I recently read something by a brilliant former student of mine who is now a professor. They wrote about the anxieties of teaching in an anxious age. The thought that particularly stuck with me is that it’s hard for many of us now to stand in front of a group of undergraduates with a strong confidence that the subject and discipline we are teaching really matters.
I feel that sometimes too, and I know many other faculty walk in to their classrooms feeling it too, even before the pandemic, but especially now. That fearful thought just as you begin to speak: what’s the point of this? Where’s it all going?
It’s not just or mostly the highly conventionalized “but will anyone get a job from what I’m teaching” thought either. I think professors are feeling it some even if they’re in a field that has a relatively tangible direct pathway to a career or teaches skills that have practical applications. Sometimes it’s the bigger, vaguer version of that paralyzing thought—the desire to be doing something that justifies the work you’re asking from students, the investment they and their families are making, in a world where it’s no longer clear what will be rewarded or if anything that anybody does will be.
Some of that anxious uncertainty comes from the general sense that all around us our institutions and the kinds of values they’ve stood for are failing. How can I teach students to write well, to communicate clearly, to use evidence responsibly, to develop a line of reasoning carefully, with any confidence that any of those skills and the values that stand behind them will hold for the future? I live in an age where many public figures routinely lie, where they make up evidence, where they reason incoherently, where they communicate poorly by any standard, and nothing happens as a result.
I live in an age where telling the truth about the past is being banned in many schools and discouraged even in some universities. Which you might think would motivate me more to teach the history of African societies and the African diaspora, but…we’ve been doing that for decades, and where has it gotten us? When I started teaching, some of what I was talking about in the classroom I took to be so much in the past that I believed I would have to do extra work to make it comprehensible for contemporary students. Now it’s all around me, like floodwaters filling the room. And yet for all the intensity of the attack on history, it also feels like nobody cares about history, as if history no longer matters, either as a component of civic patriotism or a part of critical thinking or as a way to decipher the present.
I think many faculty in many disciplines—even in STEM fields—are feeling their own version of the same thing. Understanding biology seems more urgent than ever, and yet, there have got to be mornings standing in front of a class of students where a sinking feeling hits a professor. How many of those students will go on to embrace falsehoods? How many actually want to understand the subject matter for itself and how many are just there because it’s required in order to get a particular credential that leads to a particular career where the mission and values of that career aren’t really what matters, just the perception that it’s a safe bet in an uncertain world? How can you get up in front of hundreds of undergraduates in this moment and say, “You should understand theoretical physics.”? Say, “You should understand 19th Century English literature.” Say, “You should understand ethnographic method.” Nothing feels entirely safe, even the most transactional call to understanding, because it doesn’t feel like understanding is what matters to the wider society. Understand enough to build a quick-and-dirty social media app, or apply a new technique to high-frequency trading, or land the next gig in the gig economy, but not enough to explore, dream, imagine, be curious. Because who pays that off without caring where it leads? Our society has become too mean and too austere to promise room for the improvidence of understanding a thing for itself.
We weigh ourselves down. Some days you think, “Here I am in front of a classroom, in a good job with great students, but there are so many people who could do this job well also and have been mistreated by other academic institutions that see teachers as disposable temporary labor.” Some days you think, “I really love this subject, I really love this discipline, I really love thinking about all of this, but that’s not serious enough, or it’s not my right to feel that way.” We subject ourselves to instrumentalization: who have you liberated lately? What struggle have you joined? Joy or pleasure in knowing seems self-indulgent, and so you squeeze off that source of motivation and inspiration, of the will to say the next words as you look out at your students.
You know more and more as you teach how much more there is to know, how much more there is that’s known that you don’t know, and you start to ask: who am I to be up here teaching? How can I write this or that without stopping to know everything that is embedded inside what I just wrote? Yesterday I wrote three thousand words on liberalism and its shortcomings and I suddenly ground to a halt when the rebel thought popped in, “But there is so much more to know about liberalism, you should just erase all that and start again properly after having read hundreds more books, thousands more pages.” That’s an especially fatal thought in the first hour or the tenth hour of teaching, whenever it strikes you dumb and renders you senseless, and yet you cannot afford to ward it off by assuring yourself of your mastery. The professor who is certain of the comprehensiveness of their knowledge is usually a terrible teacher: condescending, distant, and worst of all, often wrong without even knowing that they are.
And increasingly it feels to many—especially in the pandemic, but not entirely because of it—that you rise in front of a class, sit in their midst, or look at them on Zoom completely alone. You don’t feel part of a department, a discipline, a profession: the sociality of academia has evaporated so thoroughly that it feels almost as if it never was there in the first place. You feel like you are gaslighting yourself if you recall a time where you felt you were with other people who were excited, passionate, invested in this life, who liked to talk and think together.
You don’t feel you are fulfilling a mission that your leaders deeply believe in, that your society profoundly values, with a message that is all around you to buoy you up and carry you forward in your moments of doubt. If you teach with confidence, study with intensity, work with passion, you have to do it from your own heart and your own values, or through connection to some other sociality that traverses your working life.
I still get up there and teach and believe in what I’m doing. It still sings out in me. I think so many of us push through that moment of hesitancy and fear. But it has come to feel so much harder. Now is not the time to try and shore up and rebuild all the infrastructures that made it easier to teach and think with joy and confidence, but when we are out of this moment of triage, that’s the work ahead of us.
Reminding of the powers of doubt when well expressed. And also the risks.
As usual, beautifully put. I sit here, contemplating my last semester of teaching, knowing that nothing shocked me so much—here at the end of my career—as my First Years’ surprise last Fall when I told them that our class was not about preparing them for any career. It was about modeling the pleasures of conversation and clear, written communication; about reading and hearing voices from other times and societies; about joining in those long chains of thought and seeing where we fit. What did they think they’d come to a liberal arts college to do? What you said above, of course. Well, come for the credential but stay for the pleasure of learning. I taught that way for a career, so I’ll go out teaching that way, even as the ship scrapes up against the iceberg. I never thought there would be room for us in those lifeboats, anyway, Tim. Pull up a deck chair and let’s talk.