What Professors Do: Too Many Things

Social media right now is full of faculty plaints about the difficulties of making it through the final weeks of the semester. In past years, I’ve commented myself about the frenetically intense workload of this time of year.

A lot of it is about reading, grading, and providing feedback on ALL THE THINGS. One year, I calculated during the last week of the semester that I had approximately 1100 pages of student writing left to grade for students in three courses. I swore I would never make that mistake again. Counting the pages, that is.

The end of the academic year is also filled with symposia, thesis presentations, awards, and other rites of passage. I love to attend these, congratulate students, and meet their families, yet they add to an already intensely busy time.

Being on disability with Long Covid means I have time to think about how we got here. Shifts in how we think about teaching, the increasing roles of technology, the politicization and defunding of higher education, and the attendant move from tenured to contingent faculty all play major roles.

In my own undergraduate courses in literature and philosophy forty years ago, I took a midterm and a final exam, and wrote a paper near the end of the term. I could retrieve the final exam and the paper by going to the prof’s office and shuffling through a box left outside the door. Each item would have a grade at the top of the first page, maybe some marked typos, and possibly an enigmatic check or two in the margin. Teaching students writing as a process of drafting, revising, and rethinking — that you could “write to learn,” as Donald Murray put it — had not yet reached my faculty.

I became a literature professor after years of teaching composition. I took for granted that students should write a lot, with opportunities for informal, creative, and open-ended writing as well as more directed assignments. My students analyze, compare, and synthezise ideas, and they engage in meta-cognition about their reading, writing, and learning.

I assign a sequence of related writing assignments in all of my courses. I give a lot of oral and written feedback to help students see what they are good and and what they can get better at. I encourage and require drafting, revisions, expanding work, writing about the same topic for different audiences. So the way I teach takes a lot of time and energy in engaging with students and their work.

Add pandemic learning losses and the fragmenting mental health of young adults in a polarized nation facing down climate change. Professors are mandated to report if we notice students struggling. We refer students to appropriate resources on and off campus. We make phone calls to student life staff to ask them to reach out. We extend flexibility and grace to try to help students make it through courses, semesters, degrees.

These changes have happened in the context of broader social shifts. New technologies affect teaching more than you might think. Decades ago, I typed a two-page syllabus, made copies, and handed it out on the first day of class. We spent a few minutes reviewing major due dates, I’d explain the rationale for how the course was organized, and we would jump right into discussions of ideas.

Today, the syllabus is a contract between students and faculty, and contains pages and pages of information about policies and expectations, rubrics and grading criteria, uploaded to course management systems before classes start. Students buy books online rather than in a campus bookstore; usually, they have them by the third week of classes. Medieval texts exist in numerous editions and translations, and I’m lucky if students all end up with the versions I’ve planned on, and can be on the same page and even reading the same words.

The politicization of higher education has direct consequences on college faculty and their relationships with students. I’m not going to romanticize the past — there have always been plenty of students majoring in beer and bonhomie, doing the minimum they can to get through.

But current disdain among many segments of the US population for education and educators, alongside consistent defunding of higher education by state and federal governments and widespread hiring of hostile administrators with little respect for faculty, have wrought sea changes.

College and university faculty design courses and programs, they evaluate and re-evaluate the role of distribution requirements and the shape and extent of the major, and they create and revise policies on various aspects of student life. The emergence of AI-mediated writing is a current challenge for individual faculty and university policy: students need to understand appropriate uses and limitations of tools such as ChatGPT in fostering and not substituting for their own critical and original thinking. 

Across the nation, administrators, boards of trustees, and state legislatures are axing tenured professors, or simply not replacing them whey they retire. Classes are covered by hiring faculty to terms of just a few years, supplemented by numerous part-time instructors who teach at three or four different institutions to try to get by. 

Ever-fewer tenured professors shoulder the work of faculty governance and service to the profession, while coping with more stressors than ever before. So many are retiring or leaving the profession. Harvard and Stanford are never going to have trouble keeping faculty, but I wonder how much longer community colleges and regional universities can hire the faculty to keep offering courses and programs.