Two Things Tuesday: Writing, Sausage, and Teaching a Campus Crisis

It’s a funky mid-April Tuesday where I’m starting to feel both excited about my summer research time and harried by the end of a hectic semester. These two, sometimes contradictory emotions, create quite a tumult in my rather simple world. I’m both eager to get on with the program and hoping to have more time to tend to matters at hand!

In any event, complicating this further is the topic for todays “Two Thing Tuesday”:

Thing the First

A few weeks ago, I complained that I was struggling to find time to write and this was causing me a certain amount of frustration. What I really should have said, in hindsight, was that I couldn’t quite find an excuse to write. 

Fortunately, just such an excuse materialized this past week. I was very excited to have received word that the editors of a book on campus crises have accepted my proposed contribution: “Teaching as Activismduring a Campus Crisis.” Our chapters are due August 1 and since I will be up to my neck in workshops, Roman pottery, and Slavic ware for May and June, it feels like this means that I need to start writing this chapter now.

And so I have (see below).

Thing the Second 

When I started this blog, part of my goal was the expose how we make academic sausage. This means sharing book notes, outlines, drafts, crappy ideas, pre-prints, and whenever possible published work.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to turn my attention to this chapter and that means subjecting anyone who is interested in reading to drafts of my work. Keen eyed readers will note that it is cribbing a good bit from the proposal.

Enjoy (or don’t read it!):

Teaching as Activism during a Campus Crisis

Introduction

This chapter considers the potential of classroom based activism as a response to a campus crisis at the University of North Dakota, a mid-sized, public university. In 2018, the University of North Dakota labored under a painful series of budget cuts triggered by state financial shortfalls. These cuts extended across campus and made national headlines with the termination of the university’s prominent women’s hockey program and successful music therapy degree. These cuts and the largely negative publicity that they generated bewildered and angered students and faculty alike. It stoked a sense of outrage on campus which had been smoldering since the naming of an awkward and unpopular figure, Mark Kennedy, as university president. A failed effort at program prioritization, the implementation of a seemingly complex new MIRA-type budgeting process (Model for Incentive-based Resource Allocation), and the growing reach of an increasingly bureaucratized administration further exacerbated a sense of confusion surrounding university processes and decision-making. 

In response to the growing sense of crisis, I decided to offer a class on the University of North Dakota Budget. The class was offered as an honors section of our department’s venerable History of North Dakota class and taught at the intermediate level. It was open to both honors and non-honors students and quickly enrolled close to its 20-student cap. The class situated the contemporary budget crisis on the UND campus in both local and national contexts and took advantage of the timely appearance of a series of incisive books that sought to frame the national sense of crisis in higher education in historical, administrative, and ideological terms. Christopher Newfield’s The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (2016) and David Labaree’s A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendency of American Higher Education (2017) served as our textbooks. 

This chapter attempts to contextualize this class in a way that was authentic to my decision to offer the course. This means recognizing that I am not an educational theorist versed in the latest articulations of activist teaching, nor am I an historian of higher education. I do not have any training as an activist or community organizer. Instead, I was trained as a historian and archaeologist and largely teach survey and “service” classes for my department. In other words, my experiences come from the ragged edges of the professionalization paradigm that this chapter seeks to critique and, in some limited way, subvert. 

This will account, in part, for my awkward efforts to weave together three threads. First, I will situate my efforts to use teaching as a form of activism within the 20th-century conversations surrounding “teach-ins” and student empowerment. Then, this paper will offer a concise narrative of the specific budget cuts and institutional changes at UND. The third thread will be a description and discussion of two classes that these 20th-century conversations and sense of contemporary crisis inspired at my institution. 

Teaching as Activism

It has become cliche to regard crises in higher education as both slow moving and immediate. The immediacy of the crises often produce great flurries of activity designed to forestall the imminent calamity. Slower moving crises, whether rooted in the glacial pace of institutional change, the constant crises of contemporary capitalism, or the geological (albeit accelerating) rate of the global climate, often create opportunities for campus activism that operate on different trajectories than those informed by the urgency of the moment. The scholarship related to teaching as activism is as broad and complex as the social problems that it seeks to resolve (Ozaki and Parson 2020, 2021). Rather than offering a rather necessarily desiccated review of this dynamic body of literature, this chapter will take as points of reference the “teach-in” movement of the 1960s and 1970s which emerged in response to the Vietnam war and as an important component of the first Earth Day and Ira Shor’s work on empowerment in the college classroom. While these landmarks are more than a bit dated, they still offer an important lens through which to appreciate the potential of teaching (and learning) as the foundation for social and institutional changes.

The oft-recited origins of the “teach-in” movement as a response to the US bombing of North Vietnam. Jack Rothman and Marshall Sahlins offer accounts of the origin of the “teach-in” movement at the University of Michigan in 1965 (Rothman 1972; Sahlins 2009). The term sought to invoke mid-century sit-in protests or in Sahlins’s mind the Hegelian concept of the “teach out” and forged a compromise between calls for a teaching strike and calls for a form of protest that would be more in keeping with the educational mission, resources, and ”special competency” available at the university. The first teach-in at Michigan, started at the end of the class day and then ran all night. Over 3000 students and dozens of faculty gathered in university lecture halls and classrooms. This offered a way for faculty and students to engage with “a clear factual and moral protest against the Vietnam War” (Rothman 1972). While the language of Rothman’s description of the first teach-in reflected prevailing pedagogical practices of the day, it recognized the key role of universities as places to educate as well as to organize and encourage students (and the university community more broadly) in response to crises. The subsequent adoption of the teach-in as a response both to short-term and to slower moving crises — from episodes of racist hate-crimes on campus to growing concerns about the environment — reveals the persistent potential of the teach-in as a tool to produce better educated activists and larger social change.  

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 that is often, but not always, absent in the complexity of contemporary college crises.

Ira Shor begins his now classic work Empowering Education (1992) with an 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 with 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 relies upon the kind of hegemonic discourse that reproduces asymmetries of power across the institution.