J.D.
Phillips
My motion, introduced at the Faculty
Meeting, 4 December 2006.
I move that we replace the statement
in the Academic Bulletin resulting from the motion that we passed at
the 1 April 2002 faculty meeting with the following: “We, the faculty,
are mindful of the fact that the end of the semester is a busy and
stressful time for students. We will, therefore, set our
end-of-semester policies accordingly.”
1 April 2002 motion (and now current
policy).
The faculty have agreed that no exams
will be given and no papers will be due the Wednesday to Sunday of the
week prior to Finals. No papers will be due during Finals Week unless
there is not a final exam in the course, in which case the paper will
be due at the end of the regularly scheduled exam time for that course.
Prior policy.
The faculty have agreed not to
schedule any exams during the last week of class.
Statement I read to the faculty on 4
December 2006, in support of my motion.
I want to register my opposition both to the motion
we passed on 1 April 2002 and to the policy that this motion
superseded. I suspect that most of you have thought about this issue,
and you know where you stand. I don’t intend to attempt to change
anyone’s mind. But I do think that we moved too quickly to pass the
motion on 1 April 2002, at least too quickly for me to register my
dissent, both to the motion and to the prior policy. So my comments
here are just “for the record.” I was emboldened to make them by the
many recent calls for increased faculty involvement in these meetings.
So thanks for those.
What follows, then, is an explication of my
opposition to this motion and to the prior policy, including commentary
on why I think this is a particularly important issue for us,
especially at this moment in our history. That is, I think something
nontrivial is at stake; I think it’s worth it to speak up.
So let me begin, then, by noting that I have chosen
to assume that each of us has the best interests of our students in
mind; each of us construes these interests broadly; and, none of us is
concerned with merely students’ (or, God forbid, even our own) narrow
and parochial interests in only our own classes.
So first, a practical and personal account (followed
by a principled argument), of why I think the rule created by passing
the 1 April 2002 motion, as well as the prior policy, gets in the way
of student learning. Consider as an example, calculus one, Math 111.
This class meets three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Right or wrong, the fact is that there is a lot of material to cover in
this course; the syllabus, which is mostly set by the department, is
full; there are no extra days in this course; some of the students
aren’t well-prepared for its rigor, and so on. In some ways, we just
try to control the mayhem. I give three exams during the course of a
semester of calculus, as well as a comprehensive final exam. This is a
pretty typical calculus exam structure for most of the mathematicians I
know. Ideally (that is, ideally for the students, that is, not for my
own convenience), I structure the last week of my course thusly: Monday
is set aside to reviewing for the third exam. Students then take this
exam on Wednesday. Friday is then set aside for returning their third
exam, now graded, and reviewing for the final exam.
Note three things about this structure. Firstly,
there is no new material presented after the penultimate Friday of the
semester. Secondly, there are no assignments given during the final
week of the semester. Thirdly, since exams are especially rich learning
opportunities, and not merely assessment vehicles, students’ only
obligation during the final week of this course is to prepare for the
comprehensive final exam (i.e., studying for, taking, and then
reviewing the graded third exam are all a central part of the students’
preparation for the final exam).
To alter this structure in any way will have no
impact on me (except perhaps to make my life a little easier, as I’ll
have fewer exams to grade between Wednesday and Friday of the final
week of the semester). But it will have great, and negative, impact on
students. To move the third exam up a day means that we will have to
cover new material on the Wednesday of that week, material that the
students will not be tested over before they must demonstrate mastery
of it on their comprehensive final exam. I also note that suggestions
about how to restructure my class are intrusive and presumptuous. For
instance, to suggest that I devote two days (Wednesday and Friday) to
preparing for the final exam would require altering course objectives,
hence departmental objectives. Such an intrusion into pedagogy seems
unwarranted and deeply at odds with the spirit of this place.
Finally, about this personal account, I note that I
solicit fairly extensive and anonymous student feedback in all of my
courses at the end of each semester. It has not been my experience that
students are afraid of making honest and candid remarks in their,
again, anonymous feedback. In my entire 20-year career of teaching
college mathematics, I have never received even a single negative
remark about my end-of-semester policies. But students do often remark
on how much these same policies helped them prepare for exams. That is
to say that I think we are mistaken if we think that we passed this
motion because it is what students wanted. Students may have complained
about their end-of-semester workloads, but in my experience, this is
not the policy that they wanted (or want).
You can see, then, that the rules we adopted for the
last week of classes are at cross purposes with what I understand to be
the best interests of my students. This puts me in the unforgiving
position of having to choose between acting in support of what I
understand to be the best interests of my students or following a rule
that is not in the best interests of my students. And it means that
“the faculty” as a whole (no one in particular) has not only effected
the, quite frankly, patronizing position of telling me that my
understanding of the best interests of the students is wrong, but they
have also forbidden me to act in support of my understanding, of my
professional convictions about our students’ best interests.
Now, I’d like to move beyond my own parochial
example, and briefly sketch out a more principled argument in
opposition to the 1 April 2002 motion and to the prior policy.
Firstly, I would think that there is nothing at all
unique about me in this regard. That is, I am sure that there are many
among us who have similar stories about how this policy has interfered
with student learning, based on altered policies in their own classes,
forced upon them by this rule. Here’s another way to put this: I take
it that a, say, physics professor is in a much better position to
understand how the policies in his or her physics classes affect his or
her students’ lives (again, broadly conceived) than is a faculty
committee (to say nothing of the entire faculty!), the members of which
have almost no idea whatsoever about what actually goes on in the
physics professor’s classes.
Secondly, I would say that, at least as I understand
it, support for this rule depends on, among other things, believing
that some members of this faculty have policies regarding
end-of-semester activities in their courses that are destructive to
students, and moreover, that these professors are unable or unwilling
to change these policies unless we require them to do so. I think this
belief is misguided. Let me put it this way (and with appropriate
caveats for extreme cases; more on this in a moment): a better response
to differing opinions on this faculty about what constitutes
end-of-semester activities that are in the best interest of our
students is to simply respect differing professional opinions, not try
to change others’ policies into our own.
Thirdly, some (perhaps many) who supported the 1
April 2002 motion said that they did so based on their belief that
while most on the Wabash faculty didn’t egregiously pile on excessive
work at the end of the semester, a few did. Well, I say that a policy
designed to reign in a few miscreants, but that affects everyone, is
unwise. That is, if there are in fact a few incorrigible miscreants in
this regard on the Wabash faculty, then I say there are more effective
and more collegial ways to deal with them then by enacting an intrusive
rule that hamstrings the entire faculty.
Fourthly, I say that this is largely a question of
one of the bedrock principles of our guild: namely, academic
freedom. That is, by which criteria do we judge that this or that
professor’s end-of-semester policies should be ruled out-of-bounds?
(And remember, again, my assumption about the good intentions of our
colleagues.) To put it bluntly, if, as we are assuming, a professor
genuinely has his or her students’ best interests at heart (i.e., not
simple convenience), if he or she can give pedagogical and
philosophical reasons for the policies that he or she has set for the
end-of-the-semester, then I say ruling these policies out-of-bounds
must then necessarily rest on our belief that some of our colleague’s
professional beliefs about liberal education are wrong, and moreover,
their policies informed by these wrong beliefs ought to be prohibited.
Colleagues, I say that this is treacherous terrain, and we ought to
flee from it. I say that collectively flourishing in spite of, perhaps
because of, these different and deeply held professional beliefs about
liberal education, is precisely what respect for academic freedom means.
Fifthly, and finally, I note that in the past year
many among us have called for more respectful modes of discourse in our
community. Let me say, then, that I think a necessary pre-condition for
respectful discourse is to assume the good faith of your colleagues.
Recall, I’ve mentioned a few times now that I’ve chosen to assume that
each of us has the best interests of our students in mind. Do I know
this to be true? Alas, I do not. But I don’t think that we can expect
to be part of a civil and humane community if we assume the worst of
our colleagues. Our hopes, even demands, for civil discourse, ought to
be grounded in something more than our own desire to be treated with
respect. They ought to be grounded in our respect for our colleagues.
And I say that the motion that we passed on 1 April 2002, as well as
the prior policy, is grounded in a transparent lack of trust in,
indeed, a disrespect for, colleagues who have a different professional
understanding of the pedagogical means to the end that I assume we’re
all aiming for, namely, student learning in a humane environment.
So, I say that we could do a very great deal toward
improving the climate on campus, in the form of genuinely respecting
our colleagues’ pedagogical decisions and the wide panoply of salutary
teaching and learning practices on this faculty, by amending the 1
April 2002 motion so that it becomes simply advisory, i.e., we should
be mindful of the fact that the end of the semester is a busy and
stressful time for students. Period.
Statement I prepared in response to
feedback I received regarding my motion and intended to read to the
faculty at the Faculty Meeting on 15 January 2007; I was unable to read
it (Bob Royalty moved to send it back to the APC before we had a chance
to talk about my motion; the faculty overwhelmingly voted in favor of
Royalty’s motion).
Jim Brown and I spoke about this motion the day
after I introduced it at the last faculty meeting. At one point in the
conversation I said, a bit smugly, “I try to be flexible when I
schedule exams. I try to respond to the ebb and flow of student
learning over the bumpy rhythms of the semester.” Jim nodded his
approval. So I continued, “If students seem to be especially jammed up
at this or that particular moment, then I’ll hold off scheduling an
exam until things calm down a bit.” Jim was still nodding, with some
enthusiasm. “For instance,” I said, “during pan-hel week, I. . .” Jim’s
eyes lit up; he nodded with great enthusiasm, even zeal. In fact, he
was now so excited that he interrupted me and effused, misreading me,
it turns out, “Yes, except during pan-hel week! Exactly! There’s no way
in, well, hell, that I’d move an exam during that week. In fact, I like
to schedule them for that week. This is a college, right? Students have
to make decisions; what’s more important, studying or drinking?”
Turns out, though, that I have a different
understanding about how to do things during this week. For a variety of
reasons, I try to avoid giving exams during pan-hel week. Now, this was
last month, mind you, before Jim was tenured, so naturally I won the
argument. But seriously, I think you see my point. Jim’s policies
aren’t mine; mine aren’t his. Still, I genuinely respect his
professional judgment. I think he’s got his students’ best interests in
mind. We just disagree a bit about pedagogy; our educational values are
not coextensive. Now mind you, if the students came to us with a
petition asking us to ban exams during pan-hel week, I would argue
strongly against it, in spite of the fact that it would flatter my way
of thinking about these things. Again, I respect Jim’s pedagogical
decisions, even when they’re orthogonal with my own. And I expect him
to extend the same courtesy to me. And just so with end-of-semester
exam and paper policies.
I find the logjam prior to fall break, in fact, to
be more stubborn than the end-of-semester crush. It often feels like
everyone schedules exams for, and makes papers due, the Wednesday of
this week. The burden is no doubt onerous for students, again, more so,
at least in my experience, than at the end of the semester. So why
don’t we ban exams and papers during that week, too? And if we’re
really serious about our concern over student workload, why not make
rules that set workload limits in each class (no more than some fixed
number of papers, exams, quizzes, presentations, and books to read). In
other words, why do we cleave a mere three days (in this case, the
final three days) from the rest of the semester to express our concern
about student workload? The answer, I believe, is that we shouldn’t. We
should trust each other to set appropriate limits, to recognize—as with
Jim and me—that our educational values and goals are not identical, and
that this diversity is, in fact, a strength, a very great strength.
Let me briefly say a few words about what I think
the proper relationship is between student requests and faculty
responses to those requests. Students are free to make requests, which
we then honor by seriously considering them, by arguing about their
merits, by considering implications that students may have overlooked,
etc. We do not, as all of us know, simply rubber-stamp them. Nor do we
simply curmudgeonly reject them. That is, to invoke the mantra that
“the current rule was requested by the students” is not to argue for
it, it is simply to remind us that we should receive the request
respectfully, and then seriously consider it, and sometimes (this time,
for instance), even re-consider it.
Next, I want to say that I think it’s healthiest not
to think of this as an example of the tragedy of the commons, as was
suggested at last month’s meeting. Firstly, to aver that having four
papers due during the last week of classes is a tragedy is to, well,
debase the term a bit; I don’t think it’s that elastic. One perfectly
respectable response to all of this—and I note that this is not my
response, by the way—is to assert that students are pinched at the end
of the semester only if they don’t manage their time well. Four papers
due on the last day of the semester may be unpleasant, but with even a
modicum of planning, students can avoid this unpleasantness by
stretching their writing out over the course of a couple of weeks, and
thus not be stuck on the final Thursday night of the semester with four
papers to write. Moreover, the student who has planned poorly and hence
is stuck with this unpleasantness is not the victim of a tragedy; in
fact, he might even learn a valuable lesson about intellectual
self-discipline, a lesson that he will be deprived of learning under
the current rule. Again, this is not my response. But it is the
response of some among us, and I would urge us not to simply dismiss
it, as the current rule would have us do.
Secondly, and more fundamentally: to think of this
as an example of the tragedy of the commons is to confuse professional
differences about the nature of the common good (differences that we
ought to respect) for individual self-interest that damages the common
good.
Let me end by fleshing this out a bit, but just a
bit. The tragedy of the commons asserts that individuals will behave in
self-interested ways that are, collectively, at cross-purposes with the
common good. So evidently, we (or some among us), without the current
rule, would have end-of-semester policies in our courses that would
only take into account the narrow interests of our own courses, and not
take account of our students as young men taking many courses, young
men who are under a great deal of pressure at the end of the semester
(indeed, all year long). Now, I suppose that in the hurly-burly of the
end of the semester press, each of us might, from time-to-time, lose
sight of our students’ best interests, broadly conceived. A simple
reminder from the dean, as my motion proposes, ought to cure us of
this. But to think that some among us, even after being reminded, will
simply say “to hell with the common good,” and instead act with mere
self-interest, is, I sincerely hope, misguided. That is, I hope that we
can all assume the best about each other’s professional motives: each
of us is concerned with our students’ best interests, broadly
conceived, and not simply with the narrow, parochial interests
regarding our own courses. So given this, the current rule, then, as
opposed to my call for a collegial advisory reminder, invites us to
think that some of our colleagues beliefs about how their pedagogical
decisions impact their students broad interests are wrong. And as I
said at our last faculty meeting, I think this is treacherous terrain;
we ought to flee from it.