Bauerlein dismissive (oops, that's not news)

Others have commented far more eloquently than I can on Mark Bauerlein’s recent Chronicle article, “Stop Pushing Yourself,” so rather than trying to be eloquent or address the entirety of Bauerlein’s ignorance, I will focus on one small yet significant sentence of his. After asking whether it can possibly be true that any professors actually need to put in 60 hours a week to do their jobs (just the necessary stuff, not the “extra” stuff—and since I’m being focused here, I won’t go into why Bauerlein’s definition of “extra” is completely asinine), he says, “Maybe for some segments, such as teachers with a 4-4 load that includes heavy writing assignments on the syllabus.”

Whether or not it’s necessary to work 60 hours a week isn’t what I want to get into; I want to get into the dismissive attitude toward “some segments” that I detect here, the attitude that the “teachers with a 4-4 load that includes heavy writing assignments on the syllabus” are such a tiny percentage of the professors out there that they need not even be considered by an intellectual like Bauerlein.

Well, I have a 5-5 load, and as an English professor, all of my classes include heavy writing assignments on the syllabus. Interestingly, Bauerlein’s idea of a shockingly heavy load seems to be 4-4. It seems he can’t conceive of a 5-5 load. But there’s nothing unusual about my load. There are seven full time English faculty members at my institution and we all have a 5-5 load of heavy writing classes. I know that the situation at Red Rocks is typical for community college faculty in Colorado, and I doubt that it’s atypical for community colleges in general.

To come up with a very, very conservative estimate of how many faculty are in this segment Bauerlein dismisses so easily, let’s assume that only community college English faculty teach 4-4 (or more) loads with heavy writing assignments. At Red Rocks, full time English faculty make up 10% of the faculty, so I’m going to assume that 10% of all community college faculty are in this segment. According to this source, there are 4146 college campuses in the country. According to this source, there are 1166 community colleges in the country, meaning about 28% of the colleges in the country are community colleges. If there are about 1,000,000 full-time college faculty (a reasonable estimate, I think) in the country and 280,000 of them teach in community colleges, and 28,000 of them teach in English departments, then Bauerlein is simply dismissing the working conditions for 28,000 professionals. (And, remember, my estimate is EXTREMELY conservative. I am certain there are many 4-year institutions where faculty teach 4-4 heavy writing loads) And that’s not even getting into the workload for adjuncts, who in English very typically teach 5, 6, 7, or more sections of composition every semester, including summers. I imagine Bauerlein would fall over in a dead faint if he had to contemplate the 8-8-4 load many adjuncts in English teach year in and year out.

Unfortunately, Bauerlein’s easy dismissal of this segment is typical. It’s the reason I am not attending 4Cs this year. It's fine by me if Bauerlein wants to talk about his particular situation, but it is not ok for him to purport to portray "the faculty situation" and simply dismiss tens of thousands (if not more) of his colleagues and peers. Ah, but I imagine he wouldn't consider me, a mere community college instructor, to be his colleague or peer.

tags: academia  cccc  composition  community_college  stupidity  teaching  

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