Carnivalesque

This section of the Teaching Carnival is good. I want to tangetially comment on Collin Brooke's response to Mark Bauerlein. Let me say first that I agree with Collin. This is not a commentary on his argument. The reliance on a contingent work force is detrimental to any University in a number of ways. However, I want to speak to a trend in our department, because, while I have no proof, I suspect it is happening elsewhere. Also, I'm reading Bauerlein's piece right now and hopefully I'll have more to say about it soon.

Okay, while I agree that the reliance on contingent workers is bad, bad, bad for the University and does affect the quality of course work, the assumption that accompanies those arguments is that the contingent workers are not good teachers. No one is overtly saying that, but too often the connection between the increase in contingent workers and the decrease in "quality of instruction" is left unexamined. When left unexamined the faulty conclusion is that contingent workers are poor instructors. To get to the root of the problem - course numbers, outside pressures, job security, assessment, etc. it is necessary to look harder and longer than someone outside of composition might.

It's no secret that there are big changes afoot in my department. Some of them I don't mind, other's impinge on my ability to design and teach my course. Formerly the attitude of this department towards graduate students was to treat us like colleagues but to give us a little more protection. Since the lecturers in our department are mostly former graduate students they received the same kind of treatment. (Please note 'Formerly') In the desire to make our courses more uniform, to simplify assessment, and more 'transparent,' the desire to allow us to design our own courses and learn from our mistakes has gone by the wayside. All of this change comes from good intention and since I'm in my dissertation writing phase (I hate making dissertation a verb) I'm taking a "keep my head down and get out" approach to the situation.

In fact most of the changes being made have not come from concerns about how graduate students design/teach their courses, but about how the Lecturers design/teach their courses. For a number of reasons, unclear expectations, mushy accountability, a rotating person of authority, the department has developed an anxiety about what goes on in the Lecturer's classroom. (Insert 'contingent labor' for Lecturer and you can see how this is a product of the argument above.) Some things about our department that influence this.

• The Associate Head, who directly oversees lecturers is a position held by Literature faculty.
• It is a position that rotates every 2-3 years. (I'm not sure about the exact number.)
• While the Associate Head works closely with the Director of Composition, there is no visible accountability to the Composition Program, even though Lecturer's mostly teach Composition courses.
  
• Lecturer's are primarily former MFA students and/or Literature graduate students.

Recently, through the CP and Small Lake's efforts, the lit graduate students successfully argued that there should be an "Assistant to the Associate Head" position that mirrored the Assistant to the Director of Composition position that I used to hold. It would allow literature students have similar experience scheduling, managing a group of employees, which would possibly give the literature students an edge on the market. The problem is that both the current Associate Head and the current Director of Composition are micromanagers. They've managed to completely undermine both positions. (Yes, that is also a different post all together.)
The result of all of this is that the Associate Head is using her assistant to do things like walk around campus and make sure that all of the Lecturers are really holding their Friday class sessions. Seriously.

I'm not saying this kind of hall monitoring is happening everywhere. What I want to say is that if we are not careful to reiterate the systemic reasons why the reliance on contingent labor leads to a lower quality of classroom instructions, the misuse of that information leads to the kind of anxiety currently circulating in our department.