I wrote previously about a culture of deception I’ve noticed in the student body at the university where I teach. This culture, I suggested, arises from the transactional nature of an educational system (not unique to my university) that privileges ends over means.
I also explored some of the negative impacts of this culture on my students, especially on their lack of responsibility to others.
What I didn’t talk too much about, though, is the pressures this culture has put on me.
This piece has been difficult to write, and I think it might also be difficult to read. It extends the lament for my students to a more personal place. As I’ve reflected on how I can bring the love, kindness, and patience of Jesus into classrooms rife with deception, I’ve come to realize something that’s been hard to swallow: I think my career as a professor, at least as I’ve experienced it at my current institution, has made me in some ways a worse person rather than better. I find myself mourning the loss of the meaningful vision of teaching and learning communities that got me into the work, and I lament the cynicism and emotional distance that have become hallmarks of my relationships with students. What follows is part confession, and part lament, and writing this out is part of a search for repentance and healing. I hope that in sharing some of these challenges, others can think about how the cultures on their campuses have shaped them, for better and maybe sometimes for worse, with an eye toward thinking about what kinds of spiritual practices offer us resources for growth and perseverance in our particular institutional contexts. (More on that next week!)
My expectations for a career in higher education have been deeply shaped by communities that, from my time as an undergraduate to becoming a professor, cast a vision for the work of a teacher-scholar as a calling. My sense of vocation started at a Christian college. It wasn’t perfect, but I did grow a conviction that all kinds of good work can be holy, blessed endeavors of co-creating the world with God through restoring broken things and bringing beauty, goodness, and life wherever I go. I was so excited by the prospect of participating in God’s work through my love of sharing literature with others.
As a graduate student, my ideas about calling were further shaped through a fellowship with the Lilly Network, which, at the time, gathered alumni from church-related institutions of higher education for three years of biweekly meetings and annual conferences. My relationships and shared readings with those folks trained me to see the classroom as a place of hospitality, to teach reading as an act that demands charity, and to hold space for the possibility of transcendent, transformative encounters with others, and with texts, as a part of my ongoing work in the arts and humanities. Much of this training complemented what I was learning in graduate school, though some of these skills ran against the grain of suspicious, definitively materialist reading some of my seminars cultivated. All these vocational ideas, though, were framed by a sense of education as a common project of developing the knowledge and skills to sharpen and enrich students’ abilities to communicate with and respond well to others in a diverse world.
I feel really fortunate that, in much of my teaching as a graduate student and postdoctoral lecturer at a large state school, I had a sense of leading my students in a collective project of learning. It seemed from my course evaluations that the hospitality and charity I brought to our classes was meaningful to many of my students. They consistently described feeling comfortable expressing their ideas and valued as members of our classroom, as well as believing they learned things that would be of real benefit to them in the future, whether in their personal, professional, or public lives. When I received an offer for a teaching-line professor position in a university writing program, I was excited to continue this work of empowering students through both a robust general education curriculum and a continued commitment to cultivating hospitality in the classroom.
I signed my contract in December 2019 for a fall 2020 start. The coronavirus pandemic disrupted education beyond anything I’d experienced before, and it was a difficult time to move and to start a new job. When I received many cold responses from my first classes of students, I was disappointed, but I figured it was a weird time. Everyone might be a little off.
But as the semesters went by, as I taught more students, and as I asked more questions, I realized that the relational disconnect was not just a pandemic thing. Friends in campus ministry and colleagues alike described students at my institution as spiritually or emotionally closed off, and they similarly observed a casual attitude toward lying. We asked whether we could do something to promote more student ownership of academic integrity on campus (student involvement in an academic honor board?) or to promote connection and honesty (asking more-personal-but-still-appropriate questions?). The distance between students and faculty may be particular to my institution, but in any case, we struggle to make meaningful connections that really help to promote learning.
A crucial part of a successful argument, according to psychologist Carl Rogers, involves establishing common ground between the speaker and the audience. While my students do the assignments I give them and sometimes even do them really well, and while I do have many fun and meaningful moments in the classroom, I often sense a relational chasm between myself and many of my students and struggle to find meaningful places of connection. The ethics of civic engagement that are foundational to the disciplines of writing and rhetoric – which I think are foundational to democracy and that I get very excited about introducing to my students – are of little interest to most of them. It sometimes seems that our only common ground is the literal floor of our classroom.
In the last several years, I’ve found myself on the receiving end of so many of my students’ lies. What’s becoming even more prevalent, and disheartening to me, though, is when I encounter students who appear to genuinely not understand why certain forms of academic misconduct are wrong.
I’ll give one example that’s specific to the writing classroom (bear with me!) but that I think illustrates this dynamic really well. As students use ChatGPT more (not with my support, but that’s another issue for another time), I’ve seen its tendency to hallucinate. It is, after all, “generative,” and it will obligingly produce answers to users’ queries, even if such answers don’t actually exist. Almost all of the academic misconduct cases that I have pursued in the last two years have been instances of fabrication: students submit papers that cite fake sources. In every case, they initially didn’t realize that the sources were fake. The bigger issue, though, is that they have a really hard time accepting that it's a problem that they are trying to pass off falsified claims about peer reviewed research that does not exist as evidence for their project. When students give me blank looks in response to my insistence that their writing be accurate, I want to give them the benefit of the doubt that they just hadn’t thought about the implications of circulating false information. But I worry that they don’t care about the truth, or that they have so little faith in the academic project I am tasked with teaching them that they think they might as well make stuff up.
Last semester, I realized how much I have come to treat students’ lying as normal behavior when I found myself joking from the front of the classroom about the absurd excuses students use to try to get their absences excused or to justify asking for extensions on assignments. There are the classics, like “I have a raging fever and it happens to be St. Patrick’s Day and your class is at 6pm, so I’m going to have to miss it. I would hate to get anyone sick on the feast day of St Patrick.” The more far-fetched ones seem more likely to be true: “I was on a boat, and a stingray flew up out of the water and stung me right on the chest! I had to get it treated!”
My kidding about the varying quality of student excuses came partly from a desire to get a rise from my captive audience, who do react really well to this bit. But it also was a reflection of the degree to which I had accepted a culture that normalized lying. It was one of many signs that I had started to give up on common ground, and, instead, had set up camp with those I strongly disagreed with.
Paul says in Galatians not to grow weary in doing good. I say, easier said than done. Weariness is such an apt description of what I’ve felt, and still feel. And I find myself tempted toward two responses: cynical engagement or withdrawal.
My stand-up bit about students’ lying to me is a great example of cynical engagement. Other examples include: starting a snide conversation in a faculty text thread about the cringiest student presentation moments, reading during commencement (stashing novels up our voluminous regalia sleeves is a time-honored tradition), and using department and college meetings to assiduously collect absurdities and my colleagues’ scathing, hilarious commentary for a satirical campus novel.
Sometimes, too, for self-protection, I emotionally withdraw. Rather than snarking through a meeting, I skip it. Rather than texting my friends wry quips about the latest ChatGPT hallucination a student submitted, I read job ads for careers in program evaluation or project management. I teach to get through content with minimum enthusiasm, and I take fewer laps around the class to check in on individual students’ work. I run my commute with no time to shower and attend low-stakes department committee meetings dripping sweat. I just don’t care, I say.
Of course, I do not always choose cynicism or emotional distance. In fact, I try very, very hard to be a caring colleague and professor who “seek[s] the welfare of the city where God has called [me].” But when I look at all the energy that I have expended on turning disappointment to dark humor, I think of the traffic cones that, yet again, are closing off half of the best faculty parking lot for a board of directors meeting. I have cordoned off much of my better nature, I think, in a movement of bitter self-protection.
The project of pursuing my work as a holy vocation has become increasingly challenging. I do not have any colleagues in my department who are professing Christians, and although I have wonderful friends from college and graduate school who willingly lend an ear, know the terrain, and encourage me toward love and good deeds, they are not living day-to-day with me. Extending hospitality in the face of indifference and hostility is something that I struggle to do alone, and I see the ways that my tendencies toward cynicism and relational disconnection are becoming character-forming habits.
In recognizing these ways that I’ve been negatively shaped by my contexts, I also see a need for spiritual disciplines to help me cultivate virtue rather than vice. Next week, I’ll share about how the serenity prayer* led me to the conviction that I need a reset.
*God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I can’t control, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Photo by David Lezcano on StockSnap
