Teaching trivia

Posted on | April 12, 2005 | 1 Comment

*Warning: Long and rambling quasi-academic musings follow.*

I am really enjoying teaching this semester. Probably because I’m lucky enough not to have to do much. I am in a very weird position where I only teach one tutorial a week and do guest lectures for the rest of my contract. It’s a role that’s split 75-25%: most of the time I’m supposed to be a research fella, the other quarter of the time I’m a Level A lecturer. It’s a very handy combination for someone young like me who needs to maintain teaching experience while building my research record. That is, if I wish to stay in academia… tho I’m not sure what other options I can conceivably entertain at this point. For the moment then, this is it. (I really like the way Az describes his situation as using ‘the resources of academia in order to do my own thing, as much as possible’. As you’ll see when you read it, his thinking is much more intricate than one lil grab can convey).

I’m teaching first years again after a bit of a break. And because I’ve been blessed with an enthusiastic group I’m catching their excitement – and dread – as they start life according to a brand new set of rules. I overheard some of them in the corridor this afternoon: “They don’t want us to tell them what the article’s about, but how it’s been written and why.” That’s right; now you’re starting to get it.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the responsibility and privilege of teaching, trying to acknowledge the different expectations students bring to class and wondering how to satisfy enough of them. This is also to reflect upon how I came to be in the position I find myself, which takes me a long way from friends, family and a sense of involvement in my local community – pretty much what I was brought up to believe important. It means working out how much of my own ambivalence towards institutionalised forms of producing and disseminating knowledge is real, and if it is, whether I should shield this from my students. I know that in particular cultural contexts (mostly those that aren’t ‘mainstream’ white Australia) the role of teacher is one that is highly revered, and I very much want to live up to that status for international and alternative entry students in particular. These attempts are always hampered when rebellious middle-class Theory disciples are bent on confronting you in class (I’ll write more about that when next month I get together with Fiona Nicoll for a reflection on teaching our theory course last year). They are the moments that make you wonder what horrible places universities must have been when they were a closed shop, lacking the comparatively vast multitude of perspectives and experiences they promise to offer us today.

Anyway, all of this is really a preface for the further excerpts from Weber that follow. And please don’t see them as views I necessarily endorse, but a slow and gradual attempt to populate a conversation that I’m trying to enter, and that has been going on for many years. As Simon points out, Weber’s hardly talking about cultural studies here, but he is talking about the difference between the scholar and the politician. To me, in the current environment, that’s a distinction worth making, as well as historicizing – so much so that I’m writing a book about it (got my contract today, yay!).

Weber’s main point is that ‘the prophet and the demagogue do not belong on the academic platform’:

To the prophet and the demagogue, it is said: ‘Go your ways out into the streets and speak openly to the world,’ that is, speak where criticism is possible. In the lecture-room we stand opposite our audience and it has to remain silent. I deem it irresponsible to exploit the circumstance that for the sake of their career the students have to attend a teacher’s course while there is nobody present to oppose him with criticism. The task of the teacher is to serve the students with his knowledge and scientific experience and not to imprint upon them his personal political views. It is certainly possible that the individual teacher will not entirely succeed in eliminating his personal sympathies. He is then exposed to the sharpest criticism in the forum of his own conscience.

[...] The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize ‘inconvenient’ facts—I mean facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions. And for every party opinion there are facts that are extremely inconvenient, for my own opinion no less than for others. I believe the teacher accomplishes more than a mere intellectual task if he compels his audience to accustom itself to the existence of such facts.

[...] Fellow students! You come to our lectures and demand from us the qualities of leadership, and you fail to realize in advance that of a hundred professors at least ninety-nine do not and must not claim to be… ‘leaders’ in matters of conduct. Please, consider that a man’s value does not depend on whether or not he has leadership qualities. And in any case, the qualities that make a man an excellent scholar and academic teacher are not the qualities that make him a leader to give directions in practical life or, more specifically, in politics. It is pure accident if a teacher also possesses this quality, and it is a critical situation if every teacher on the platform feels himself confronted with the students’ expectation that the teacher should claim this quality.

[...] The professor who feels called upon to act as a counsellor of youth and enjoys their trust may prove himself a man in personal human relations with them. And if he feels called upon to intervene in the struggles of world views and party opinions, he may do so outside, in the market place, in the press, in meetings, in associations, wherever he wishes. But after all, it is somewhat too convenient to demonstrate one’s courage in taking a stand where the audience and possible opponents are condemned to silence.

Coming up next: Bourdieu on Academic Discourse.

Category: Teaching

Comments

One Response to “Teaching trivia”

  1. Christian McCrea
    April 13th, 2005 @ 1:31 pm

    All of this makes sense when your students come in to learn. But in my case, most of my students are moneyed drones of a middle-class I cannot interpolate any longer. They come no longer even to find themselves, but are as aimless and detached as the zomboid participants of a Dawn-of-the-Dead parodic shopping mall. “Will this be on the test?” long after the establishment of there being no test, “Why is this important?” at least once a week.

    I encourage my students to criticise my method and politics all the time, but there are disinvested even the basic forms of intellectual need. When there is engagement on the level of political discourse, it is merely apathy versus that engagement.

    My university has imploded in the past 2-3 years; there has been a complete shift in the demographic entry points of students. Even cultural studies here has a 35% full-fee paying student ratio. My department is around the same number, but my course, an informal survey puts it at 50%.

    Angry week!

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