A couple of months ago, I got a call from the Associate Dean in our Faculty of Management. They were putting on a professional development conference, and she wondered if I would give a ninety-minute session.
I jumped at the chance.
The event helped me provide some professional development to our Arts and Science instructors in Calgary and Edmonton, and so it was only fair that I helped provide the content. She gave me a generic title -- "Empowering Classroom Instructors" -- but I decided to give the talk on academic freedom. I was reading both Matthew FInkin and Robert Post's For The Common Good and Stanley Fish's Save The World On Your Own Time, and I was thinking quite a bit about what latitude we are granted in the classroom. The talk was a lot of work. I dragged the books halfway around the world and chewed on them a little bit. In the end, I think our little group of twenty university teachers raised and discussed at least a dozen related issues. I still have not processed all we covered, but I do come back again and again to the reaction to one of Fish's assertions. Basically, he suggests that many university professors do too much -- what he describes as doing someone else's job -- and that gets us away from our true tasks. "College and university teachers can (legitimately) do two things," he claims, "(1) introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry that had not previously been part of their experience; and (2) equip those same students with the analytical skills -- of argument, statistical modeling, laboratory procedure -- that will enable them to move confidently within those traditions and to engage in independent research after a course is over."
There is a part of me to which this appeals a great deal. I am but one station on the assembly line of someone's life. I can describe my job, and I can learn to do it well. But I think it is fair to say that my colleagues at the conference were appalled. Almost everyone believed us to be participating in some much more comprehensive, holistic education of citizens. But while my analogy of the line worker may be unfair -- imagine the teacher as Lucille Ball trying to sort candy -- I am not sure that we should assign "quality control" to professors, either. I introduce them to the concepts, sharpen the tools, and send them out to think for themselves. Don't I?
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