Is teaching "cost efficient"?

What I mean by this question is that the same sort of profoundly antihumanistic thinking that makes research seem pointless, that counts up citations or the lack of citations, would also make teaching *as we know it* largely obsolete. For lecturing, you could just mass distribute the work of brilliant lecturers. Why have countless people involved in giving physics lectures in numerous universities over the world? You could must pay 1,000,000 to the best damned lecturer and use those lectures everywhere from Perth to Dallas. Students could teach themselves out of textbooks and by listening to lectures. Of course, the antihumanist thinking also reduces education to *outcomes* that can be quantified or exercises that can be graded by machines. You could hire peons to grade more qualitative assignments like essays. You could have armies of tutors for those who can't manage the system.

The kind of *transactional* learning that occurs in a class discussion, or when a professor gives personal comments to a student she knows in the flesh, is not very cost effective, after all. Perhaps even less so than research. We know the academic institution values teaching less, because when they hire someone to teach with no expectation of research, the salary is much lower on a per course basis.

What I am talking about is something that is already occurring. Once you take research out of the picture, you no longer have the mechanism for training college professors who adhere to the older values of humanism. As the intellectual standards slip, the more education will become more remedial rote work that can be quantified and parceled out into low-paying jobs.

This is a downward cycle, because the stupider people get, the less need they will see for higher intellectual pursuits. The more education will be oriented toward the bare minimum, which will make people stupider, which will make them even more disdainful of intellectual pursuits.

Some Weaknesses

My weaknesses include proofreading and archival research. I find it hard to maintain teaching energy from August to December or January to May. I often make minor mistakes on my syllabus, leaving out a day or scheduling class when there isn't supposed to be any. I am bad at event planning.

Sometimes I jump ahead of myself and develop my ideas intuitively, before I do my research, so my research is often playing catch-up to my writing. I still am not accurate at estimating how long things will take to do, despite my pretentions as a time-management guru. I am both too rigid with time and not rigid enough. In other words, I will sometimes impose rigid but useless scheduling rules for myself, but at the same time fail to follow more basic principles.

I am somewhat egotistical and conceited in some ways, but yet I find it difficult to do the necessary self-promotion. I can be peevish and ill-tempered. I am prone to sloth, envy, greed, pride, gluttony, lust, ire, and pride, not necessarily in that order.

Some of my research pursues issues of interest to almost nobody except myself. I don't know if that's a weakness or not. Self-absorption? I am a master at that.

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That's only a partial list. The purpose of it is not to tear myself down, but to arrive at a realistic sense of weaknesses I can easily remedy and which are more intractable. Which of them are harmless foibles and which are keeping me back in more significant ways. There should be a third category too, of things that are neither strengths nor weaknesses, things that I can do just good enough, but that I don't really need to improve.

The Automatic University

I'm probably just oldfashioned but this vision of the university horrifies me. I was struck in particular by the collage of half-baked ideas gleaned (too quickly, I think) from studies of academic life. Citing that study by Mark Bauerlein about the alleged overproduction of uncited writing, which we've discussed already, Schumpeter argues that

The time wasted writing articles that will never be read cannot be spent teaching. In “Academically Adrift” Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa argue that over a third of America’s students show no improvement in critical thinking or analytical reasoning after four years in college.

But Arum and Roksa showed precisely that only those students who are enrolled in more or less traditional liberal arts programs, where writing is required, showed such improvement. Students who don't write, and teachers who don't demand it, presumably believe that the time wasted writing school assignments cannot be spent "studying"! Better to watch a lot of online lectures and then take a multiple choice exam that a machine can grade.

The automated university-as-a-business that Schumpeter desires fails to valorize the qualities of mind that follow from regular writing practices. A good writer of prose is also a good teacher, and can easily detect good ideas in well-written prose. The regular writer, then, does not need to spend as much time "teaching". The student and the teacher are prepared by their respective efforts to prose the material. A quick bit of interaction. Some simple comments. Even something as a simple as a grade. That's all it takes to move the student in the right direction.

I'm truly afraid of the conception of a university as a machine and of education as something this machine does to the minds of students. Of course, no one is really that evil. Rather, most people see the university as a machine that does something to the resumé of the students. It transforms credentials, not competences. What Schumpeter might mean then is: since students don't learn anything at school anyway, we may as well make it cheaper.

Inventory of Strengths

I am going to inventory my strengths in this post, for two or three reasons. I want to put myself up for a distinguished professorship, so I better have some idea of what my selling points are. I also find it helpful to figure out how to exploit the things that I already know how to do well. (A separate post will outline my weaknesses.) Thirdly, I want to continue writing in these 25 minute "boxes" in order to develop those particular muscles for "speed writing." I might run out of strong points before the time has elapsed. That is always a risk.

First, modesty. (That is a joke.)

More seriously, I see nothing immodest about taking inventory of strengths as well as weaknesses. One strength I have is the ability for honest and realistic self-assessment. That is a very significant talent to have. It is easy to puff oneself up or to tear oneself down in a sort of useless way. Real self-assessment is a little more difficult.

I think I am a good writer of prose. I am fairly erudite in my own field, with a very solid scholarly base, and adept at finding questions of significance to tackle. I am intellectually curious and have developed several areas of research that interlock with one another in interesting ways. I am also very independent of trends. I am more likely to influence the debate than to let myself be influenced by others. My perspectives, as a consequence, are independent. I have some ability to think critically and some theoretical "chops."

I am adept at time management and seeing research projects through to their completion, as well as generating new ideas. I can work with speed and efficiency, with no sacrifice of quality. I have no problem concentrating for a few hours and getting something significant done. I am tenacious and not easily discouraged.

Aside from Spanish, I can read a novel in just about any other Romance language (except Romanian). I have a decent knowledge of literature in the English language.

In my teaching I am good at coming up with new ideas for courses and at presenting very complex ideas. I am good at helping students develop their own research ideas. I am a compelling and engaging public speaker. I wouldn't think of using powerpoint in a public lecture.

I have a particular area of strength in mentoring and evaluation. I am good at helping others improve their writing and fulfill their professional ambitions. Some have said that I am "generous" in this area. I enjoy intellectual dialogue, and am a good listener.

I can write a poem better than some so-called professional poets. I am not a bad translator either.

I know how to combine these strengths to produce scholarly work that is compelling, intellectually demanding, thought-provoking, and imaginative. My time is up for this post, and I may have left something out, but it is a good start.

Fitness

Just as Jonathan once had a low opinion of business-inspired approaches to the writing process, ten years ago I would have balked at the idea of modeling the writing process on an exercise regimen. In fact, I think I even used to explicitly balk at the idea of mens sana in corpore sanum.

But I do also remember, in those same days, beginning to worry about the collective and individual conditions that would be required to makes sense of a book like Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or Joyce's Ulysses. When I thought about my own work habits and those of my peers (even those of my mentors), and the sorts of poses, affectations, and contortions this produced in seminars and in writing, I came to suspect that it was pretty much impossible to have the conversation that would be necessary to decide what these sorts of books mean. If knowledge of the transcendental conditions of our experience of objects was to be possible at all, it would require minds that were a good deal more disciplined, I had to admit, than mine. By a similar token, I had to grant that a Joycean epiphany might be entirely out of my reach.

It wasn't until I started working seriously with other people's writing, people whose ideas I knew (or at least thought) to be have some rigour, but whose writing was always, it seemed to me, struggling at the edge of their abilities, that I realized that I had to get these authors to practice. I had to get them to see that they had to gain the necessary strength and grace to express the ideas that we had (I thought) been talking about all these years. And having noticed the mote in my brother's eye, I had to recognize the beam in my own.

Business

As an academic I used to scorn productivity techniques and gimmicks that I associated more with the world of business. My time management skills were not all that great either, and I could get away with it up to a certain point because I could write fast when I needed to. I think this might have caught up to me in the late 90s or so. I was still producing articles, but longer projects became more difficult to manage. One book never got written and ended up as a series of articles instead. Another took several more years to complete and appear in print than I would have wanted.

Now I think that the source of an idea doesn't matter so much. I have my own "business" to take care of. They might need to be adopted to academic realities, but a good principle of work is a good principle, period.

Google Docs

I have begun to use google docs for documents that I need to have on every computer, so that I don't need to carry them around on a flashdrive or worry about what the latest version is if the doc is on two hard drives. I just log into my blogger account and find my docs under "My Account." I can even edit them on the ipad, which otherwise lacks a suitable word processing program (at least my ipad does, so far.) I can upload an existing doc to google docs or else create one from scratch.