Rigor

I've been surrounded by discussions of rigor lately. In academia, rigor seems always to go hand in hand with quality. Degree programs, departments, courses, and assignments which are deemed more "rigorous" are also seen as better. Aside from an often glaring lack of rigor in the definition of "rigor" itself, I suspect that using rigor as a proxy for quality is often misguided.

A post from Dean Dad raises many of these issues. He writes,

Which is more rigorous: a program with all required and prescribed classes, or a program with a host of electives? 

The correct answer is that the question doesn’t make sense.  It’s like asking whether red cars are faster than blue cars.  Academic rigor and freedom of choice are unrelated.  One can choose very easy classes, very difficult classes, or a mix.  A program can require very easy classes, very hard classes, or a mix.  And that’s before getting into non-objective definitions of rigor. 

That should be common sense.  But nearly every year I find myself arguing with people who believe that rigor is about control.  It’s frustrating, because the underlying assumptions -- and therefore definitions -- are different, so we wind up talking past each other.

The idea of a longer required sequence of courses, a longer list of required readings, a longer required essay, etc. strikes many academics as obviously more rigorous and, therefore, better. I have failed many times in discussions with colleagues to shift them from this way of thinking. Quality and quantity are rarely so easily linked.

The real effect of these sorts of mechanical methods of increasing rigor may simply be to make the work load less possible and/or less palatable for many students. Students who are struggling academically, students with less natural talent for reading and writing, students who have to spend more time working for a wage, or students with other compelling intellectual interests, all may fail when rigor is increased in this way. This looks like what has been achieved is making your program/class/assignment more selective since fewer successfully complete it. True enough. But finding the breaking point beyond which only the most academically gifted and well supported students can succeed is very different from fostering excellence in education. In fact, it may be a sign of just the opposite. If the only students who succeed are the most talented ones, that's not very compelling evidence for the quality of our instruction. If one gave voice lessons, but the only students who passed your course were already Grammy winners, it's not clear you're doing much good for your students. They would all sing wonderfully no matter what you were teaching. That we can teach things to wonderful students does not really say much about our teaching skills.

Instead, the goal of rigor starts to feel a bit like a form of academic hazing. We add more required readings, more and longer writing assignments, more and more difficult exams, and the result of this increased work load is called "rigor." We weed out the students unable or unwilling to suffer enough. Making something difficult and making something good are different goals. Strangely enough, making something difficult is easy, and we tend to do that well in academia. Making something good is much harder, and creating an environment where learning is facilitated is much more difficult than creating an environment where learning is hard. A fallacy of composition no doubt lurks somewhere behind many of our discussions of academic rigor.

Random Bullets on Academic Labor

There's been an unusually wide assortment of blog posts, discussions, and news items on academic labor issues this week. Due to the conditions of my own academic labor, and the size of the stacks of papers and exams to grade on my desk, I can't do more than briefly list them here:

• Inside Higher Ed is reporting on the recent American Federation of Teachers report on adjunct usage nation wide.

• Dean Dad takes umbrage at the AFT report. It calls for paying adjuncts significantly more for the work they already do. Dean Dad notices this would be bad for budgets. LumpenProf takes umbrage at Dean Dad's umbrage. When workers are paid below the poverty line the way to fix this is to pay them more, not work them harder. This always hurts budgets. And just as unions managed to cut the work week in half and keep their pay the same during the depression, look for academic workers to aim at increasing wages while keeping their hours the same during the coming depression. Never waste a good crisis. Academic labor needs to come out of this crisis stronger and better organized than ever.

• This quote posted by Ortho seems very timely as well: "An ersatz program imposed from above always looks better to an administrator than a proposal growing organically from a constituency below. And power does corrupt." -- Cary Nelson & Stephen Watt, Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education

• Acephalus and Tenured Radical respond to the miseries of Sisyphus' current academic job search.

• And I've been having an intriguing, if somewhat vexed, discussion over on Dead Voles about the status of the lumpenprofessoriat. When you can't even get the Marxist profs on board with the idea of unionizing, it starts to look like a long row to hoe.
  

Academic Transgressions

Transgression is a prerogative of rank. We in the lower orders have to obey. Sometimes it just gets a little frustrating. – Confessions of a Community College Dean

This wonderful line is in response to a post from Easily Distracted on re-imagining the liberal arts curriculum (this discussion also continues on Reassigned Time as well). CCCD notes that his own community college isn't free innovate or experiment with ways to reinvent the college curriculum because of its place within the academic food chain. Instead, it is constrained to fill the requirements set by four year institutions. CCCD is exactly right: "Transgression is a prerogative of rank."

But this insight holds true not only between institutions, but also within institutions.

At my own Bizarro University, we are currently in the midst of a "reorganization" which has meant that faculty who for decades had been able to envision and implement an interdisciplinary program of study not unlike the one imagined by Easily Distracted, have instead been disbanded. The ability to transgress and innovate has been moved higher up the chain of command and is now the demesne of Provosts and Vice Chancellors. This is simply one of the most recent manifestations of the corporate university structure as it is being played out on my campus. Now, rather than curricular decisions about interdisciplinary programs being made by the faculty and implemented by the administration, the order has been reversed. The administration decides, and the faculty is supposed to implement.

The problems with this structure will no doubt plague us for many years to come. And as CCCD correctly notes: "Sometimes it just gets a little frustrating."

A Cog's Eye View

Academic Cog has a very interesting post on contingent academic labor from the vantage point of a TA working under an adjunct lecturer. Academic Cog writes:

... huge numbers of classes are being taught by people who know they are here only temporarily and who already have an eye on the future and one foot out the door, frantically scrambling to grab a permanent position. Because the adjunct positions are there permanently, only with different individuals cycled in and out of them, what the university ends up with is instructors who are permanently job seeking and distracted. If you put 30 hours a week on an intensive and draining job search, how much time are you going to put in additionally to a job that pays you crap wages? How will that time break down per student given the class sizes?

In short, why invest any more time or effort or collegiality or service into a university that is investing practically nothing in you?

This is yet another face of the current reliance on contingent faculty to teach an ever increasing share of college classes. There are very good reasons to limit the number of years a university can exploit a particular adjunct at starvation wages (and to my mind the fewer years the better -- zero would be ideal). But as Academic Cog notes, the adjunct positions themselves are there permanently. This means that there is revolving door of new faces occupying these underpaid and overworked positions. The result of this is that the institution is buying faculty who cannot afford to invest the time and effort into their teaching that everyone involved -- students, administrators, TA's, other faculty, and not least the adjunct faculty member him or herself -- wishes to be able to devote to teaching.

This is why the question of adjuncts and accreditation begins to loom so large. Adjunct use creates structural limitations on the quality of instruction -- through no fault of the hard working adjunct faculty themselves. Unlike Confessions of a Community College Dean (CCCD), I think linking university accreditation with limits on the use of contingent labor is exactly the right place to apply pressure. Universities cannot be expected to resist the lure of cheap contingent faculty labor without some equally powerful disincentive. Accreditation provides universities with a materially relevant reason to limit their use of adjunct faculty. Moral arguments alone against this exploitation are always doomed to fail when confronted with the realities of a limited budget.

CCCD is rightly concerned, though, that externally imposed limits on the number of adjuncts allowed will simply encourage institutions to game the system and may even force some institutions to increase their use of adjuncts up to the legal limit. This is why I think it will still be necessary to eliminate the existing wage differentials between contingent and tenure-track faculty. As long as adjuncts can be hired on the cheap and without benefits, institutions will continue to exploit them. In fact, the fiduciary responsibilities of an institution's administrators will virtually demand it. Therefore, a twin-pronged strategy focusing on linking accreditation with minimizing adjunct use, coupled with raising adjunct salaries seems necessary.

As to CCCD's other concern about the relevance of limiting adjunct use to the goals of accreditation itself, there is Marc Bousquet's recent article in Inside Higher Ed. CCCD writes:

More to the point, what is the point of accreditation? I've always understood it as a way of assuring prospective students that the institution is what it says it is, rather than some fly-by-night operation. To the extent that it's really about the students, I'm not entirely sure what a magic cutoff number for adjuncts has to do with it.

As Marc Bousquet writes:

First-year students are more likely to persist to their sophomore year when high-stakes “gate-keeper” courses are taught by permanent faculty, and campus unions generate significantly greater undergraduate experience of tenure-stream faculty, observe two studies just released at the annual convention of the American Education Research Association.

This can be coupled with other findings that show that:

A national analysis of graduation and program completion rates at community colleges has found that institutions with higher percentages of full-time faculty members have higher completion rates.

And student retention and persistence to graduation are certainly legitimate and appropriate concerns for accreditation.

Or you can simply look again at the situation faced by Academic Cog who, as the TA for an overworked and underpaid adjunct, sees firsthand the ways students get short-changed by these working conditions:

You know what they call the TA who makes up for this situation by putting in extra time and effort to actually teach the students something about writing and critical thinking and writes lots of insightful, constructive comments on drafts and essays?

Sucker.