Stressing Education

Apparently, some folks at CNBC have come to the conclusion that being a university professor is the least stressful job heading into the year 2013.  As the piece that reaches this conclusion explains, "If you look at the criteria for stressful jobs, things like working under deadlines, physical demands of the job, environmental conditions hazards, is your life at risk, are you responsible for the life of someone else, they rank like 'zero' on pretty much all of them! ... Plus, they're in total control. They teach as many classes as they want and what they want to teach. They tell the students what to do and reign over the classroom. They are the managers of their own stress level."

As someone who is a university professor and who has had other jobs, I can say that this is ludicrous, and it's made even more ludicrous by the inaccuracies in the description.  I don't get to "teach as many classes as [I] want."  While I do have some input into what I will teach, I do not get to teach whatever I want.  I do not "reign over the classroom"; I do set rules, but I'm also obligated to follow rules set up by my university and college, and I don't simply "tell the students what to do." 

Meanwhile, the piece's stated "criteria for stressful jobs" appear to have been applied inadequately to my job.  I have plenty of deadlines, so I'm not sure where that comes from.  While, yes, I don't do heavy lifting or other tasks often designated as "physical demands" for hours on end, there are physical demands in my job that often go overlooked (until, for instance, as happened to me a couple of years ago, one develops back pain that lingers several months after a session of sitting at one's desk grading papers ... to meet a deadline, by the way ...)  In terms of environmental hazards, between 2007 and 2012, my campus office was in a building that suffered and continues to suffer from strong, persistent mold problems.  Perhaps you might think that's an anomaly, but then we might look around the country at the number of faculty members with offices in buildings in various states of disrepair while universities build sports facilities, new amenities, and other structures servicing non-academic priorities.

I could go on, and other have, such as this blog post that addresses CNBC's claim.  I also want to be clear, as I'm sure that I have to be, that I am not complaining.  I'm not suggesting that I don't like my job and that I wish I was doing something else.  Not at all.  Rather, I am attempting to suggest the inaccuracies of the assumptions that appear to have contributed to this CNBC piece, and I am attempting to challenge the misperceptions that might accompany such assumptions.

And it's on that level of misperceptions that I want to focus a little more fully, with a goal of suggesting what this might demonstrate about how teaching is popularly represented in American culture.  Namely, one of the criteria mentioned in this piece is being "responsible for the life of someone else," with the indication in the piece that this criterion applies little, if at all, to university professors.  I assume that this means that university professors aren't associated with saving or protecting lives in crisis moments.  For instance, if I were an EMT who responds to an automobile accident or a fire fighter who rescues people from a burning building, I'd then rank high for this criterion.  There is a difficulty in that connection.  After all, haven't many teachers faced situations in which we have been in a position to respond to students needed counseling, and we have directed them to the appropriate entities at our institutions to do so?  Maybe there's a qualitative and/or quantitative difference between that and the EMT/fire fighter examples, but my question does still seem worth noting.

Meanwhile, the context of "responsible for the life of someone else" seems even more worthy of note.  Even as we hear consistent calls for "accountability" in education -- calls that often get answered by approaches that demonstrate inadequate senses of what education entails (you know, stuff like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top) -- we continue to malign and devalue what teachers do.  When they seek to have some control over their working conditions and the standards by which they are evaluated, they are often portrayed as lazy miscreants hoping to live scot-free off others' money.  In prominent discussions of national security, tons of emphasis is placed on building weapons and using surveillance technologies, without real consideration of how better education systems might lead to a better and more secure society.  Recent discussions on guns in schools include proposals to arm teachers, put armed guards in schools, and the like, without adequate focus on helping our educational institutions have the means by which to help individuals of all sorts work within society rather than against it.

Hell, one of the most prevailing public perceptions is that teachers don't even do anything.  After all, as the saying goes, "those who can, do; those who can't, teach."  (And don't get me started on the problems of that particular bromide.)

What I'm getting at is that the CNBC piece suffers from what I think is a larger cultural problem in regard to education.  Rather than seeing education as vital to society -- as something that not only affects peoples lives, but does so in profound ways -- this piece, like so many other elements of contemporary U.S. culture, reflects a sense of education as a sort of easygoing, unstructured relatively low-impact set of exercises that might have a bit of value, but whose value is largely marginal.  Yet, education can do and mean so much more than that, and when we really invest ourselves in the process of educating, that meaning becomes so much more profound ... and, concurrently, so much more stressful.  After all, it now means something.  Why wouldn't it be stressful?

Perhaps there are university professors out there for whom this is a rather stress-free existence, but then again, there are likely EMTs, fire fighters, entrepreneurs, soldiers, athletes, appliance installers, and so on who fit that same bill.  Indeed, our culture is replete with examples of individuals in all kinds of fields -- even purportedly "stressful" fields -- who seem to have or take it easy in those fields.  Yet, for the many, many of us who take our jobs as university professors seriously, doing so also means quite a bit of stress.  How we structure a course might influence whether or not someone sees value in a field.  How we lead a discussion might help a student feel accepted and valued rather than marginalized.  How we offer comments on papers and how we cover course content might propel students to new insights and valuable connections or at least toward pursuing paths that might lead them to such insights and connections.

This can be -- and is -- wonderful, inspiring, rewarding, and all of those things, but in investing oneself into it in order to make that happen, one also realizes how much more it matters, and that means one acknowledges so much more the responsibilities one has in connection with the lives of others.  That, then, means stress.  And just as it seems so easy in contemporary U.S. society to recognize as leadership (rather than complaint) the soldier, the police officer, or the small business owner who acknowledges the stress of what he or she does, maybe it's time to do an even deeper job of recognizing the same about people who teach.  Unfortunately, this CNBC piece does just the opposite.