A New Deal For Higher Education: Start With More Small Classes For Everyone

Because I have the advantage of a faculty fellowship at Zenith's Center for the Humanities this semester, I teach only on Thursday. All Thursday morning I prepare for class; all Thursday afternoon I teach it. It's very tidy, and also very satisfying. Because of my blogging ethic I can't tell you what happens during class, but I can tell you I like our meetings immensely. I can also tell you that I have fewer than ten students enrolled. To be honest, there are six.

But wait -- you will say: fewer than ten students? Have you become unpopular? Does your dean know? How is that a good use of the university's money?

Well, the truth is, normally my classes are overenrolled, so I consider this to be some kind of cosmic payback for years of overwork in the classroom and elsewhere. For a variety of reasons, plenty of my colleagues teach fewer than ten students per class all the time; this is an uncomfortable fact in an economic climate where teaching more, more, more is being subtly but persistently urged on all of us. At Zenith, open up what we call the "curriculum tools" to work on your course descriptions for next year and you will find that seminars and colloquia that were always capped at 15 have been bumped up to 17 or even 19 by some anonymous person (happily, you can just lower these numbers again and hit "save.") Nineteen, as everyone knows, is the magic number, since in its annual rankings the U.S. News and World Report uses classes under 20 students as part of the algorithm that moves a school up - or down. Lecture classes that are in high demand (translate: their parents call the provost when they are shut out of a class) are also expanding. Surveys and introductions to the field that have, in the past, been capped at 40 have been bumped up to 45 or 50 by the same invisible hand. And two or three times a semester, our faculty is offered the opportunity to teach a fifth, perhaps a sixth course, at the same wages we pay adjuncts: there is a small M.A. program in liberal studies, there is the new summer school for undergraduates that is intended to offer an intimate learning experience and stop the budgetary bleeding, and there is a special pot of money that would increase offerings of small classes in the curriculum.

Put aside the question of whether an optional 3-2, or 3-3, or 2-1-2, counts as speed-up during a time when there are thousands of jobless Ph.D.'s dying for work. Try, if you can, to ignore the pensions that have tanked, and the flat-lined faculty salaries that have made colleagues everywhere desperate for additional income to keep up with the financial responsibilities they have. There is something positive to pay attention to here. In its own, oblique way, Zenith is recognizing something that real educators -- as opposed to people who make policy about education and have never taught, or legislators who see education budgets as low-hanging fruit -- have always known: small classes are better, and there should be more of them. Discussions, in which the teacher can both model and encourage critical thought, are better venues for learning than lectures.

Why do we teach large classes if we know students learn better in small classes? Because, given the economic and pedagogical philosophies that govern education now, we must teach large classes. They allow us to standardize part of our curriculum. Large classes make it possible to require gateways and foundation courses that, in turn, permit us to control the size of a given major through a minimum grade or aggregate grade (not to mention congratulate ourselves for "having standards.") Large classes are economical: we process more students with fewer faculty, and often those faculty can be extraordinarily ill-paid and inexperienced but still do the job. For example, any graduate student who has passed her comps can teach the United States history survey. Perhaps it won't be a transcendent experience, as it would have been with the late Howard Zinn, but if the point is content delivery and a level of energy that will keep a room full of teenagers engaged, graduate students can do it as well or better than your average mid-career history prof.

But why, you might ask, is a small class better intellectually? And what counts as a small class?

The second question is an important predicate to the first. A seminar of 19, or even 15, is a small-er class, but it doesn't count as a small class nor does it count as an intimate learning experience except by comparison to fifty or eighty minutes spent in a lecture room with 99 other people. But what possibilities does a class of 10 or fewer students open up? Let's take student writing, something most faculty claim they care about, and which is the object of large annual budget appropriations to help students do it well. Whether writing centers actually accomplish this task is hard to know, but they have not changed one thing we do know: that the average 4-5 page essay, of which somewhere between two and four will be assigned for each class, is currently a drag to assign, a drag to write, and a drag to read. Students either learn to churn them out or they don't, and if they don't, it becomes a terrible emotional burden for them as well as an imagined learning disability that affects the pleasure they might otherwise take in learning.

How about those of us who read these essays that are often the academic equivalent of forced labor? Everyone who views teaching students to write as a professional commitment (which isn't everyone, as we know) is aware that it takes a minimum of 30 minutes -- and often more like 45 minutes -- to read, think about and make intelligent comments on each paper. For a class of 15, this means somewhere between 8 and 12 hours, minimum, will be spent on a set of papers to give students even the minimal feedback they deserve for their thoughts. Hence, grading those papers becomes a full-time occupation for between one and two working days.

And for what? So that students can receive a grade at the end of the course. Ask your students how many of them enjoy their writing; imagine writing as something they might do for a living; or if they can recall a college paper they have written that was a real learning experience. And ask your students how many of their teachers, perhaps as a way to get off what they view as a hamster wheel of evaluating papers that no one wanted to write in the first place, return their papers with a letter grade and a one-line comment that is nice, rude or indifferent.

Talk about alienated labor. And yet, there is a solution to this problem: an increase in small classes that is not part of a general plan of university speed-up. Fewer students per faculty member could lead to more, and better, attention to each student by intellectuals who are freed up to be truly interested in what students bring to the table as people, as opposed to how students can be more efficiently processed.

The professor who had ten or fewer students might be encouraged to take student writing seriously if s/he actually had time be interested in it, and time to know the students well enough to care what they think. When you see ten students in office hours, rather than twenty, you can teach each student where s/he is, rather than where the curricular matrix dictates s/he should be. When you receive ten papers rather than twenty, you could actually read, think about and respond to each one -- rather than grade them, hand them back and move on. You could assign enough writing to help a student develop a set of thoughts consistently over the course of the semester that were uniquely tuned to that student's interests. Students might be encouraged to enjoy, and invest in, their writing more if they truly believed that it was part of a more intimate learning experience rather than merely a vehicle for assigning a grade.

Of course, the truth is that students really want to talk to us and talk to each other. The smaller the class, the more fully engaged and spontaneous class discussions can be and the less likely it is that the room will be taken over by a minority of learners who have the confidence to dominate, and silence, a room full of people. In a seminar of ten or fewer students everyone gets to speak, and better yet, will develop the interest in others that will facilitate respectful, engaged exchanges among people who disagree. The professor, in turn, will have a better opportunity to notice, accommodate and use to advantage the differences in learning styles and intellectual interests that make each student unique.

A commitment to smaller classes could transform higher education, not just by creating a better classroom experience for learners and teachers, but because it would require an enhanced commitment to the hiring of more faculty rather than more technicians, tutors and administrators to cope with the problems and dissatisfactions that large, alienating classes produce. There are many reasons why the job market is glutted with well-educated Ph.D.'s who are dying to teach, but one of them is that over time our tolerance for large classes has grown dramatically over time, even at elite liberal arts colleges that have the resources to do better. Currently, colleges want to have it all: they want the option of growing class sizes even further and lay claim to a spirit of innovation that promises individual attention to each of 19 -- no, 25 -- no, 50 -- no 150 -- students. That individual attention is often actually delivered, not by faculty, but by tutors, math centers, writing centers, teaching assistants, learning centers, computing centers, academic deans -- many of which come at a significant cost, in personnel, in new buildings, and in an ongoing commitment to maintaining infrastructure and technology.

Why not just make a commitment to funding small classes?

Macdonough School Build Day with Habitat for Humanity

Macdonough School staff will be volunteering with Habitat for Humanity to help in the construction of a new home on Liberty Street!  The group will be volunteering on Saturday, April 13th.

Pancakes with the Principal

Three Macdonough School second graders took a special field trip to the world famous O'Rourke's Diner to have pancakes with the principal.

They were treated to a delicious pancake breakfast. The group also saw important people like Miss Maley (a former Macdonough teacher). They also met Brian O'Rourke (the owner of the diner). 

Students were selected for exhibiting SURFS up behavior (Self-responsibility, Understanding, Respect, Fairness, and Safety).

Happy Birthday Mr. President, From Your Favorite Radical

Barack won't get a party as nice as this one (I hear the Senate Democrats are coming over for ice cream, cake and donkey rides) , but Happy Birthday anyway, Mr. President!

The Ice Storm: A Few Observations About The Workings Of The University

From the upper deck of Tenured Radical.

Last week the snow day was great, a gift of 24 hours that (depending on your teaching schedule) created the equivalent of a Thanksgiving break.  Now the weather is increasingly a drag.  Despite the dangers and inconveniences of coming up to Zenith, one canceled day seems to be all the educational enterprise can sustain, and we receive messages saying that it is "our choice" whether to come to campus or not.  This often puts one in the untenable position of deciding how much of one's personal safety is worth risking to not fall any further behind than one already is, given the difficulties of travel (or even walking down the street) in the last ten days.

In 1997, Ang Lee made a film called The Ice Storm about the emotional perils of suburban living in the 1970s.  Based on a 1994 novel by Rick Moody, the movie shows one evening in the life of two New Canaan families.  The ice storm stands in as a metaphor for the ways that they are all emotionally "frozen;" and the effects of the weather force a series of unexpected events that, not surprisingly, "freeze" the dynamics between people and make it possible to see them in new ways.

Similarly, this spate of bad weather causes one to see things differently.  Whether my observations are right or not -- well, I am not sure.  But here goes.

Giving academics choices might be a way of administrations not making decisions about what authority they wish to have over the institutions they govern.  Under circumstances in which law enforcement is asking people who live in this state not to drive, under what conditions does it make sense to tell your faculty that it is their choice whether to teach their classes or not?  Looking at it the administrator's way, one might say:

• Zenith is a residential campus, and 99.9% of students live on it.  Therefore, why shouldn't they go to school?
• Some faculty might be more nervous about falling further behind in their work than they are about driving to work;
• Conditions might improve by afternoon, so that whereas morning classes might be impossible, afternoon classes might be more manageable;
• Faculty hate to be told what to do.

The elite residential college still presumes that the default position for faculty is to live in the college community, preferable on the borders of campus.  I have not infrequently heard reports that our trustees and long-time faculty and administrators are appalled that some faculty live elsewhere, and I have heard all kinds of casual criticism of those of us who "live in New Haven and New York."  These cities are mentioned in the same breath, despite the fact that one is  25 minutes from Zenith and the other 2 hours and 15 minutes from Zenith (and that's if you are flying.)

The Radical back yard:  maple tree and bamboo.

Now, I do think that everyone on the faculty ought to be doing the same work regardless of where they live, and that this mandates equal attendance under normal conditions. I have always done my best to adhere to this, whether I lived in Zenith, New York or New Haven. But I also think that the casual disregard for the safety of those of us who have to drive to work (whether it is from the outskirts of Zenith or from another city) is rather stunning.  The assumption is that those who can get to work easily set the norm; the rest of us are deviant to a greater or lesser degree, and in danger of revealing ourselves as slackers.  This norm was set back in the 1940s and lasted until the mid-1970s or so. It was set prior to the emergence of two career couples, the employment of people of color at Zenith, working mothers, parenting fathers and the ability of GLBT people to find, and live openly in, heterogeneous, progressive communities.  Zenith has many virtues, but it doesn't accommodate any of these things well, either as a school or as part of the small city that it inhabits.

People who have tenure might feel more free to exercise the choice to cancel class than people who do not.  You would think this would be perfectly obvious, wouldn't you?  And yet, universities maintain the weirdly benevolent fiction that, despite the inequalities of rank that they treasure, we all have equality of choice despite our rank.

Suggesting that some people will not come to work because they are frightened or cautious is demeaning.  I say this, perhaps, because I am now of an age where the idea of falling and hurting myself does frighten me, and I sometimes wish for that reason and others that I was still young.  But I am not sure whether my caution originates from a place of being more fearful, or whether I have more garden-variety common sense than when I was young.  Once, when I lived in Zenith, I went to school in an ice storm: I lived up a hill about a half mile from campus.  As I began to descend the hill, which was covered in sheet ice slicked with rain, my car began to shimmy around, and I slid down the length of the hill sideways, towards a blind turn from which, fortunately, no one emerged to take me to Jesus.

Like every other entity, universities are trying to carry on as if they have not cut services drastically and this does not have an effect on our work.  I did meet my students yesterday, so loath was I to lose contact with a class I had only begun to teach.  They are a group of first and second year students who are reading really hard stuff, and if we don't spend some concentrated time together they would feel justified in being utterly confused.  But going to school wasn't what you would call a "good choice." It was a bad choice.  The roads were incredibly dangerous, but not half as dangerous as navigating a campus that was unshoveled, unsalted and unsanded.

It was also clear to me, by the way, that Zenith is entirely unprepared to feed lunch or dinner to large numbers of people who might come to campus in such weather and find themselves trapped there; nor were there any arrangements made with a local inn to get a special rate for those of us who might come to school today and be unable to get home.

Ah well.  Out to scrape and salt the end of the driveway as we seem to have no city services in New Haven either this year.  My street has not been plowed, salted or sanded once since it started to snow two weeks ago, and I am sorry to say to the libertarians in the audience, this has not resulted in citizens banding together to do it themselves.  Kiss my a$$, Ayn Rand.

Paying The Prison Bill: A Review Of Sunny Schwartz, Dreams of the Monster Factory

Sunny Schwartz with David Boodell, Dreams From The Monster Factory: A Tale Of Prison, Redemption and One Woman's Fight To Restore Justice For All (New York: Scribners, 2009) 204 pp. Hardback 24.00.

Sunny Schwartz, co-founder of the RSVP (Resolve To Stop The Violence Project) is not only one of the freshest voices in prison reform, she is one of the few voices to speak to a popular audience about a national problem as urgent and intractable as health care: the cycle of violence that has resulted in the incarceration of 2.3 million Americans.

A proponent of what is called "restorative justice," Schwartz is not out to be loved by either liberals or conservatives, nor does she spend much time on the issues that dominate prison reform conversations on the left: the conviction of innocent people, the high correlation between incarceration and lack of education, the effects of the war on drugs and harsh sentencing guidelines. She argues that there are people who belong in prison (something many death row attorneys agree with in my experience) and that prisons play a function in society by punishing people for harms they have inflicted. But, she also maintains, the "get tough" attitude promoted on the right for the last quarter century has done nothing to make communities safer, while increasing the national prison population to unmanageable levels. RSVP was founded in 1997 when Schwartz and her colleagues in the San Francisco Sheriff's Department came to understand that none of us are served by prisons when they do not actively work to force prisoners to come to terms with their crimes and change their behavior. And this can't happen unless all of us commit to that as the principle goal of incarceration.

With David Boodell, a television writer and producer, Schwartz has produced a book that lets you see inside prisons, hear the mind-bending noise of the cellblocks she has worked in, and practically smell them too. She started working in prisons as a legal intern, where she began to realize that many prisoners knew that the end of a sentence or a parole date only started the clock ticking towards the date when they would be re-incarcerated for a new crime. Interestingly, she works hard to keep the focus off herself in this book, which is hard because she's pretty interesting -- how many lesbians do you know who went to law school and passed the California bar without attending college? But it's a brave thing to do all the same, in a literary world driven by memoir and sensational personal accounts that make it seem as of nothing of importance happens outside the self. By continually returning the spotlight to prisons, Schwartz keeps an eloquent, ethical focus on what she has devoted her career to: the guards, the prisoners and the crime victims who should all be served better by the billions of dollars spent on so-called corrections. A prison system that is expanding yearly, she argues, is not succeeding. And everyone -- liberals and conservatives, do-gooders and prosecutors, prison guards and defense attorneys, victims and criminals -- has a stake in prison reform that takes positive steps to reduce violent behavior and increase accountability for violent crimes.

Why am I interested in this? In part, because some of our students at Zenith have launched a prison education initiative modeled on the Bard Prison Initiative, and while one of my specialties as a historian is crime, violence and policing, that doesn't exactly prepare you to walk into a prison and teach, nor does it help you teach students about what goes on in prisons and why. This book also underlines an important point which decarceration projects (reducing the influence of the prison-industrial complex to de-emphasize incarceration as a "solution" to crime) tend to obscure: that reforming incarceration practices to demand that prisoners take full responsibility for their own violence needs to be part of a decarceration agenda. Undergraduates in particular, whether in a course that is about prison, social justice or contemporary ethics, are going to love this book; furthermore, because you can't categorize the politics as either liberal or conservative, it will produce a lively classroom discussion. I'm going to tell you right now -- although an Amazon search will tell you there are over 90,000 titles out there, there aren't more than a couple dozen that are as direct, frank and compellingly written as Dreams From The Monster Factory.

You've probably guessed by now that the "monster factory" is the prison itself, a place where violent people are, Schwartz contends, warehoused in such a way as to refine their capacity for violence and return them to society as even more dangerous people than they were when they were originally convicted. "In fact," Schwartz argues, "everything about the system of prosecution and defense is set up so that criminals get into the habit of denying their responsibility." As she explains, the whole system of criminal justice, and the brutality of being imprisoned with thousands of violent people like themselves, creates an atmosphere in which felons perceive themselves as victims:

After their trial, if they're convicted, many don't change their mind-set. Why should they? To truly confront what they've done requires confronting the shame and fear and reality of their situation. Few people choose to do this, because it's difficult. ...So criminals blame someone or something else -- the cop who caught them or their lousy upbringing -- for their circumstances and spend their time growing angrier and angrier about being treated like an animal. They are usually full of rage when they are released, and less prepared to function as citizens; the predictable products of the monster factory. (127)

Given that increasing access to higher education is not on the national agenda but that the ever-politically popular and ambiguous "getting tough on crime" is, the outcomes (that the United States has the largest prison population in the world, that there are more black men in prison than in college) are going from bad to untenable. Furthermore, according to the United States Bureau of Prisons, incarceration rates are still trending up: in 2007, 506 out of every 100,000 men were in prison. Fifty-three percent of the prisoners incarcerated in the United States are serving sentences connected to a violent crime, which is not a surprising statistic until you realize that, while violent felonies are in some ways related to expanded drug trade and drug prosecutions in the United States, only 20% of felons are incarcerated for a felony drug crime alone.

There are things about this book that make it highly teachable: one ongoing theme is what it means to create empathy between and among people who have good reason to distrust and even detest each other. At its most basic, all violence, including the violence internal to prisons, is likely when people fail, or refuse, to recognize each other's humanity. Perhaps what I like best is that the portraits of prisoners, victims and guards are complex and well-drawn, discouraging readers from romanticizing anybody or taking refuge in the idea of pure evil. Critical features of RSVP are honest and provocative. For example, Schwartz bluntly points out that it is entirely reasonable to want to punish someone, even to physically hurt a criminal, who has caused innocent people pain by selfish and cruel behaviors. She's not even certain it's a bad idea. And she doesn't minimize the fact that human beings are capable of terrible things, or that to become the victim of violence changes a person's life forever.

But Schwartz also believes that, by and large our system is failing, and that we need to refocus -- not on "fixing" it -- but simply doing better: funding rehabilitation techniques like RSVP that we know can work, rejecting forms of incarceration that we know will fail. Sometimes success and failure are illustrated in the same person: not just prisoners, victims and guards, but Schwartz herself struggles with demons that can sometimes overcome her. Glimpses of her complex private history reveal the violence and anger passed down in her own family that have given her useful insights into how damaging emotions and behaviors reproduce themselves. Alternatively, her work in prison caused her to see herself and loved ones in a new light. But this ongoing recognition and reflection about self and other re-emphasize throughout the book that the ethic of RSVP is to teach prisoners to acknowledge and take responsibility for the monster within. The more subtle point is that all of us have monsters within, and that when the law-abiding community disidentifies and permanently disassociates itself from the law-breaking community, peace and justice are not restored for anyone. Worse, when the only point of prison is to actively separate the felon from the community, Schwartz argues, it also allows the felon to separate from the consequences of what he has done and transfer the responsibility elsewhere -- to a drug habit, to childhood abuse, to bad luck. Inadvertently, by employing these mitigating factors in court, defense attorneys often create a narrative that erases the victim and justifies the felon's belief that he is, in fact, the injured party.

Schwartz doesn't address several important topics that have become the focus of contemporary critiques of imprisonment: the privatization of prisons, the political influence of prison guards' unions, the ways in which prisons are viewed as a source of jobs for communities that have lost their industrial manufacturing base, or the large, false convictions for capital crimes, and important debates about why so many black men spend part of their lives in prison and what the social effects of that are on our communities. It's not that she doesn't think these are compelling questions -- she does. It's that she is doing something else, something that works.

She's changing people, one at a time.

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Here are reviews by Helen Eppstein in the The New York Review of Books and Eyal Press in The Nation.

Parents In Action

Miss Nikki with 3 PIA members! (Sherly, Yohanny, and Magda)

 

 

Marily and Magda posing with new PIA t-shirts!

 

The Family Resource Center at Macdonough has 12 Parents in Action members that volunteer their time making smoothies, helping teachers with projects, and helping out with the FRC Boutique.  If you would like to become a PIA member please contact the FRC at 860-638-3742.