We The Professors

THE TIME TO END

This is the 200^th post I have written for this blog. And therefore it seems a good time to end...or at least to take a long recess.

I have written this tome for two reasons. The first was quite selfish. I retired in early 2013. And since I had worked in colleges and universities for nearly 40 years, I needed some sort of way to transition from day-to-day administration and teaching to a life in retirement. So, I decided to write this blog as a way to stay engaged and active with higher education.

The second reason was that after 40 years I felt I had some things to share: advice, guidance, ideas, opinions, prognostications and sometimes just plain bulls*#t. And thus I wanted to write some of it down in hopes that it might be helpful, interesting and thought provoking.

But now the file cabinets in my mind that once were front and center and filled with thoughts of classes, meetings and research have taken their proper place in a dusty corner. Doesn’t mean they’re not there and cannot be easily accessed, but it means that the file cabinet called things-to-do-in-retirement has now become front and center.

Also, I do feel that I have written virtually all of what I have to say. And I am not a big fan of redundancy. I may turn these posts into an e-book sometime, but right now I’m finished.

So, thanks to all of you for reading this blog both regularly and irregularly. Working in higher education is, to me, the best career a person could have. And as I would tell my students and my colleagues, and as I urge you to forever say to yourself…

 

I HOPE I MADE

A DIFFERENCE.

 

THE ABOMINABLE UNFAIRNESS OF ALLOWING DEBT

Millions of college and university students in the United States are being pushed into incredible debt through student loans and other types of financial aid. Not just debt that lasts a year or two, but debt that lasts a decade or two or three.

And this is flat out the wrong way to do things. It compromises the future of a significant portion of the workforce. And it hurts society itself. According to an article in Huffington Post, unpaid student loans have swelled to more than $1.3 trillion, prompting dire warnings about future effects on the growth of the U.S. economy. And solutions to this daunting problem seem to be impossible.

So why would those of us who teach in and administer higher education allow our students to incur these exorbitant amounts of debt to go to college? And to allow this while we also realize that many of those students do not have the maturity to graduate in four years or to even graduate at all with anything resembling an actual education?

Students should absolutely not be permitted to graduate with a degree but not an education.

In its most recent survey of college pricing, the College Board reports that a "moderate" college budget for an in-state public college for the 2014–2015 academic year averaged $23,410. A moderate budget at a private college averaged $46,272. With these amounts of money at stake, higher education must become a system that filters out those students who don’t or can’t, right from the beginning, make the grade. College can no longer just be looked at as a maturing experience, a necessary bridge between high school and adulthood. The hard realities are that to saddle a kid with thousands and thousands of dollars of debt for something he mostly dislikes and that has little impact on him is just unfair.

There are plenty of students for whom college works, but also plenty that simply need more time to mature and to reap the true benefits of a higher education. And I certainly realize that kids who graduate from high school do need something beneficial to do, but needlessly incurring debt that lasts decades is not that thing.

One thing that should and can be done is to make the first year of college an intense, individually focused, pressure packed experience, one that weeds out those who should wait a few years to mature and to understand the attitude and discipline required in higher education.

It’s obviously disheartening to have to have a conversation with a student about maturity and not continuing when we know that that student might be the one who matures in his junior or senior year. But it’s also disheartening to watch the debt pile up and then watch students drop out after two or three years. The first year of college has to actually live up to the quotation attributed to a Dean at Harvard Law School: "Look to your left, look to your right, because one of you won't be here by the end of the year."   

And as I said in a post on Jan. 5, maybe it’s time to throw away the manual on higher education and recreate the entire model of what truly needs to be accomplished. And financial aid is surely one of those problems that must be discussed at the very beginning. 

 

STORYTELLING: THE PROFESSOR’S ANGLE

People say (I know, never start out by saying people say, but nevertheless, people say…and yes, I could document the people) that many new faculty enter classrooms being a bit uncertain and sometimes a little tenuous about what they might know and not know about teaching. In other words, their confidence is a bit lacking.

And students, well, students are a lot like dogs. They can sense fear. And some of them react to the profs fear by being sympathetic and helpful. Others see the fear and want to capitalize on it and dominate and gain the upper hand. And a big problem is that you have all those “dogs” watching you and waiting to sense the fear.

So what do you do? Run, hide, roll over or give in? Actually, the best thing to do is to tell yourself a story.

Because the story you tell yourself when you walk into the classroom, that story, determines everything.

• If you tell yourself you’re scared, you’ll be scared. (This is not the same as being nervous. Nervous is a good thing.)

• If you walk into the room like you own the room, you will own the room.

• If you speak assertively, you will be perceived as assertive.

• If you’ve practiced using the technology and seeing that it works, then you will be perceived as competent.

• If you gesture while you speak you will be perceived as outgoing and friendly.

• If you tell a sad story to yourself about your teaching, then you’ll be a sad teacher.

It’s the story in your head. The story that you told yourself the day you were hired. The story you told yourself when you walked in your new office. The story you told yourself when you wrote your syllabi. The story you told yourself in graduate school when you made the decision to teach.

It’s not about what they (students) think of you. It’s about what you (the professor) think about yourself. That little engine attitude of “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can,” goes a long way toward climbing that hill and succeeding. Yep, what you think about yourself is everything.

If you’ve not been telling yourself any story about your teaching life, or if you realize that you’ve been telling yourself the wrong story, then create a new story. And make that story the one you teach by.

 

STORYTELLING: A FURTHER ANGLE

I have written before in this blog about the power of storytelling. And each year as I watch the Academy Award presentation show (as I did last Sunday evening) I am again reinforced and reminded about a story’s power to impart meaning in the most powerful way possible.

And I am therefore led down the path of saying that all professors in any field can utilize the power of stories to better impart the knowledge of their disciplines more effectively.

I’m not talking here about having students write stories, although in many courses that can be useful and necessary. Rather I’m talking about the professor structuring his/her courses and presentations and projects and readings around stories. History is the most obvious example of using stories and a prof only needs to study the presentations of the documentary historian Ken Burns to see powerful storytelling.

Stories can be informational, emotional, funny, sad, tragic, poignant, differently structured, told in words or pictures or charts or graphs or video or in many, many other ways. But stories always have to be two things: memorable and interesting.

Through being memorable, stories allow thinking and learning to take place. Through being interesting, stories allow attention to be maintained.

Examples.

Psychology is the discipline of studying and explaining behavior and the workings of the human mind. And behavior is about stimulus and response. And every stimulus and its corresponding positive or negative or emotional or intellectual response can be told BETTER by using a story.

Literature is the study of story structure and using interesting and fascinating characters to fit into those structures, and thus to fascinate and create mind-blowing narratives that resonate and remain a part of us forever.

Mathematics, because of its abstract nature, is harder to fit into the story motif. But every application of mathematics to other disciplines is the story of problems and how those problems can be solved and why those problems need to be solved.  Many stories are structured and told to present and solve problems, whether those problems be crimes, or journeys, or social, or numerical.

Business and economics are case studies and societal stories, and can best be taught that way.

I could go on and on, and I hope that by now so can you.

Take your next class and:

• find a way to fit a unifying story into it.
• create a fascinating and interesting story that explains the material.
• structure the entire class and classroom environment around the concept of a story that is both interesting and memorable.
• allow students to structure stories that better explain concepts previously only explained by facts.

Just examine your own fascination with stories. Then imagine or re-imagine your course as a story. Then break the big story into many smaller stories. Then teach the course that way.

Awards are given for storytelling because people love stories. The subject you love can also be loved for its stories. You just have to structure the process and the stories.

No Oscars, but lots of rewards.

 

SHARE AND SHARE AGAIN

In his wonderful new book titled “What to Do When It’s Your Turn” Seth Godin writes:

“Many powerful organizations fear a truth-teller. They work hard to avoid being confronted by an individual who sees the world as it is and by a person who cares enough to change things.”

This quote applies absolutely to colleges, universities, schools, departments, committees, requirements, and courses.

Too many administrators of every kind make excuses about why maintaining the status quo and not rocking the boat and not making waves (or even ripples) are the right ways and the easy ways to run an organization of any size.

If your life is in higher education, share this with the people you work with and for, and tell them to share it with the people they work with and for.

And maybe, just maybe, just maybe the truth-tellers and the ones who care can emerge.

 

A DAY, A WEEK, A MONTH, A YEAR…A START

What if there could be a worldwide higher education re-imagination day?

On this day every college and university on the planet would individually sit down and brainstorm, discuss, debate, argue and create ideas and strategies and proposals for the future of higher education.

And then each college and university would organize and categorize these ideas.

And then each college and university would make plans to implement these ideas.

And then every college and university would submit these ideas to an organization specifically created to re-imagine the re-imaginings and to categorize and distribute the best of them.

And what if, instead of a day, this worldwide higher education re-imagination event was a week, or a month, or a year?

And what if the present and future of higher education was actually changed by the energy of the ideas and the plethora of ideas that could genuinely and significantly and, yes, passionately generate international discussion. And what if this discussion was not just endless rhetoric that goes on forever and ever, but discussion that lasts a short time and results in genuine change.

It could happen. It needs to happen. Maybe not at every school, but certainly at many, many, many schools.  After all, the future is getting closer and closer.

All that’s required is a team of energized dreamers to organize and implement these events.