More on Teaching as a Response to a Campus Crisis

On Tuesday, I posted some text from my new project “Teaching as Activismduring a Campus Crisis.” I explained in my post then that this project has a sense of urgency fueled in no small part by an August 1 deadline! 

Wednesday was a chaotic day punctuated by the dogs annual visit to the vet, an afternoon playing hooky on my gravel bike, a faculty meeting, and then a night class. This means that I didn’t get as much writing done as I would have liked. 

That said, I did get a bit done. To understand the context for this, you probably need to go back to Tuesday’s post, but some of it will make sense without it:

Of course, the special competence of faculty as teachers framed an approach to rallying social change that was anything but open ended. The original teach-in organizers had the kind of moral and political clarity and social authority that is often, but not always, absent in the complexity of contemporary college crises. Contemporary campuses encounter crises in a diversity of ways that reflect the plurality of “stakeholders” in the neoliberal university. Faculty over the last fifty years of have increasingly come to recognize the need for foreground the empowerment of students prompted in no small part by the rise of campus activism provoked by interventions such as the Vietnam era “Teach-In” and its predecessors in the Civil Rights movements. 

While each generation produces a new canon of literature on student empowerment, my efforts to empower students on our campus found inspiration in Ira Shor’s classic work Empowering Education (1992). He began his work with anecdote about the first day of a new semester teaching “English One” at a New York public college. The students were surly and unresponsive until Shor asked them bluntly what was going on. At that point, the class became surly and responsive and explained that they were angry about the English writing test required for all first-year students. The class went on to explain to Shor that they felt the test to be unfair. Shor leveraged their frustration both to build an empathetic relationship with the students and to encourage them to channel their anger into the goals of the course. He admitted that despite the students’ ability to articulate their views, they stopped short of wanting to become activists themselves. 

What Shor recognized, however, is that giving students space and time to voice their anger and frustration started a process where they worked together to articulate their concerns. He was also giving students the critical tools to express their ideas in more compelling ways. As scholars have long argued, perhaps nowhere more compellingly as in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970 in English), teaching critical engagement during crises provides a basis for empowerment. While it goes without saying that largely middle-class honors students at a regional state university are a far cry from Freire’s Chilean peasants, the systems and structures that these students encountered on a daily basis, however, nevertheless relied upon the kind of hegemonic discourse that reproduces asymmetries of power across the institution. Thus activist teaching in and concerning the contemporary university often involves unpacking and understanding the complex institutional strategies designed to support the university’s functions. These strategies and the way in which they structure relationships (and power) on the university campus became the object of critique throughout our class on the 2018 budget cuts at the University of North Dakota. 

Even a mid-sized college campus represents a complex institution. Christopher Newport argued that the growing complexity of the contemporary public college campus is a symptom of the increasing privatization of public universities. For Newport, this involves the shift from collaborative to transactional modes of interaction across the institution. The financialization of interactions across the institution, for example, reconfigures curriculum from a collaborative responsibility to produce prepared and well-rounded students, to a competition for resources across campus. While advocates of this kind of competition imagine this as a way to produce efficiencies through a “marketplace of ideas,” instead it has intensified commitments to the professionalized standards of expertise and competence that often produce “silos” across institutions and hinder collaboration and cooperation. The logic of competition-born efficiency extends throughout our institutions not only fortifying claims to discreet professional competences, but also creating barriers to “shared governance.” For students and faculty, this can often mean that we are on the outside of a byzantine bureaucracy looking in even as the fate of programs, departments, and services crucial for both our own and our students expectations hang in the balance. It is unsurprising that during these times of the crisis that the bureaucracy itself becomes the object of vitriol as faculty and students from across the ideological spectrum attacked the lack of transparency, “administrative bloat,” and levels of compensation as the cause rather than the symptom of the changing financial environment facing 21st-century universities.