, will my ancient history students remember Augustine’s conditions for a just war? Will my modern Europe students remember who was in the Triple Alliance? Will my women’s history students remember the date the Declaration of Sentiments was signed, or who invented the tampon? I suspect most of these facts (if memorized at all in the first place) will rapidly vanish from their memories in the months and years to come.

For example, in my History 1B (Modern Europe) class, the theme all semester long has been “the triumph of the individual.” (For an Anabaptist socialist, it’s an unlikely theme. My heroes ought to be Menno and Marx; instead I tend to rely on Montesquieu and Mill. Go figure.) My course began with Martin Luther nailing up his theses; it ends with the Nuremberg Trials after World War Two. It’s a stretch to tie them together, but I give it a go. I suggest that just as Luther insisted on the primacy of faith (and faith, while a gift from God, is essentially internal and individual), the Nuremberg Trials insisted that men and women were accountable to their individual conscience even over the direct orders of a superior. The Protestant Reformation and Nuremberg are, I argued, both instances where the notion of a universal law, written on the human heart, is used to trump obligations to an external, human authority. It’s a whopping generalization to describe these events in that fashion, but while it’s a stretch, it’s not indefensible. I ask my students to consider this concern for individual rights and individual conscience to be the great legacy of the last five centuries of European history.

In my women’s history class, I’m far more polemical. I tell them that my real purpose in teaching this course has been to raise up young feminists and their pro-feminist allies. I’ve given them a narrative of four centuries of American women’s history to instill gratitude within them for all that their foremothers endured on their behalf. I want them to understand that the right to vote, the right to use birth control, the right to education — all of these were won by women who sacrificed years and years of their lives to the feminist cause. But I don’t just want my students to be grateful! I remind them that the feminist struggle is far from over: in a country without guaranteed maternity leave, where rape and sexual exploitation remain serious problems, where sexual harassment is still widespread and families headed by single women are disproportionately poor, feminism still has relevance. I remind them that how they feel about their bodies — and the bodies of other women — is also a feminist issue. Women have not always suffered from crippling anxiety about their flesh, as my students have learned; one important front in the feminist cause must be to transform individual and collective attitudes towards the body. I urge my students to consider wearing the feminist label (which most of them have heretofore shunned) with pride.

I don’t expect many of my students to really take what I’m saying to heart. I’m far too realistic for that. Most of them are simply here to pass their classes, move on to the next level, and have what they and I hope will be rewarding careers as a result. I wish them well regardless of whether or not they embrace feminism as a philosophy and a cause. Yes, my heart is thrilled whenever I get a note from a student who has changed her major to women’s studies, or has decided on a career in justice work. Part of me suspects these students might have chosen these laudable paths without me or my class; it’s dangerous for those of us in this profession to over-estimate our own significance. But it’s dangerous to underestimate our influence as well. Even those students who won’t make different decisions academically or professionally as a result of a feminist studies class may still find fruitful, if small ways to apply what it is that they’ve absorbed in these sixteen weeks.

In the end, I’m convinced that good teaching is polemical. In order for me to teach, I have to believe that what I teach has a practical application beyond simply providing students with interesting stories and a general background. Good teaching — and I hope in some way, some of the time, I’m a practitioner of that — is meant to push students in specific directions, not merely towards the “truth” but towards the application of that truth in their own lives. Though that is most true in courses like Women’s History, I’m convinced it is also part and parcel of even general survey classes.

More on the erotics of teaching: a response to William Deresiewicz

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 16, 2007
in Pasadena City College, Student crushes and Teaching
. 5 Comments

Several people (three counts as several in my book) sent me links this past week to this William Deresiewicz article in the American Scholar: Love On Campus. It’s an interesting and lengthy rumination about the ubiquity of the “lecherous English professor type” in popular film and literature; it’s also an examination of the role of sexuality in teaching.
It’s a subject in which I have some considerable interest.

Much of Deresiewicz says is, I think, fairly accurate:

Love is a flame, and the good teacher raises in students a burning desire for his or her approval and attention, his or her voice and presence, that is erotic in its urgency and intensity. The professor ignites these feelings just by standing in front of a classroom talking about Shakespeare or anthropology or physics, but the fruits of the mind are that sweet, and intellect has the power to call forth new forces in the soul. Students will sometimes mistake this earthquake for sexual attraction, and the foolish or inexperienced or cynical instructor will exploit that confusion for his or her own gratification. But the great majority of professors understand that the art of teaching consists not only of arousing desire but of redirecting it toward its proper object, from the teacher to the thing taught. Teaching, Yeats said, is lighting a fire, not filling a bucket, and this is how it gets lit. The professor becomes the student’s muse, the figure to whom the labors of the semester — the studying, the speaking in class, the writing — are consecrated. The alert student understands this. In talking to one of my teaching assistants about these matters, I asked her if she’d ever had a crush on an instructor when she was in college. Yes, she said, a young graduate student. “And did you want to have sex with him?” I asked. “No,” she said, “I wanted to have brain sex with him.”

I like the Yeats quote, which I confess I didn’t know before. And his anecdote about his teaching assistant matches what I remember hearing about student crushes from my friend Tiffany back when I was an undergraduate (something I wrote about here.) If we’re doing our job, we are lighting fires — and when and if student arousal appears to be directed our way, we redirect it towards the subject and away from ourselves. Deresiewicz overlooks, however, the possibility that student attraction towards their best professors is less about the subject (or the professor himself), but rather about the student’s sense of their own potential to which their teacher is helping them to awaken. It’s a small but not insignificant distinction.

I also appreciate immensely this Yale professor’s acknowledgement that good teaching often flourishes in the less prestigious corners of academe (such as two-year colleges like my own):

In fact, kids who have had fewer educational advantages before they get to college are often more eager to learn and more ready to have their deepest convictions overturned than their more fortunate peers. And it is often away from the elite schools — where a single-minded focus on research plus a talent for bureaucratic maneuvering are the necessary tickets to success — that true teaching most flourishes.

He’ll get an “amen” from me there. Yet despite considerable agreement with good Professor Deresiewicz, I found myself troubled by other aspects of his piece. This bit about consensual relationships policies left me spluttering:

Professors are the surrogate parents that parents hand their children over to, and the raising and casting out of the specter of the sexually predatory academic may be a way of purging the anxiety that transaction evokes. But long before the baby boomers’ offspring started to reach college, the feminist campaign against sexual harassment — most effective in academia, the institution most responsive to feminist concerns — had turned universities into the most anxiously self-patrolled workplace in American society, especially when it comes to relations between professors and undergraduates.

“The specter of the sexually predatory academic”? Specters generally are unreal phantasms that we fear irrationally. There is nothing spectral about predatory instructors (overwhelmingly male) who seduce (or in their distorted justifications, allow themselves to be seduced) by much younger (overwhelmingly female) students. The stereotype of the professor who crosses sexual boundaries he ought not to cross is hardly a figment of the literary or cinematic imagination. Sexual affairs between students and teachers that involve at best a colossal power imbalance and at worse deeply destructive exploitation are all too real, and Deresiewicz’s dismissal of that reality is disingenuous. Referring to “specters” invites us to think that those who pursue lecherous professors are on “witch hunts”. And yet witchcraft isn’t a real threat, and most accused at Salem and elsewhere were not real practitioners of the dark arts. The transgressions of amorous academics are all too real, and it’s a serious error to pretend otherwise. In his eagerness to insist that good teaching has an erotic element, which I think it does, Deresiwicz downplays the reality that many professors have a hard time distinguishing between “lighting an intellectual fire” and foolish, irresponsible seduction.

But with that significant quibble aside, it’s really a fine meditation on teaching and eros. And his penultimate paragraph elicited from me an enthusiastic “Hell, yes!”

Teaching, finally, is about relationships. It is mentorship, not instruction. Socrates also says that the bond between teacher and student lasts a lifetime, even when the two are no longer together. And so it is. Student succeeds student, and I know that even the ones I’m closest to now will soon become names in my address book and then just distant memories. But the feelings we have for the teachers or students who have meant the most to us, like those we have for long-lost friends, never go away. They are part of us, and the briefest thought revives them, and we know that in some heaven we will all meet again.

Bold emphasis mine.

All the more reason why we “Casanovas of the classroom” ought not to fear the regulations that seek to protect our students from the advances of our colleagues, whether those advances be fervently wished for or not.

No summer school office hours

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 25, 2007
in Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 4 Comments

One of the things I loathe about summer school: no office hours. I’m teaching three classes back-to-back-to-back and I don’t have five danged minutes to meet with students. No time to go over papers with them, no time to meet to chat. I try and get to my office early before my 8:00AM class, which is the one time I can set aside, but that’s awfully early for many of my students — especially those who don’t have my class until the afternoon.

Query: anyone work at an institution where summer school profs have office hours? I feel as if my students are getting short-changed as they don’t get the access to me that kids do during the regular semesters. On my own time, I can squeeze in five minutes here or there, but it’s tough to make up.

No Magic Grading Machine

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 19, 2007
in Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 6 Comments

I’m done with the grading. Jeepers, I hate grading. We can’t give plus/minus modifications to final grades, so everyone ends up with a straight A,B,C,D, or F. (I give very few Ds, lots of Cs, a fair number of Bs, a few As and a few Fs.) Ranked in order of commonality, it’s C,B,A,F,D.

Particularly with the Bs and Cs, there are huge gaps. One student who gets a B just missed an A; another who gets a B barely avoided a C. If you wre to read their final papers, you would be bewildered as to how they could end up with the same grade. But with no plus/minus option, there you have it — a huge variation amongst folks with similar grades. That’s less true of the As, but for Bs and Cs, it’s a constant.

I had 322 finals or final papers to grade. No time for thoughtful comments, just a quick read-through, a grade, and then a brief period of wrestling over what final mark to give for the class. A few very kind students manage to earn the same grade on everything, and that makes the ultimate decision simple; there are not nearly enough of these consistent types to make my job easier.

I dream of a magic grading machine, operated by industrious chinchillas.

Away for three days, and a note on “sink a scholar”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 17, 2007
in Memories and Pasadena City College
. 3 Comments

This will be my last post until Monday; my wife and I will be in the Bay Area over the weekend attending a memorial service for my uncle and celebrating a plethora of family birthdays (we have loved ones turning 16, 40, 50, and 70 within the next few weeks — lots of milestones).

I spent the better part of the lunch hour by the campus pool, doing a fund-raiser for our student honor society on campus. It’s called “sink a scholar”, and involves professors (in costume) leaping into the pool off the high dive board, all while being pelted with wet sponges. It’s a yearly event that goes back decades, and I’ve done it most years since I joined the faculty in ‘94.

This year’s theme was sports, so I wore my cycling kit (including the red and black jersey Lance wears in his Dasani water ads). I was quite demure. Exactly ten years ago in 1997, at the height of my inappropriateness, I leapt off the diving board during “sink a scholar” dressed in rubber and vinyl as a fetish submissive, complete with ball gag. I was pierced in several obvious places at the time (all have long since been removed). It was a mild scandal, but it attracted a huge audience and raised lots of money. I have long since gotten rid of the pictures.

Today I caused barely a ripple. My body stayed largely covered. I raised very little money, and very few eyebrows.

Thank God for the grace to grow up, and thank God for tenure.

Strange doings at “the Beach”: CSULB, Kevin Macdonald, and Barry Dank

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 7, 2007
in Pasadena City College, Sexual ethics and transformation and Teaching
. 16 Comments

I didn’t get a chance to post about the interesting case of Cal State Long Beach psychology professor Kevin MacDonald, whose work on Jews has been linked to hate groups. (Here’s Inside Higher Ed on the story; here’s the Times — both stories are from about two weeks ago.)

I’ve defended the rights of avowed (or at least apparent) Nazis to teach, so I certainly have no problem with MacDonald remaining in the classroom. He’s no Nazi, but his work is problematic. He told the Times:

In general, Judaism is considered a complex and successful survival mechanism, and at times they’ve been victimized for it. I do think there is a biological element at work here that’s existed throughout the centuries.

Jews, who have typically been in the minority in countries around the world, are compelled by an evolutionary strategy that makes them push for liberal policies, like immigration and diversity, with the intent of weakening the power of the majority that rules them.

I like the Long Beach State response. They aren’t taking Prof. MacDonald’s classes away from him, but they have issued a series of public statements separating themselves from his work. More importantly, at least some of his colleagues have apparently expressed a willingness to confront MacDonald (civilly, of course). Tenure ought to protect those who teach unpopular ideas from losing their jobs, but tenure is no shield from vigorous criticism. If MacDonald were in my department, I would have no trouble pushing him to clarify his views. Our jobs are sacrosanct, but with that ironclad security comes a duty to engage in some intense intellectual tussles.

But I’m reminded by the MacDonald case that I never posted about one of his colleagues at Long Beach State, the now-retired sociologist Barry Dank. While a great many folks are rightly troubled by the implicit anti-Semitism in MacDonald’s work, too few bothered to challenge Dank, who in the 1990s and into the first half of this decade was the leading proponent of faculty-student romantic relationships.

Sometime in the early 1990s, Dank (already a senior faculty member) became deeply troubled by the growing number of policies designed to protect students from lecherous professors. While he seemed to reluctantly support bans on outright, unwelcome harassment, Dank became academia’s most public and vociferous defender of the right of professors to date their current students, as long as the relationshiip was with a legal, consenting adult.

He founded the Foundation for Advancement of Sexual Equity (the website is now gone), and put up the still-extant Academic Sexual Correctness site, still hosted on a Cal State Long Beach server. The first article on the ASC site is Dank’s piece that ran in the Electonic Journal of Human Sexuality: Banning Sexual Asymmetry on Campus. It’s a hoot to read, as Dank goes so far as to compare bans on teacher-student dating to pre-Loving anti-miscegenation statutes:

The closest analogy we can draw is the traditional opposition to inter-racial relationships, particularly black-white relationships, with their stereotypes of innocent white females and predatory sexually obsessed black males. Bans on inter-racial relationships were, as we well know, designed to maintain rigid systems of racial stratification.

It gets better. Dank reveals the his true colors as a misogynist by suggesting that those who propose bans on faculty-student sex are mostly older women worried about being unable to compete with “hot coeds”:

Some other motives suggest themselves from the new Puritans loud insistence that their only interest is protecting innocent female students. We cannot help wonder if some of them might be really interested in protecting themselves from competition from younger women or affirming their power over younger women.

Dank’s article was co-authored with the late College of Charleston anthropologist Klaus de Albuquerque (a great name, btw).

Unlike his colleague MacDonald, who has — rightly or wrongly — been vilified for his stance, Dank was never the subject of angry editorials. It’s hard to see how his positions are any less offensive, or potentially threatening to students involved. Of course, Dank is retired now, though Long Beach still hosts his site, which hasn’t been updated for years. (If you read through the rest of the articles, you get more of the same stuff — and you get a link to the National Coalition of Free Men, suggesting, unsurprisingly, that Dank has strong MRA ties.)

By the time I discovered Dank’s work, I was already well into my own process of making amends for the brief period early in my career where I had had a series of consensual romantic relationships with my students. When I was chairing the academic senate’s ad hoc committee to write a policy banning consensual sexual relationships several years ago, I wrote to Dank but received no reply. I wrote to take particular issue with his suggestion that these policies were being pushed by aging (female) feminists eager to control their male colleagues and protect themselves from competition from younger women. I wrote to him as a man who had come to realize that he had crossed an ethical line. I wrote to him as a man who had never been held accountable by the college (or anyone else) for these inappropriate relationships, but who nonetheless had come to believe that faculty-student sex was always and in every instance a gross betrayal of professional and moral responsibility. By this point, I had already “outed” myself to the president of the college, the campus newspaper, the VP for human resources and my colleagues. I had, where possible, made sincere and heartfelt amends to the women who had been in my classes as well as in my bed. Chairing the committee to write this policy was President Kossler’s idea, as he (a former Catholic priest) thought it would be an excellent way to demonstrate contrition and take positive action.

I came across Dank’s work as I was researching policies that other campuses had devised. I was tempted to dismiss him as a crank, but knowing that at the time he was still an active faculty member, I wanted to push for some dialogue. He never replied to my overtures, and I dropped the issue. But if he were still teachin’ at Long Beach, I’d ask my friends at Inside Higher Ed to consider running a story on him and his views. If Kevin MacDonald’s bizarre take on Jewishness is fair game for public debate, which it rightly is, so too are the views of faculty like Dank who defend their right to bed their students.

Reprinting a lost oldie on anti-feminist young women

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 26, 2007
in Feminism, Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 5 Comments

A few posts from my old blog got “lost in the shuffle” (particularly posts from late September –mid-October 2005.) I’m reprinting a few of them periodically. Here’s one from October 13, 2005, with most of the text “below the fold”:

Tuesday night, my wife and I were in the Apple store in Old Town Pasadena, picking up iPod accessories. When I handed my credit card over to the young woman behind the counter, she read my name and said “Hey, you teach at PCC.” I admitted that it was so, and we chatted as she rang up the purchase. Jokingly, I asked her why she hadn’t taken any of my courses. I mentioned my courses in Western Civ, as well as Women’s History. As soon as I mentioned the latter class, the gal remarked “Well, I’d never take a class like that. I’m not a feminist. I’m all about being a homemaker, and I don’t like sitting around listening to a bunch of women complain about how unfair the world is.” Continue reading ‘Reprinting a lost oldie on anti-feminist young women’

“Dukes don’t emigrate”: more OKOP/NOKOP reflections, and wincing at the use of the term “upper-class”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 22, 2007
in Class, Ethnicity and Pasadena City College
. 29 Comments

Here at Pasadena City College, we have an excellent theater department. Here’s the press release for the newest production:

Follow a year in the lives of six upper-class friends through a series of holiday-themed parties as the Pasadena City College Performing and Communication Arts Division proudly presents “The Country Club,” which opens on Friday, March 23, in PCC’s Sexson Auditorium.
Playwright Douglas Carter Beane’s comedy-drama tells the story of a young and charmingly neurotic woman who retreats from a failed marriage and decides to go back to her upper-class hometown in Pennsylvania. There, she finds love, friendships, and tragedies. The play consists of nine scenes and evolves around different holidays.

“This ‘dramady’ reflects the typical White Anglo-Saxon Protestant domain of the upper-class,” said Duke Stroud, PCC professor and director of the play. “It’s a portrait of dysfunctional relationships, which are funny and dramatic at the same time.”

(Note: I’ve explained OKOP and NOKOP here, and I now have a whole specific archive dealing with class.)

I know nothing about the play, and I doubt I’ll be able to get a chance to see it. But the press release, which I read yesterday, got under my skin instantly. You see, I hate the use of the phrase “upper class” to describe American families.

I grew up in culture that described itself as “upper-middle class”. And in the WASP circles of my youth and my family background, I certainly encountered plenty of remarkably well-to-do people. I know the world of “clubs” fairly well, and though that world holds relatively little interest for me today, it’s still quite familiar. (Or as John Bradshaw would write it, family-ar). And here’s the thing: if there’s one maxim “our kind of people” all agreed on, it was that talking explicitly and publicly about class was prima facie evidence that you lacked it. Nothing could be more more NOKOP than to describe anything, be it a social gesture or a fashion accessory, as “classy.” Once, while at a family luncheon, I used the term “classy” to describe the play of one of John McEnroe’s opponents (we had just watched a Wimbledon match on television.) From the reaction of a few of my older relatives, you would think I had dropped the f-bomb. “I think you want to say that his behavior was ‘gentlemanly’, dear” one of my elders advised me. Another suggested that “sporting” would have been an even more appropriate choice. I was about 14, and just starting to get the picture: we don’t talk about class.

And even worse than calling something “classy”? Referring to the existence of an American “upper-class.” I was raised to believe that the only authentic upper-class that exists is to be found in Europe. As one hired geneaologist famously told my great-aunt Carmen when she speculated that we had many aristocratic forebears, “Mrs. Starr, dukes don’t emigrate.” “Dukes don’t emigrate” became the standard bon mot we all used (and still do) whenever anyone speaks of an upper class in the United States. As far as we’re concerned, we maintain the satisfying fiction that almost all are middle class: there’s lower-middle, middle-middle, and upper-middle. And the less said specifically about these strata, the better.

To be really honest, I feel protective of the very sort of people the press release from our theater department seems to disparage. I’ve reread it a couple of times, and it’s not particularly offensive (save for the wince-inducing use of “upper class”). But here’s the really blunt truth: there are very few folks on this campus — faculty, staff, students — who come from a WASPy upper-middle class background. On at least one side of my family, I do. And part of me feels as if this play (about which I know zilch) is going to caricature a culture that I value. And those doing the caricaturing on stage will, on this campus that is over 80% non-white, be those who know little or nothing about the culture they lampoon.

It’s embarrassing to cop to this. Frankly, I’m prepared to believe that there’s a certain element of both classism and racism in my response. And Lord knows, despite years and years of teaching at a diverse urban community college, despite living in a glorious, successful, interracial marriage, I still struggle with my own bigotry, my own elitism. I am not proud of it, and I continue to work spiritually and psychologically to overcome whatever vestiges of prejudice remain in my soul.

The “WASPy country-club set” don’t need me to defend them. Yes, I continue to maintain quite seriously that we don’t have an authentic “upper-class” in this country. I continue to feel uncomfortable when others discuss what sort of behaviors or clothing choices are “classy” or not. But my intellectual and political training tells me that there’s no point in defending those who have had the greatest access to power and privilege in our nation’s relatively brief history. My commitment to justice and equality tells me that there is much in what I call my heritage that is ugly, oppressive, elitist, emotionally stunted and whoppingly superficial. There is also, as I’ve posted before, much that is joyous and good. (Read my “Happy WASP boy”.)

And I may have to swallow my own issues, and go see this play.

UPDATE: I’m reminded that nearly a century ago, my great-great grandfather wrote and privately published his memoirs. Speaking of ancestry, he wrote something lovely that is quoted as often as the “dukes don’t emigrate” line. A.A. Moore said in 1915:

Children, let your modest pride be this: you come of sturdy stock.

I love that. Even if I suspect it’s a reference to the fact that many of us are big-boned.

Student Crushes #3: “affirming and redirecting” and some other thoughts

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 7, 2007
in Pasadena City College, Student crushes and Teaching
. 25 Comments

It’s been nearly a year since I put up my two posts about student crushes. My stats tell me that next to queries about older men, younger women (my archive on that is here), nothing brings me more hits than the subject of unrequited student longing for their professors.

The two posts I’ve written on that subject said most of what I wanted to say at the time. But both posts continue to get comments, both here and at my old blog. Lots of students write in for advice. (I note, checking IP addresses, that a disproportionate number of those commenting are from the UK. Is there something about the lecturer-student relationship that seems more enticing in England than here? I’ll have to ask my brother.) Most of the question are of the general “what do I do?” sort.

This comment at my old blog is typical. Some excerpts:

I’ve been on the edge of my seat for my (married) geology professor for about two months now. I’m feeling sad that this quarter is almost over because I fear the anxiety of not being able to see him anymore. I’m so glad that I found this blog because I was starting to feel very deviant and out of the norm… i’m not even thinking about my grade, i could fail that class and still want him. i’m going crazy and i thought about just telling him how i feel, or just teasing the shit out of him. i don’t know what to do. it takes so much for me to snap back into reality and know that it’s wrong for many reasons…want him to know that I want him without having to say anything. I don’t even care if I get turned down. I just want him to know that he’s wanted.

Ten days ago, “Heartbroken” wrote:

I seriously have a problem about this whole issue…Now I’m in the middle of a crush on one lecturer, and me being the class representative, I’ve had a lot of contact with him. It’s really painful to see him everyday, and I really want to talk to him about it to make it easier to deal with. Exams are over, so there won’t be a problem with him giving me any more grades. Is it unfair of me to talk to him about this? He is married, and I am aware that i might have this crush because he’s just such a brilliant character… I really don’t know what to do, any advice will be considered.

Bold emphases are mine.

And last month, a random student wrote:

How do you know if a student has a crush on you? Im just wondering cos i’ve had the biggest crush on my teacher for months now, and I really dont want him to know…

I stand by the theory of student crushes I offered a year ago: that we tend to fall for people who embody qualities we want in ourselves. Students fall for their professors and teachers not because we are, in and of ourselves, unbearably desirable; they fall for us because we expose them to new ideas and possibilities. They love the way we make them feel, and they understandably confuse an attraction to what we do for them with an attraction to us as individuals. I’m honestly convinced that covers the vast majority of “common crushes”.

The questions above revolve around two main issues we haven’t touched on before: can professors tell when students have crushes on them? And should students, like “Heartbroken”, talk to their objects of their infatuation about the crush itself, either to see if it’s reciprocated or to get some sort of help in working through their feelings?

I can’t speak for all my colleagues around the globe, but I can say that this professor doesn’t expend a lot of energy wondering if a particular student has a crush on him or not. I know full well that an outer appearance of excitement and attentiveness can mean many things! It can be a calculated act designed to send a message that the student is listening, whether that’s true or not. (And word to my students: don’t nod appreciatively every time I make eye contact with you. It often looks forced. Once in a while is fine, but every time, it seems, well, a bit fake.) The attentiveness can mean — indeed, I always hope it means — a genuine interest in and excitement about the subject. And it can mean an excitement about the subject mixed with an attraction to the professor/teacher/lecturer himself or herself. I’ve been at this gig for just about fifteen years, and I’ll be darned if I can tell easily what’s going on inside a student’s head. In a world where so many young people have been trained to flatter, it’s difficult if not impossible to assess motive merely from a student’s smiles and body language.

Of course, this doesn’t mean I think most of my students are frauds! Far from it. I just don’t spend a great deal of time wondering what it is that my students think about me. By definition, good teachers are more concerned with what the student is learning than with whether or not their student likes ‘em or not. And on those occasions when a crush does become obvious, I always remember, as I wrote last year, that it’s not about me: it’s about an experience the student is having as a result of encountering the material I’m presenting. Even if they think it’s about me rather than the class, in the end, it’s usually about their own excited response to the material.

Bottom line is this: I don’t think most of us can tell what our students are thinking. It’s not that we don’t care, it’s that we lack the ability to discern among many different possible reasons for excitement and interest. And the wise among us know that we don’t need to know. Our students aren’t here to feed our egos.

As for telling the professor about a crush of which he may or may not already be aware, I tend to think that’s generally a bad idea. (I said “generally”, not “always”.) Obviously, for a whole host of academic reasons, it’s a bad idea to broach the topic while you’re a student in his class. I note that the two professors who are the objects of student crushes in the quoted sections above are both married. Confessing a strong attraction to a married person is, I think, just about always a fundamentally selfish thing to do. Whether or not their marriage is on a firm foundation, basic decency compels us to respect the commitments that those around us have made. That applies universally. (At the risk of going off on a tangent, let me make it clear that I really dislike it when people say to each other things like “Oh, if I were single…” or “If only you weren’t married…” Just saying the words is an act of hostility towards a married person and their spouse. It’s not an excuse to protest “But I would never act on it!” Fidelity is about what we say as well as what we do, and expressing strong sexual or romantic attraction to someone who’s “taken” is low-grade adultery!)

Sometimes students tell their professors about their crushes in the apparently sincere hope that the prof will help them “work through” their feelings. This has happened to me a time or three, though less often now than in the past. While some students clearly are hoping to spark a romantic relationship, others tend to see their teacher as a resource with whom they can “process” their feelings. Of course, it’s hard if not impossible to work through a crush with the object of the crush. It sounds good in theory, but in practice, it’s nigh on impossible.

I learned to be very respectful of those students who confessed crushes to me. I don’t belittle them or tease them or berate them. At the same time, I am very good about not encouraging the crush. And that often means affirming the student’s very real and intense feelings, and then gently redirecting that student towards a counselor or a therapist (we have plenty right here on campus.) The “affirm and redirect” strategy is by far the best approach a teacher can take when faced with a love-struck student.

One of the things I’ve really come to understand about teaching: it’s a one-way street. I am here to lecture, to challenge, to provoke, to nurture, to push. I love what I do, and I love my students very much. I am committed to them, devoted to them, even when I have far less time to offer them individually than I would like. And I know that they have a wide variety of responses to me, ranging from complete apathy to outright adoration, from moderate enthusiasm to genuine hostility, from vague dislike to erotic infatuation. I can know that because I teach hundreds and hundreds every year, and the chances are damn good that some are gonna love me, some are gonna hate me, and the great majority won’t have any strong feelings at all. But in the end, my teaching isn’t conditional on my students’ feelings about me. When I was younger and more insecure, I did worry about what my students thought about me as a person, about whether they thought I was “cool”; my teaching suffered as a result. Blessedly, age and experience and transformation has changed all that.

I love that my work is a “one-way street”. Because I get my needs met elsewhere, I don’t need to bring my neediness into the office, into the classroom. I am here for my students, they are not here for me; my sense of self is grounded in my relationship with Christ, in my amazing marriage, in my family and friends and my sense that I am climbing a mountain God wants me to climb.

Workaholism and posts deferred

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 29, 2007
in Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 10 Comments

I’ve got a couple of serious posts floating in my head, and no time to write them. I want to make a gently feminist/Christian case that we are right to be more upset by porn than by violence on TV. And I had a great run with a friend of mine a week ago, one that turned into a meditation not only on masculinity and ageing but also nationalism, the appeal of “country” versus “club” soccer, and the benefits of living in a place where your family has no roots, no ties, no history. Two long reflections, frankly, that I ache to write.

But no time again today. I learned last week that I teach more classes than any of my colleagues in the entire social sciences division, and more than virtually anyone else in the whole college. For the second straight year, I will teach 20 classes: seven each semester, three each intersession. No one else in my division exceeds 18, and few exceed 15.

Some might say I have an addictive relationship to work. How that jives with my spiritual commitments and my longing to rethink masculinity, I have no idea.

I’ll make time tomorrow. Promise.