The Market-Driven Life

In an earlier post, I mentioned that few--if any--students take my classes because they're interested in the topic. Instead, they've signed up for it to satisfy a university requirement. This is probably a lament for many instructors of introductory courses outside the hard sciences (and, I daresay, for some within that field as well). Let's face it: 100-level humanities classes at big universities are generally not designed for anyone who actually plans to pursue that major.

I'm not saying they should be. At my undergraduate institution, they seemed specifically engineered to weed out students who weren't invested in the subject: unless you really wanted to be there, you were going to hate it. This had obvious benefits and drawbacks. It helped keep departments lean and elite, but it also meant there was a deep divide within the student body. Feedback must've seemed bipolar: many evaluations of professors would be vicious. "Oh my God, Prof. So-and-So is sooo mean, he never gives A's, there's so much reading, yadda yadda." Meanwhile, the kids who were interested sometimes hero-worshiped those instructors, since they treated us like real, thinking people. We got to learn a subject in depth, without catering to the lowest common denominator, which had never been the case for us before. So this kind of class design philosophy made for a palpable divisiveness, and drove most students to stay within our academic comfort zones.

The department I'm in now has taken a different tack, but I can't say that it's better. Our administrators have faced the reality that hardly anyone is going to pursue a bachelor's degree in such an unprofitable discipline as religion. At best, we're going to remain a boutique field, tempting the odd international relations sophomore to complete a minor. A devout School of Communications or Health Sciences student might dip into a class on the Bible, since she always meant to read it more. That's about it. And these demographics have a pronounced effect on our course syllabi.

I'm not really talking about the upper-level offerings that cater to our few dozen full-time undergrads (and are always cross-registered with graduate seminars, to pad the roster). Our faculty often come up with wonderful workshops on Maimonides or the Ramayana or women in Islam. Rather, the 70- to 200-person intro classes--the surveys of Eastern or Western religions, or scripture, or history--see the most impact on their design. They can't possibly gear the entire enterprise around the 1.3 students who might take another religion course, who might go on to use this information again in some other academic setting. So compromises are made.

I've seen how the sausage is made. The Ph.D. candidates in my department have to sing for their supper, earning our keep by teaching, as TA's or writing program instructors. One of our funding commitments is attendance at monthly pedagogical seminars; a different faculty member comes each time, to talk about how he or she conceptualizes each intro course. A recent seminar leader described the necessary balance between giving the students what he wants to give them (basic critical thinking tools) and giving them what they want (namely, memorizable facts about Christianity, with maybe a few juicy tidbits about Islam thrown in). In practice, this is what that balance looks like: accommodate their desires when there's no good reason not to, and only hammer home the one other thing that's most important to you. There just isn't time in a fifteen-week semester to do anything else effectively.

I'm not sure yet what that "one other thing" would be in my class, when I get to design my own syllabus in that long-off future. Too many scholarly issues are too important to me. I suppose it would be crafting thoughtful arguments... but would that leave enough time to give them the raw information to argue about? On the flip side, I know I have a tendency to get caught up in the details. (I think this is common among former English majors, who were told over and over again of the value in "close reading.") Would I spend too much classtime pointing out all the little nuances of Psalm 139 or Sura 9, rather than reminding them of the big picture? I just don't know yet.

In the meantime, we instructors are left to suss out what sorts of things the students want to know, and to present that material in an easily-digestible format. (If a little critical thinking comes up along the way, so much the better, but we don't expect it to happen often.) And these kids want to learn things, not abstracts: information that can be written on the board or in a PowerPoint presentation, with bullet points and vocabulary lists. They want to know things like:

• What religion are Chinese people?
• Who wrote the Bible?
  
• What do Muslims think about America?
• If Jesus was a real person, then why don't Jews believe in him?
• Are Mormons Christians?
• Who's the Buddha?
• Scientology's a cult, right?
  

These are real, honest, earnest questions, asked without guile. These are things they don't understand, and now they have a resource at their disposal, without having to doing too much extra work. And many of these queries aren't as dumb as they might sound at first blush. Honestly, I'd rather they ask these questions--really, any questions--than sit there silently and buy wholesale whatever I tell them... which is what most of them actually want. They're hoping they can just write in their notes that the Hijra took place in 622 and that there are seven sacraments in Catholicism and that Judaism is really about remembering the covenant between God and Israel.

A big part of me--the part that likes being mistaken for an authority, the part that likes having a few dozen trusting minds look up at me--wants to give them those facts. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that: critical thinking doesn't do much in a vacuum. But if "telling students the facts" is the main thing a class is designed for, then we're giving the unknowledgeable too much power in setting the agenda. Should students' desires be taken seriously? Yes. Undoubtedly. But higher education should aim beyond lists of dates and dictates, and should expect us to dedicate our scarce classtime to imparting knowledge that can't be easily learned from a PowerPoint.

Unfortunately, as I suggested in my last post, much of the time I can't trust that students will do the work. Reviewing old material has become the focus of most class meetings. This suits the philosophy of my department just fine: it's better that everyone masters the basics, rather than leaving some behind while a few flourish. And I guess I'm okay with it.

I can't help myself. I wish more young people were interested in becoming well-rounded, informed citizens. If they were, my job would be so much easier--they'd ask better questions and do the reading and bring new ideas to the table. Maybe they are interested, and I just don't see it; or maybe I'm expecting too much of eighteen-year-olds, who probably also have jobs or internships or hours of labwork each week. I don't know. I just see a lamentable, perhaps dangerous lack of deep curiosity about subjects outside their more lucrative majors.

Part of my role in the university is to help mold these kids into the kinds of thinkers I hope they'll become. But if our classes kowtow to what those teenagers want, rather than what we want for them, then what is the likelihood of that happening?