Professors Adore/Abhor Pupils, Revere/Regret Their Own Calling

This month the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching issued the results of a survey of 5,000 college and university professors. Professors were asked to appraise their students and their jobs (not the same thing). The results: Johnny can’t read. We knew that. Johnny is a bore. Did we know that?

Undergraduates are unwilling to work hard, doing just enough work to get by. Students are more grade-conscious now--and more likely to cheat.

Responding professors, 64% of them, agree with the survey statement that “many students ill-suited to academic life are now enrolling in colleges and universities.”

We should be as wary of despairing opinions among adults regarding youth as we are wary of the reverse. Children are both critics and heirs. In either case, our perception of their behavior ought to tell as much about us as about them.

My own generation--the one that went to college in the 1960s--was famous for proclamations of freedom. We were free-- of parents and grandparents and government and corporations and all that stuff. Suddenly the Winter Palace was overturned. We were our own teachers. History hadn’t worked. “Don’t trust anyone over 30.”

The ‘60s generation was conceived during the postwar years--the baby boom. Far from being free of history, we were tied to history by birth, a biological continuation of the species after cataclysm. During the war our parents had seen the world nearly destroyed. And after the war, a blanket of optimism, the necessary hypocrisy, was thrown over the obscene memory. America rewarded knowledge of evil with a GI Bill that would transform higher education into mass education.

The generation of the 1960s, having presumed to overturn history, is not now resigned to being itself overturned. Our authority was our youth. We undermined our authority by growing old. Haven’t our children noticed some hypocrisy?

The faculty members surveyed by Carnegie identify themselves on a 5-point scale as “moderately liberal.” They perceive their students as “conservative”--politically conservative and conservative in life style.

About 84% of the professors believe “undergraduates have become more careerist in their concerns.”

I taught freshman English as a graduate student during the late-1970s. I remember lecturing a class about Hamlet while at the back of the room, several premed students studied biochemistry behind propped-up Shakespeares. What did my class matter when there was a “real” course to follow? Who had time for soliloquies?

The new careerism was a rejection of the romantic rhetoric of the 1960s. Student of the late-’70s saw clearly enough that the ‘60s radical was enrolled in law school now, that the anti-war activist had become an aerobics superstar.

The romance of the 1960s was that higher education should be made available to groups of people who had never reached it before. What the next generation had to realize was that a degree was worth less than before. To distinguish oneself in the 1970s one needed a degree beyond college. Law. Medicine.

I heard teachers in the 1970s--I was one of them--disdain the new careerism. The young, discovering pragmatism, had turned us into what we thought we would never be: just another generation.

One of the few things the young seem to have kept from us is rock music. They hear its beauty and its darkness. What grandmother understood --that the world can be disrupted--today’s young take for granted. They accept despair calmly, through the earphones of their Walkmans. Talk to undergraduates. They’re not interested in George Bush or Michael S. Dukakis; they care little for left or right. They are more likely to be environmentalists. They can imagine incipient tragedy larger even than their grandparents remembered. There is literally a hole in the future, somewhere over the pole.

“I am apprehensive about the future of this country,” so agreed 63% of the professors.

When I left graduate school, I was scandalized to discover that many adults could not read or write--I mean adults who had been to college, men and women who worked in banks and elementary schools. My first job was to revise the everyday correspondence of businessmen. One of the men who employed me was a Yale graduate with the language skills of a grammar school student.

America keeps its secret, but “basic skills” may be rarer in this age of mass education than anyone cares to admit. Basic skills may even be irrelevant. Who knows? Perhaps Peggy Noonan knows. The most powerful men and women in America routinely pay a Peggy Noonan to write what they will say.

I know teachers who cannot write; I know others who insist that if you cannot write clearly, you cannot think clearly.

During the ferociously democratic 1960s, I noticed a loss of confidence among certain professors. They seemed afraid of the implication of their role. One insisted that students call him by his first name. Another rejected the idea of grades. His solution was to give all A’s.

In those years, some students believed a classroom should reduce to commerce: “I’m paying for this,” the student reminded the university. As teachers inflated grades, student assumed the right to evaluate professors, as one would evaluate an employee.

Two decades later, the faculty members polled by the Carnegie Foundation complain about “grade inflation” at American colleges and universities.

About 62% of the professors admit that grade inflation is a “problem at my institution.” Are they talking about the teacher down the hall or their own classroom?

There has been a “widespread lowering of standards in American higher education,” say 67% of the educators. Lowering of which standards, and by whom?

Many faculty members admit that they spend little time attending meetings of the faculty senate. Many have never participated on an administrative committee. These same professors complain about the “autocratic administration of their schools.”

In the 1960s, affirmative action was the hot issue on campus. Many professors wouldn’t engage the issue publicly. And all questions of affirmative action were relegated to “the administration.” Today’s difficult issue is the canon--are there texts, dates, memories, all American student should know in common? Again the professors fret privately. But at prominent universities students have already been offered the option: you decide.

Among Carnegie respondents, 77% would make the same job choice if given the chance anew. But 44% say they would like the option of early retirement. Like many other Americans, most professors think they receive a “good” salary but not an “excellent” one.

Despite the criticism of undergraduate careerism, there is something careerist about this enterprise. The survey reduces the complex experience of teaching to numb-skull assertions: “I enjoy interacting informally with undergraduates--agree, neutral, disagree.” Check one. The language belongs to the rating game, less opportunity for nuance than on a tax form. Carnegie posits teaching as a job, not a vocation, and that may be the truth.

Our professors say they are pessimistic about their students. They also say they are content with their jobs. They feel decisions are being made without their say. They are disappointed with the young. They like working with the young. Our professors, for all their degrees, agrees and disagrees, end up sounding so much like other Americans.