You could say that I’m a teaching junkie. I’ve been teaching for 50 years and can’t get enough of it.
In August, I usually begin to count down the days until the semester starts and the students return, bringing energy and vitality back to campus.
But not this year.
It’s not that I won’t be happy to see my students; it’s just that I’m feeling a bit at sea, facing a tsunami of challenges in the classroom and in responding to student work, and I feel like I could use some help figuring out how to respond.
First, there is the situation created by the political climate in the United States, particularly the hostility toward higher education. Reason, truth, scientific progress, and the whole Enlightenment project on which higher education rests have come under attack. As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer puts it, “The Trump administration has launched an attack on knowledge itself.”
Serwer writes of “the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking — a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages.”
When the United States is led by someone who doesn’t seem to value learning at all, it is hard to get students to value learning themselves.
Even basic information feels like a fragile concept. Most of my students have been raised in an era saturated with alternative facts, video and audio deepfakes, and so-called fake news. How does all that shape their willingness to enter a domain where they are supposed to believe that truth matters? Or that it’s worth it to learn to discern what is real and what is not? How to convince them that that skill will pay off in the world beyond college?
And then there is the climate of fear — fear of being judged by one’s opinions — that is now very much a part of American life. Many students have been afraid to say what they think or experiment with unpopular ideas. They see the lives of people who say or do the “wrong” thing turned upside down.
Because I teach in the humanities and social sciences, the climate of anxiety is never far from my classroom. It promises to make the task of getting students to think beyond accepted beliefs and politically correct solutions even more difficult.
What can I say to assure them that what they say in the classroom will not find its way onto the internet with potentially ruinous consequences? To start, I will ask my students to sign a classroom pledge that they will not post anything about our class on social media. But I’m not sure how efficacious such an approach will be, or whether it will simply make them even more anxious.
Then there is the challenge posed by artificial intelligence. I invest a lot in teaching my students to write clearly and concisely, to say what they mean and mean what they say. But how do I convince them that it is worth learning to write well when they can go online, boot up ChatGPT, and in an instant have it produce a reasonable facsimile of human writing?
New York Times columnist Frank Bruni recounts a dinner conversation with fellow professors in which they mused, “Given [AI’s] advancing sophistication, should we surrender to it? … Perhaps the future of college instruction lies in whatever slivers of mental endeavor can’t be outsourced to these digital know-it-alls?” Bruni also notes concerns over “grade inflation — and the reality that getting A’s seldom requires any herculean effort. … Many students, accordingly, redirect their energies away from the classroom and the library. Less deep reading. More shrewd networking.”
“What happened,” Bruni asked, “to college as a theater of intellectual betterment, character development, self-discovery?”
Frankly, I don’t have a good answer. But I am eager to find answers together with my colleagues. I feel a real craving for these questions to be taken up directly before we get to the standard pieties about critical reasoning, a lifetime of learning, and transformative educational experiences in our “welcome to campus” events.
That craving was fed last summer when I taught a summer program for high school teachers. They came from around the country and worked in many different school settings.
When asked to characterize the mood among the students they teach, they collectively agreed on “cynicism.” Cynical about education and its value, cynical about adults and the world they have fashioned, cynical about the future and their place in it.
They are not alone in seeing that. Confronting that cynicism head-on is as difficult as it is urgent.
Add that to the political climate, AI, and grade inflation; it is a toxic brew. Ignoring these challenges will not make them go away.
Let me be clear, I do not long for some lost golden age. I have no ready solution, but it does no good for institutions of higher education not to address these problems as a package.
Instead of the usual start-of-the-semester, high-minded speeches about the virtues of education, let’s start the year by talking frankly about the difficulties that will shape the education that we provide. That way, all of us will feel a little less alone as we seek to navigate the troubled waters of American higher education.
