Everywhere but in a small number of elite colleges, we are moving towards elimination of tenure and an army of contingent, cheap workers teaching primitive, basic courses that keep the gap between the elites and everybody else as wide as ever.
In order to do away with the concept of a professor as a scholar and thinker, professors are being lured into teaching courses where they can easily be substituted by cheap, fungible part-timers. In foreign languages, this is being done through the narrative of “you can still be a professor and a scholar even when teaching Spanish 101.” Once a gullible or lazy professor buys into this narrative, it will become super easy to get rid of him altogether.
My suggestion is: let’s not allow our expertise to be trivialized. Let’s remember that we are thinkers and intellectuals, and everybody, including students at state schools deserve access to our research and our knowledge.
Clarissa's Blog 
They guilt trip you, saying that if you really loved your discipline you would love 101 best, but my discipline is literature.
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That’s exactly what I’m talking about. And it’s not innocent, even if individual colleagues say it in good faith. You are bad because you resist being made redundant, easily replaceable. And because you think your students deserve more than what they are being given.
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Right. And I am fine with teaching literature at the lower levels, or to people who don’t read perfectly, or beginning literature courses (not exclusively, of course, but my point is that this is the field I feel at home in.
ALTHOUGH, and Shedding will love this, I got a comment from a student the other day, in a language class: “I am glad I am studying with someone who knows how to teach languages.” What he was referring to was that I am not assigning a long vocabulary list every day, just a few words, but I am insisting that students then use and reuse these words. Apparently the majority assign long lists for passive recognition. So, I was about to say I don’t know how to teach languages, but I guess I do.
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As I said, Miu Miu would design a kick-ass house dress. 😉
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The problem is you view basic classes as a house dress, when they are actually the foundation of the house itself. In terms of actual teaching, the bar for many language classes is so low, almost anything makes them better (As a grad student, I was complemented for something as ridiculous as making students ask questions with vocabulary words instead of having them listen and repeat them for an hour. What I did in that lesson was certainly an improvement, but it is not good language teaching).
I don’t think that literature professors should love 101, and I don’t think it is your field either–but I do think literature professors are essential to designing a 101 in the type of program you are imagining (and we are imagining very different 101s). I just wish they used their expertise, in coordination with people whose field this actually is, to make these classes better, rather than discounting them as trash.
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I’ve known many and I mean MANY people who are teaching language courses without a PhD or without an MA. And they are doing an amazing job. It is not my job to lecture them on how they can “improve” or get between them and their students in any way. I am convinced that my instructor colleagues are doing just as good a job teaching as I do.
This is precisely when departments fracture and animosity begins: when TT faculty begins to lecture instructors instead of treating them as equals.
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How can you consider them equals if you call their courses “primitive”? I am talking about having everyone contribute to the curriculum, not TT faculty lecturing instructors on courses they don’t teach. I actually think instructors should teach more advanced courses too, but that is a different topic.
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The moment instructors are allowed to teach more advanced courses, tenure lines will be closed for good. Why pay more when you can pay less?
We even joke that whenever an instructor is appointed to a 300-level course, you can hear the quiet sound of a tenure line dying.
It’s very interesting that all of your suggestions lead in the direction of eliminating tenure and substituting professors with cheap contingent labor. I’m sure that’s not your goal at all. But don’t you see how it’s the most logical consequence?
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No, because we have polar opposite views (shockingly :-)) of how to prevent the erosion of tenure. It seems to me that you think tenure is being eroded solely because contingent faculty are cheaper. I think there is a larger problem, which is the lack of societal value placed on anything in a languages department (including literature). Therefore, if we want to prevent the erosion of tenure, we have to demonstrate the value of what we do, and this includes language classes. Part of this is using our collective expertise to make them as valuable as possible, and then demonstrating this value to the decision-makers. Thus from my perspective, when you dismiss classes as primitive, basic, and unworthy of your expertise, you contribute to the problem, rather than the solution.
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But there do need to be vibrant, well-conceived language programs. If you leave that to people without serious expertise and commitment, you end up with students who haven’t learned anything, or who have been damaged.
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Absolutely! I agree with Clarissa’s ideas about the upper-level courses, they need to be content driven and things like requiring 30% grammar in an Intro to Lit course are just insane and counterproductive. But hiring a bunch of folks with BAs for very low wages to teach the lower level courses is also a recipe for long-term failure.
The instructors in the lower-level courses are the pipeline to the major, they can identify the students with the most promise and actively encourage them to pursue higher level studies in the language. You will have more and better majors if things are running really well in the beginning courses, but you need dedicated and qualified instructors with some level of commitment to the institution for that to happen. I think the ideal for the lower-level language courses would be full time instructors with MA-level qualifications who would have higher teaching loads and lower salaries than the tenure track folks, but would still receive benefits and renewable (something like 3-5 year) contracts. That would ensure consistency and quality while still keeping down the cost of providing the lower level language courses.
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but you need dedicated and qualified instructors with some level of commitment to the institution for that to happen.
Bingo! We have some low-level (not language) courses taught by faculty associates, who are MS, with industrial experience, and have teaching-only appointments. They don’t have tenure but they have stable annual contracts with full benefits and partake in faculty meetings and curriculum development. They are excellent teachers, committed to the work, and the fact that they are so dedicated to teaching means they really both educate and energize the students entering the major.
Having bad or disinterested or overworked teachers at the entry level will lead to a quick demise of any major. IME, you can and should kick people’s a$$es in intro courses and they will rise to the challenge (after a bit of initial whining) and many will excel. There is nothing worse and more disrespectful than placing low expectations on students. And then give them unique, meaty courses shortly thereafter.
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I agree with the need for this type of position, but you still need to connect the lower and upper division courses, and that requires greater expertise than this type of position (although there are plenty of over-qualified people in these positions in languages usually). The people doing the connecting really need to teach both for practical and credibility purposes. That is how you prevent “primitive” entry level courses. Of course, if the people who teach higher level courses view entry level ones as beneath them, and the people who teach entry level ones have no job security and poor pay, you get the current untenable status quo.
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