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.

I Don't Have Time For This Bowl Crap

At 3:00 p.m. today, the institution at which I received my Bachelor's degree and at which I am currently employed will take the field for a college football bowl game as the Bowling Green State University Falcons will play the San Jose State University Spartans in the Military Bowl.  In past years, I would have already written a little bit on this blog about this bowl game, as it likely would have been at the top or near the top of my ranking of the season's college football bowl games in terms of how much watching each appeals to me. Like in previous years, that ranking would have offered an honest assessment of my interest and would have been meant to provide a counternarrative to the lists on major sports news websites that are dominated by games featuring teams from leagues that have automatic qualification for the BCS bowl games -- you know, those lists that reflect a perspective that correlates in some ways to the sentiment of outrage that was articulated when Mid-American Conference member Northern Illinois earned an invitation to one of the BCS games this year.

This year, there was no list because ... well ... there is no appeal to watching any of the games.  After deciding in August to give up college football, I have not watched a single moment of any college football bowl games this year, and I have no plans to watch any of them.  Thus, I offer no list.

I had thought about going through each of the 35 college football games and demonstrating a reason for not watching each one by pointing to some way in which one or both institutions place football in too powerful of a position, by pointing out a practice at one or both institutions that demonstrates the troubling ramifications of how football programs are run and/or financed, or by pointing out a troubling ramification of the bowl game itself.  It was easy to start seeing and finding examples for many games, but frankly, I didn't want to write the post up and scout out a link to an example to provide for every game.  College football doesn't warrant that much of my time.

So, instead, I'll just reiterate that sentiment.  My alma mater is playing in a college football bowl game today.  It's a bowl game that is problematic as a bowl game for some of its ramifications, as Michael Butterworth and Stormi Moskal have pointed out.  It's also featuring, in my alma mater, an institution that, amid a climate of concerns about rising tuition, already has its students on the hook for $50 a semester in a student fee to pay for the basketball arena that opened in 2011, yet, as reported in the Toledo Blade, members of the Board of Trustees for this institution attended a football game at the University of Akron this fall to "gain ideas for a renovation of Doyt Perry Stadium."

Yeah ... college football definitely doesn't warrant any more of my time.

Serving Up Christmas

I am not a Christian.  I do not belong or adhere to any particular set of religious beliefs.  Rather, as I have written on this blog, I found spiritual peace when I came to the conclusion that I neither believe nor disbelieve in God (or, for that matter, any particular religious perspective).  So, Christmas does not have particular meaning for me as a celebration of the birth of the son of God and the various significances that go with that.  Still, there would seem to be much of worth in the philosophies associated with Jesus, and so, as I have been contemplating that this year, I have come to the view that celebrating Christmas as a means of commemorating and reflecting upon those philosophies may have value.  That value, though, would seem to call for celebration of Christmas in a very different way than how so many of us currently celebrate it, and for that I'd like to contextualize it within other views of holidays that I have developed in recent years.

As I have indicated on this blog, I think we should rearrange some of the meanings we currently associate with winter holidays.  Thanksgiving should be removed, as it and its mythology of oppression have little meaning, or it should be changed to a National Day of Mourning.  I think the day of thanks that many now observe on Thanksgiving should be moved to Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.  A day celebrating those who have worked and sacrificed in the name of civil rights seems much more appropriate as a time at which to be thankful.  The day of giving gifts that we now celebrate on Christmas should be moved to New Year's Eve/Day. The time when we both look back at the past year and look forward to the next year seems like the appropriate time for gift giving and merriness.

Christmas, then, in this reconfiguration, would take over for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a day of service.  There certainly are good reasons to associate Martin Luther King, Jr., and civil rights with the theme of service, so it's not that I'm opposed to that connection (though there may be some problematic racial coding occurring when the concept of "service" is associated with the holiday that is most prominently associated with the contributions of racial and ethnic minorities).  It seems, though, that that holiday is much more appropriately themed as a time of thanks.  Meanwhile, the messages offered by Jesus seem to align so squarely with the concept of service and seem to have their most use to both Christians and non-Christians as they are associated with service that I think, at least insofar as we might wish to maintain Christmas as a holiday, we ought to make it the day of service.

With that in mind, I am making plans this Christmas to increase my forms of service this coming year, and I resolve each Christmas Day and/or Eve going forward to spend a few hours volunteering in some form of service capacity.  That seems so much more deeply in line with my understandings of Jesus than anything else I might do that day.

On Maryland, Rutgers, and the "Benefits" of Their Big Ten Memberships

So, word is that the University of Maryland and Rutgers University are joining the Big Ten (or whatever it is called now) conference, and amid all of the discussion regarding the pros and cons of these moves, regarding the reasons why the moves are happening, and regarding the various kinds of ramifications for the moves, we have this story by Sports Illustrated's Andy Staples that sums up the case for Maryland's move (and, I think, by extension, much of the same would be applied to Rutgers).

As Staples notes, the University of Maryland -- like many other state universities around the country -- is facing drastic budget cuts that affect programs throughout the university, including college athletics.  So, the move to the Big Ten for Maryland's athletic programs will presumably help the athletic department pay for itself and thus not be as reliant on the university's budget.  As Staples notes, this means the athletic department will be able to "meet its budget without taking more money from taxpayers or students."  So, this sounds like a pretty good argument, right?  For all us critics of big-time college athletics, this takes away much of our case, right?  After all, now at places like Maryland and Rutgers, athletics won't draw money from the university, and that money could be used for other things.  Indeed, as Staples notes, "Some schools in big-revenue conferences such as the Big Ten and the SEC actually give money back to the academic side after balancing their budgets."  Heck, can't beat that they'll actually give back, right?

Well, yeah, you see, I think we can beat that.  To do, so let's see how this new scenario looks at a place such as the University of Maryland.

Let's say Maryland athletics make so much money that they contribute a few million dollars -- heck, even 10 or 20 million dollars -- back into the budget.  Even the high end of that range ($20 million) does not equal half of the $50 million budget cuts with which the University of Maryland system was threatened this past spring.  And, remember, Staples says that "some" Big Ten programs give money back to their universities--not all.  And I would get the feeling that places like Ohio State and Michigan are more likely to be the "some" than places like Rutgers and Maryland.  Still, even if a place such as Maryland does give back, it's not making up for the cuts other parts of the university are facing.  So, athletics at a place like Maryland grows, while other parts of the university suffer and shrink (although apparently not the president's house), and at best athletics provides slight assistance in warding off some of that suffering an shrinking.

Meanwhile, there is another alternative.  We could take all of the money we spend on athletics -- and especially football, since it's the sport that's driving this -- and spend it instead on funding education.  Given estimates of revenues that the athletic department at a place like Maryland will generate based on joining the Big 10, if we applied all that money to other aspects of the university -- buying tickets for events at the university that support academic programs, donating it for education and attending a two or three hour reception for donors rather than a two-hour basketball game or three-hour football game, giving money and time spent on college sports to student support services at the university, and so on -- we would more than make up that threatened $50 million budget cut.  (And, by the way, doesn't look just like another amount that's prominent in the University of Maryland's move to the Big Ten -- i.e., the amount they are asked to pay to leave the Atlantic Coast Conference in order to join the Big Ten?)  Tuition would not have to rise, and folks would not have to be asked for more tax money to support higher education. 

As I've argued before, and I continue to argue, this is a matter of priorities.  If we're going to continue down the road of less state support for college education, forcing collegiate programs of all sorts to find other ways to fund themselves amid the marketplace (a model that I find problematic, but that's a discussion for another time), then our choices as consumers in that marketplace really, really matter.  And despite how deeply so many of us have become socialized to participate in the support of college football and other big-time college athletics, we have to start resisting through the choices that we make if we are going to have worthwhile, effective, and accessible higher education.  We need to change our priorities, and I think that starts with giving up college football.  College football is what's driving conference expansion, and college football is driving too much of the ship at too many universities.  I've already made the choice to give it up, and today, while reading about Maryland and Rutgers joining the Big Ten, I'm even more resolved in the idea that I made the right one.

I Hear There's Been Discontent with the NFL ...

When I made the decision in August to give up college football, I also decided to throw in the NFL as well.  So, just I have not been paying attention to college football, I have equally not been paying attention to the NFL.  I didn't even know that the NFL referees had been locked out until I happened, while reading about other sports, to see a story about it heading into the first week of the NFL season.

Meanwhile, while I wasn't watching, many who have been watching have apparently voiced their discontent following the game this past Monday, using, as Michael Butterworth has noted, the language of armageddon.

Frankly, I don't care a whole heck of a lot about "botched" or otherwise controversial calls.  I suppose it's good that fans have voiced their outrage, but I'm happy that I wasn't even watching in the first place.  Remember -- the NFL locked out its referees; the referees did not strike.  And then, while locking out the referees, the NFL hired replacements ...

This does, I think, as Butterworth suggests, offer "a glimpse into our eschatological future."  And I think it's telling about our present and potentially that future that the articulation of discontent came now and not when the NFL locked out the referees.  It's telling because it reflects the worrisome disregard for the place of labor in the United States and the troubling adherence to the corporate organizational structure that has become so entrenched in U.S. society. When are folks upset?  Apparently only when the product they want suffers, not when the folks who make that product do.

The NFL is a high-stakes corporation, and it seems to have all of the oppressive side effects of such an organization.  In other words, I don't regret giving it up at all ...

Building a Society

In recent weeks, much has been made of a comment by President Obama in which he said, "You didn't build that."  With the statement pulled from its context, many folks have taken exception to it, particularly people who have suggested that the statement dismisses or devalues the hard work that people put into building businesses.  This theme featured prominently at the Republican National Convention this past week.  It even served as context for a bakery in Virginia to turn away Vice President Joe Biden.

I'm certainly not the first to comment on Obama's statement and the context of the statement and/or to offer a counter-criticism of the complaints about the statement.  Heck, the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign were, as one would expect, quick to jump on that.  Yet, on this Labor Day, I want to touch on one aspect of those complaints.  In the speech in which Obama made this statement, he was talking about all of the various things that helped people be in positions to build their businesses.  They were taught by other people.  The roads they used were built by other people.  And so on ... Again, plenty of other folks have already covered that.  I want to focus, though, on how these complaints reflect on laborers.

As the story above about comments from the Republican National Convention demonstrates, these complaints take part in a tradition of thought focused on individualism.  They build out of a myth of the American Dream in which people build success in their own lives out of their own hard work and effort.  And they then argue that Obama's comment flies in the face of the logic of that mythology.

Yet, in the process of suggesting that their work should be valued, these complaints belie a particularly troubling self-centeredness.  Yes, insofar as we place value on labor, the work that one puts into creating and developing an organization warrants recognition.  Yet, anyone who thinks that they are alone in that process is either rather naive or rather uncaring.  In addition to the teachers, road builders, and others to whom Obama was referring when making the comment, businesses don't make it without employees.  Sure, some employees work harder than others, some have more commitment to their jobs than others, and so on, but individuals who perform labor allow organizations to succeed.  Without people doing the day-to-day tasks that any organization needs, the organization does not function and, thus, does not succeed.  Still, in the U.S. we're quick to deny these individuals much recognition.  Focus placed on things like "business leadership" invoke the idea that executives and owners of businesses provided the means for businesses to be profitable and, as such, they deserve large sums of money and large amounts of social and political power.  We then hear how that's their money--they earned it, and they should be able to do with it as they wish.

Except that they didn't earn it all by themselves.  When someone like Terrence Pegula has $88 million available to donate to Penn State hockey programs and still has $189 million left to buy the Buffalo Sabres, he got that money from investing in something.  And, in this particular case, he got it from sale of an oil and gas company that he owned (and which, by the way, made considerable money from fracking).  People worked for him in that company, doing many of the tasks, often very dirty tasks, that made that possible.  Yet, where are they in getting to have a say in the use of that money and the priorities used when doling it out?

In the end, the U.S. gives plenty of credit to business owners, entrepreneurs, and executives who run organizations.  Indeed, the Mitt Romney presidential campaign is centered on the idea that that's what makes someone qualified to be president, and Romney is far from alone among politicians from various sides in articulating such a sentiment.  We do just fine in recognizing their contributions.  On the other hand, we are much less effective in recognizing the labor that accompanied these folks' contributions.  When business owners complain that Obama's comment devalues their work because they did build their companies, as if they did it themselves, they're succumbing to the rather self-centered, undemocratic notion that lies at the heart of our ineffectiveness in recognizing the contributions of laborers.

For every business owner out there who takes exception to Obama's "You didn't build that" statement, there are scores of laborers who helped those business owners build what they are acting like they built themselves.  On this Labor Day -- this day of all days on which we are asked to think about the contributions of laborers to our society -- it seems like a good time to reflect on that a little bit more.

How I Fared in My First Weekend Without College Football

Thursday, as the college football season was beginning, I wrote about why I could not in good conscience watch the sport anymore, despite enjoying it quite it a lot over the past couple of decades.  Well, after the first Saturday of the season, I can truthfully say that I did not watch or, with one small but important exception that I will note momentarily, follow along with any college football games over the past three days.  As I expected, though, it was difficult.  On Friday morning, as I checked the Arizona State University website to read other news, I saw that one of my alma maters, Arizona State, won big over Northern Arizona on Thursday night.  Because I haven't been following the sport, I hadn't even realized that ASU played Thursday night.  Seeing a headline about it gave me a small twinge of longing to have watched a bit of the game.

On Saturday morning, while checking other sports news on espn.com while eating my breakfast, I saw that Michigan State -- another of my alma maters and the team from among the big six conferences that I have most rooted for and identified with over the past 15 years -- won a close and apparently exciting game over Boise State on Friday night in what appears to have been billed as an opening weekend heavyweight matchup.  Again, I had not even realized that Michigan State had played Friday night or had opened with Boise State.  Had I been following the sport, I would have known this and probably would have watched, and so on Saturday morning, reading about this, I felt quite a lot more longing for college football.

Then, during the say on Saturday, as I logged into Facebook a few times, I saw people using their Facebook status to provide updates on the game between Bowling Green and Florida.  Apparently, Bowling Green scored first, was in the tie with Florida at 14 points apiece in the second half, and hung in well against an opponent that was expected to demolish them.  I learned all of these things from other folks' Facebook updates, and this is when I had the biggest longing of all.  It was very hard not to turn on the television and see if I could watch.  This is when I most started stretching the boundaries of my pact, as twice I went to espn.com, eventually to read stories about tennis, golf, and auto racing, but also, to be honest, as an opportunity to look to the upper left quickly and see the BGSU-Florida score.  It was hard to stop there, and it took a lot of my might not to do more to keep up with the game.

Then, last night, while surfing the net for some reading material while eating something, I saw the headline for this story on the main page of usatoday.com.  Since my checks of espn.com when I glanced at the BGSU-Florida score also meant that I saw headlines indicating that the Nittany Lions had lost to Ohio University, I already knew the outcome of the game.  And, since this was a commentary on Penn State and not a game story, I decided to read the piece.  I'm glad I did, because while reading some of the signs from the Penn State game that are listed in the piece and while reading the tone of moving on from what happened at Penn State that the piece reflects, this story strengthened my resolve.  It feels as if we have learned nothing from what happened at Penn State, nothing about how football occupies an inappropriate place in the structures of universities, and nothing about ourselves.

We are addicts.  We have become addicted to college football, and my own behavior on Saturday demonstrated it.  Like someone addicted to alcohol who finds a way to justify one drink at a social gathering or someone addicted to gambling who starts drawing distinctions between gambling for money and gambling without money, I was already on the first Saturday of the college football season looking for ways to skirt my own commitment to quit the habit.  And as many an addiction program will tell us, the first step in solving a problem is admitting you have a problem.

A major reason why college football is able to keep driving the ship at universities around the country is because so many of us have a problem.  We've become addicted to it.  We spend gobs of money on it, we spend considerable time with it, and we allow it to have heavy influence on so many other parts of our lives.  In the name of this addiction, we justify all kinds of things that we really have no business justifying, from boys being abused at Penn State to allocation of financial resources away from academic programs to a bunch of other things along the way.  As I keep saying, this is a matter of priorities, and like an individual, when a society is addicted, its priorities are out of whack.

I learned this opening college football weekend a little more about the depths to which my priorities have been out of whack.  I was then reminded in the story on usatoday.com how widespread those misplaced priorities are.  I largely made it through the first few days of the college football season with my commitment not to follow the sport intact, yet the ways in which I circumvented that commitment are deeply telling.  I have work to do to relinquish college football's hold on me, and I feel pretty sure that I'm far from alone.