The New York Sophist

There really isn’t such a thing as “graduate student pedagogy,” but I thought I would write about it anyway. I’m always hopeful about it, but I know why it doesn’t exist: People who want to teach graduate students don’t understand how teaching works, they aren’t interested in thinking or talking about teaching, and they also have a very high self-image of their own importance to the field and to their studies.

Graduate student pedagogy is essential, particularly in pedagogy. It is clear that nearly all future jobs for advanced degree holders are going to be in teaching, and will likely consist of a lot more teaching than we are used to in academic appointments. When departments don’t have serious conversations about course and assignment design, and don’t have regular conversations about how to teach, pretty terrible things happen as they recently did on my campus.

A graduate student was removed of his teaching duties after he tried to get a class to come up with arguments in favor of slavery. As someone who teaches argumentation for a living, and someone who thinks a lot about the power and nature of classroom speech, this assignment cannot adequately be described as terrible. It’s the epitome of bad graduate student mentoring and what happens when you don’t have open conversations about teaching and what it’s about. Professor Taylor’s terrible assignment is a symptom, not an independent problem. And it’s a symptom that exists at some level in higher education in general.

Graduate student supervisors, as a rule, are really nervous about talking about teaching quality with graduate students. I wonder why this is? Are they afraid? Are they unwilling to let the graduate students know that teaching is an art that requires a lot of work and thought just to realize you could have done it so much better? Is it that they don’t know what to say, they believe in a simple transmission and response model? Taylor is, to his credit, trying to have an interactive classroom. But his assumptions about things like critical thinking, student engagement, and what his role is as a professor are detrimental to his ability to teach. He is one of these people who seems to believe the professor’s role is to offer the opposite, to teach from the point of opposition, to take up the impossible position and push it toward the students to see if they can push back correctly. This is not teaching. This is like mixing chemicals as a Chemistry teacher to see how the students will react to the explosions. It’s irresponsible, and it’s simply not teaching.

This professor was trying to be edgy, he was trying to really get the students to “think outside the box” to have that moment of “Wow! I’ve never thought of that before,” or whatever trendy nonsense was going through his head. It is not teaching to rupture the students’ relationships with the things they bring into the classroom. It is also not appropriate to think that you are offering radical expose about ideas to them. This assignment screams the attitude that Taylor believed he knew more about this issue than his students. This is an inappropriate attitude for teaching anything. Good teaching is realizing that you know different ways to encounter knowledge, not that you have amassed more than they have.

Secondly, Taylor did not do any adequate research to try to teach this assignment. People have written books where they have contextualized the arguments in favor of slavery from American history as well as the history of other countries that practiced it. But this was done carefully, with research, with context, and with the understanding that bad and good are contextually understood. Taylor did not offer any of that to his students, by all reports, and just tried to get them to speculate what good could come from slavery as they were sitting there, in a classroom, in 2020, with no other resources than their own feelings and thoughts. Of course that is inappropriate. More than that, it’s irresponsible to think that this would help teach these students anything about how slavery was permitted to survive so long, or how people justified it in the time and place where it was practiced. How is this the teaching of history if you are not providing deep context? Again, there are entire books written on this topic.

Finally there is this idea floating around that the pedagogy of critical thinking consists of examining the extant “two sides” of every issue. These two sides exist already and can always be accessed. One is preferred now, the other is not although it could be preferred given the right argument.

This is an unhealthy and improper model of argument, controversy, and critical thinking. If you can access arguments in favor of something it does not mean this side of the issue has legitimacy. That legitimacy is always conferred by audiences. In order to think critically about any controversy, all positions must be situated within the discourse, the context, and the ideology of the time. This requires a lot more than just sitting and staring into space in a classroom and writing down whatever reasons come to mind.

Taylor seems to believe that a starting point for critical thinking and teaching is to tell students to imagine a horrible atrocity from a positive point of view. This stereotype of thought often appears in popular culture as what rhetoric or debate offer. Nothing is further from the truth. If Taylor had actually prepared to teach his class, he would have provided them ample readings from scholars of the time who discuss why it was that people who were decent citizens in every other respect would consider it normal and healthy to own other human beings. That’s a conversation worth having, and that’s something where the critical thinker could make connections between our discourse about global economics and the terrible conditions of Chinese labor could be recognized as a more modern version of this atrocity.

Thinking that coming up with a logical argument to justify atrocity without any consideration of context is evidence of only one argument: A lazy, unprepared teacher who should not be teaching in the first place. But isn’t the blame really with the supervisors and mentors who clearly didn’t inquire, or investigate, or suggest how to teach to their graduate student?

It seems that what COVID 19 won’t eliminate in terms of higher education, Google will. The recent announcement that Google will offer certificate training in technology jobs is not surprising. What is scary about the recent announcement is that Google will accept certificate training – basically those “badges” on Linked In – as the equivalent of a four year college degree.

Google isn’t to be blamed for anything, they are following along the ineptitude of our college and university administration. For years the discourse from university administrators has been “college matters because you can get a career and make money from it.” That has literally been the only thing that administrators have leaned on to defend the university. Who can blame Google if they take a look at this justification, take it as an honest argument, and then respond with, “we can do it cheaper and better.”

As other companies like Microsoft and Facebook, as well as some of the halfway-in companies like EdX start to follow Google’s lead, university enrollment in the things that keep revenue coming in will diminish. Most students are at the university because they want to work a corporate job. The university has taken the position of unquestioningly facilitating this, assuming that an 18 year old has a fully formed, fully explored vision of what they’d like to do with their life for the next 45 years. This business approach of giving the “customer” what they ask for is foolish, unethical, and anti-educational. But any other approach appears to threaten the revenue stream which funds both a bloated administration full of bureaucrats and also floats a lot of really great, really good programs that aren’t self-sustaining like languages, philosophy, anthropology – necessary modes of inquiry that can’t sustain themselves right now.

As Google’s move takes off and admissions starts to see students who are choosing to go the way of corporate certification, a defense will develop that will be terrible. Administrators are timid and easily panicked individuals. They like the trappings of an executive role – the suits, the meeting rooms, the cynical sneer and hallway conversations of those “in the know,” but they can’t face decision points, and can’t do anything in a crisis except repeat old arguments or backpedal. They enjoy the trappings and can’t do the work.

The defense we’ll get is one where the certificate is described as “not good enough” to secure the “best jobs.” Of course, this won’t be persuasive at all. People are already at their limit in what they will accept as the cost of university. They are at their limit in accepting the narrative that eccentric and mean professors are just part of the experience. The entire college experience seems to be accounted for with a ton of debt, a shrug, and the acceptance of a job and career path where paying off that loan is not something that will happen until retirement.

The defense against the Google move that the universities should make, but won’t, is to abandon the idea that the university makes a difference in career track. If you want a career, don’t come to college. If you are that sure, and that focused on what you want to do, go get the relevant certificates instead. But when you find your life to be somewhat shallow, when there’s nothing else to watch on Netflix, and when you are wondering about the purpose of all of this, then you can come to college to get a certificate in life, thought, citizenship, or inquiry.

The core curriculum is what the college should be doubling down on, that and the campus space. In COVID 19, we have lost the second one in totality. The first one though, that’s something that we all sort of feel, in the back of our minds, that the administration wishes we didn’t have. But here is what a job training program can’t get you: The practices in creating narrative, justification, and explanation that help you navigate everything from political polarization in the news to doubts about the nature and purpose of existence.

These conversations require time and space, and are probably best held when people are not panicking about what sort of job they are going to get. They are best when people have stories to share about their own experiences out in the world working with other people and experiencing life in a community. They are not taught at their best to 18 year olds whose experience with others in the world has primarily been under the draconian thumb of some high school teacher or principal.

The defense of the university should be to abandon the certification game in favor of the narrative game. The answer is in radically changing the narrative to one that plays on the strengths of college: Space, time, engagement, questioning, and conversation.