Archive for February, 2010

When should professors bring their own views into class?

A few years ago, a student of mine began a sentence with, “I don’t know what your religious views are, but…”. I can’t recall what the rest of the sentence was (I listened then, I just don’t remember now), but she went on and I wasn’t obligated to answer the implied question about my own religious views after all. But I thought about it for a while after that and wondered how open I, a vigorous atheist, ought to be about my religious views in class. It’s not always a pressing concern — I don’t teach religion — but religious questions often come up in literature — which is what I do teach — and, in any case, students occasionally ask.

This question came back to me during the explosive debate on these pages over the place of the religious university in Canada and all that that implies. Without going over that debate again — clearly we’ve covered that in enough detail — the larger question remains: when and how should a professor bring his own views into the classroom?

To begin, I think most scholars would agree that every intellectual must, by definition, have strong views on some subjects. And no expert worthy of that word could fail to hold strong convictions about issues in his own field. If I don’t have strong opinions on how to read Hamlet, or the extent to which intention is relevant to meaning, or the value of placing a play in its historical context — well, then I’m not really doing my job. Further, I think most professors would agree that it is perfectly responsible to make those positions known in a lecture of class discussion. If I have an interesting and well-supported argument for how to think about the language of Romeo and Juliet, I would be remiss if I did not share it with my class.

But now things start to get complicated. When does sharing a position verge over into trying to convince students of my position? In my own classroom, I try to give a variety of points of view, and make them as convincingly as possible, before letting students know what my own view is. Ideally, students shouldn’t be able to tell what my position is until I tip my hand, since I’ve made the case for each side so well. And if I’ve done it right, students should be able to make up their own mind, whether it accords with my personal view or not. I experienced an even better version of this multi-faceted approach when I had the pleasure of team teaching a course with a colleague: students were presented with, and could judge between, genuine debate from professors with competing perspectives.

So far, so good. Still, there are some positions where I do not feel that an equally convincing account of competing positions is honestly possible or even academically desirable. In my Shakespeare class, for instance, I usually spend a day on the so-called authorship debate, mainly so that students understand why it is that scholars agree that Shakespeare was Shakespeare despite the claims of enthusiastic amateurs to the contrary. I imagine that biologists might treat creationism the same way — if they touch on it at all.

Still, these are largely matters of fact. When broader questions like social justice come into play, the issues become even more vexing. A colleague of mine once complained to me that she had two men in her women’s studies classes who questioned the most basic assumptions of the course. It was hard to teach the class, she explained, if the students were not willing to accept at least a few basic premises about the oppression of women as historical and contemporary reality. But this raises troubling questions regarding where lines can and must be drawn. Certainly all disciplines have certain basic assumptions. My own discipline assumes that language is capable of generating some kinds of meaning (though what that means is up for grabs); science disciplines assume that empirical observation, rightly analyzed, can give us at least some information about the state of the real world. Philosophers assume that contradictions cannot be true, and theologians assume that there is a God, in at least some useful sense of the word. But are all these assumptions equally valid? What about a cultural studies professor who assumes that all culture is based on economic inequity, or a literary theory prof who takes for granted Foucault’s suggestion that all knowledge itself is a form of oppression?

In addition to assumptions about the nature of disciplines and sub-disciplines come assumptions about what the function of those same fields. What, precisely, are we trying to do to our students? Help them become better in some sense, to be sure. Better informed, more critical, more thoughtful. But what else? More compassionate? More skeptical? More tolerant? What happens when skepticism conflicts with tolerance?

I once had a student who, for a creative writing assignment, turned in a poem that ridiculed fat people as greedy, stupid, and, if they had kids, bad parents. Being rather on the wrong side of slim myself, I had a difficult time knowing how to respond to the assignment. Intellectually, I felt right in finding fault with the poem for the simplistic treatment of its theme. But at the same time, I wondered whether I would have reacted the same way if I were slimmer and fitter.

In reality, every professor will have to make these judgements in the particular moment depending on circumstances. But what will prevent students from getting an education limited to only certain points-of-view and presented from certain angles? I would say that this is precisely where the universality of the university comes in. Not that any university can provide every perspective, but that  all universities must strive to present a range of perspectives and require students to study a range of courses. Similarly, students seeking the best possible education should make a point of seeking out professors with differing views and approaches, or at the very least avoid deliberately taking courses from those few profs they like and agree with.

How are you to know what your professors’ deeply held convictions? Start by asking.

If women’s studies programs exist to advance an agenda at the expense of scholarship, then reform is needed

The heat generated over the National Post‘s editorial last Tuesday excoriating women’s studies programs obscures the most important question: is the research and teaching in women’s studies departments held to the same academic standards as more traditional programs? The Post‘s editorialists blame women studies for the adoption of hiring quotas, family law that punishes men, and a general climate where males are viewed as de-facto date-rapists. The newspaper didn’t even consider questions of scholarship, teaching standards, and academic freedom. Unfortunately neither do the Post‘s detractors.

Instead, some of the Post‘s critics adopt one of the newspaper’s central underlying arguments: that women studies programs exist for political reasons, not academic ones. For example, a letter to the editor penned by Pennie Stewart of the CAUT and Katherine Giroux-Bougard of the CFS, argue that women’s studies are still necessary because “women still hit a glass ceiling.” (As an aside, my colleague and friend Erin Millar, endorses this letter.)

Stewart and Giroux-Bougard’s letter does nothing but concede the point that the legitimacy of women’s studies departments is to be measured against factors extraneous to the logic of the university. A better defense would be to demonstrate that such programs contribute to human understanding as rigourously and responsibly as we should expect from a university department. Even if women studies programs were implemented for political purposes, that does not mean that they still do. However, if this cannot be shown, and women’s studies programs really do exist to advance an agenda, and the quality of scholarship and teaching suffers as a result, then serious reform is needed.

Is there still a place for women’s studies in universities?

The National Post continued its dialogue about whether women studies departments should continue to exist on university campuses today by publishing a letter to the editor written by Penni Stewart of the Canadian Association of University Teachers and Katherine Giroux-Bougard of the Canadian Federation of Students. Stewart and Giroux-Bougard countered last week’s doozy of an editorial piece, in which the Post’s editorial board argued that Radical feminism at the core of these programs has reaped havoc on families, labour law, court systems, constitutional freedoms and “even the ordinary relations between men and women.”

Predictably, the editorial sparked a chorus of anger from all corners of the internet. Read my coverage and opinion (yes, it is clearly an opinion) here.

Thankfully, today’s paper included Stewart and Giroux-Bougard’s refreshing response. They argue (rightly, in my view) that women studies programs are “essential to an equitable society” and that they have evolved over the last 40 years to reflect the current state of inequality between men and women. Sure, we’ve come a long way, but there’s much work and study to be done:

In the world imagined by the editorial board, women and men are treated equally, and feminism has fundamentally undermined individual rights, the court system and Canadian society. Women’s Studies programs have destroyed the traditional family and radically reshaped constitutional freedoms.

On the planet the rest of us live on, women continue to earn significantly less than men for performing the same work, are underrepresented at every level of government, are more likely to live in poverty and are at a significantly higher risk of violence and abuse. Despite progress in recent decades, women still hit a glass ceiling that maintains the upper echelons of business, government and society as a male domain.

Here here.

Union advises faculty to vote ‘no’

The College Compensation and Appointments Council announced this morning that they will be bringing their final offer directly to faculty. The colleges placed a request to the Ontario Labour Relations Board to prepare a strike vote after the Ontario Public Service Employees Union announced a strike deadline yesterday, of Feb 11. The union indicated it would be open to binding arbitration.

College teachers voted Jan. 13 to give OPSEU`s bargaining team a strike mandate.

Last week, the OPSEU bargaining team rejected management`s final offer, and denied requests to bring the proposal to faculty. The union, representing 9,000 academic staff at Ontario`s 24 community colleges, told the Appointments Council that if they want teachers to vote on their final offer, that they could bring it to faculty themselves, which is what the colleges are now doing.

“We are asking that the offer go to a vote because we think the faculty should have an opportunity to have their say,” said Rachel Donovan, chair of the college`s bargaining team, in a release.

The day of the vote is yet to be determined.

UPDATE: OPSEU has released a statement encouraging faculty to vote ‘no’ to the college’s offer. However, the union says if the colleges are unable to arrange a vote on the proposal until February 12, that OPSEU would postpone its Feb 11 strike deadline to give faculty a chance to vote on management’s final offer.

Union opens the door to binding arbitration

The Ontario Public Service Employees Union  representing Ontario college faculty announced today it has given college management until Feb 11 to reach an agreement and avoid a strike. Last week, negotiations stalled after the College Compensation and Appointment Council tabled its final offer. Management wants the union to take their proposal to teachers for a vote, while the union says the offer falls too far short of OPSEU’s demands. The union has said that if the colleges want faculty to vote on the deal, they can call the vote themselves.

OPSEU represents 9,000 academic staff at Ontario’s 24 community colleges. The bargaining team was given a strike mandate by faculty in a vote held Jan 13. Whilethe colleges have increased the salary increments on offer, and shortened the collective agreement to three years, down from four, the two sides are still in disagreement on how to implement the recommendations of the Joint Workload Taskforce Report.

In a release, chair of the OPSEU bargaining team, Ted Montgomery said the union is willing to go to binding arbitration. “First and foremost, we want to reach a negotiated settlement . . .If the Colleges won’t bargain that, we are willing to send all our outstanding issues to binding arbitration. The Colleges, however, must agree.”

In speaking notes released to the media, Montgomery says that imposing a deadline will improve the chances of negotiating a deal and avoiding a work stoppage.

As many as 500,000 students could be affected.

For all of On Campus’ coverage of the ongoing negotiations, please click here.

Profs say high schools aren’t teaching grammar

Little or no grammar teaching, cellphone texting, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, are all being blamed for an increasing number of post-secondary students who can’t write properly. For years there’s been a flood of anecdotal complaints from professors about what they say is the wretched state of English grammar coming from some of their students.

Now there seems to be some solid evidence.

The University of Waterloo  is one of the few post-secondary institutions in Canada to require students to pass an exam testing their English language skills. Almost a third of those students are failing. “Thirty per cent of students who are admitted are not able to pass at a minimum level,” says Ann Barrett, managing director of the English language proficiency exam at Waterloo. “We would certainly like it to be a lot lower.” Barrett says the failure rate has jumped five percentage points in the past few years, up to 30 per cent from 25 per cent. “What has happened in high school that they cannot pass our simple test of written English, at a minimum?” she asks.

Even those with good marks out of Grade 12, so-called elite students, “still can’t pass our simple test,” she says. Poor grammar is the major reason students fail, says Barrett. “If a student has problems with articles, prepositions, verb tenses, that’s a problem.” Some students in public schools are no longer being taught grammar, she believes. “Are they (really) preparing students for university studies?”

At Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, one in 10 new students are not qualified to take the mandatory writing courses required for graduation. That 10 per cent must take so-called “foundational” writing courses first. Simon Fraser is reviewing its entrance requirements for English language. “There has been this general sense in the last two or three years that we are finding more students are struggling in terms of language proficiency,” says Rummana Khan Hemani, the university’s director of academic advising.

Emoticons, happy faces, sad faces, cuz, are just some of the writing horrors being handed in, say professors and administrators at Simon Fraser. “Little happy faces … or a sad face … little abbreviations,” show up even in letters of academic appeal, says Khan Hemani. “Instead of ‘because’, it’s ‘cuz’. That’s one I see fairly frequently,” she says, and these are new in the past five years.

Khan Hemani sends appeal submissions with emoticons in them back to students to be re-written “because a committee will immediately get their backs up when they see that kind of written style.”

Professors are seeing their share of bad grammar in essays as well. “The words ‘a lot’ have become one word, for everyone, as far as I can tell. ‘Definitely’ is always spelled with an ‘a’ -’definitely.’ I don’t know why,” says Paul Budra, an English professor and associate dean of arts and science at Simon Fraser. “Punctuation errors are huge, and apostrophe errors. Students seem to have absolutely no idea what an apostrophe is for. None. Absolutely none.”