Toward a Different Accountability:
Problems Teaching an Introductory Philosophy Course at the Community College
Francis Conroy
Burlington County College
I want to do two things: to explain the rather simple, beloved, somewhat traditional and seemingly non-controversial ‘Philosophy 101’ course that I teach, and to analyze the rather startling barrage of forces perched ever-ready to destroy it. In doing so I will get into some questions concerning effective pedagogy with today’s community college students and some problems of the social-structural environment for humanities education, particularly relating to accountability.
To provide a certain baptism into thought and the humanities, the Philosophy 101 course may be our best chance to get at many community college students. We want to model for them several things at once:
With regard to critical thinking, the starting place comes well before the classroom. Today as we conceive our course in the first place we need to be aware of those forces that would keep us under control. In the Soviet Union these might have come from the Politboro, but for us they come from the corporate environment. Textbook companies, regional accrediting agencies (such as Middle States), state and national government, and college management are arguably all, to some degree, intermediary puppets in a social structure characterized by the unprecedented control of powerful corporations. This is the great din and roar of our times; someday it too will pass. In the meantime, the quiet little voice of the Philosophy 101 professor needs to speak up for thinking. “How do I model and encourage wresting oneself free from that – so freedom might have a chance to begin?” he asks himself. Hegel once said, “Thinking is essentially the negation of what is immediately before us.” What is before us is an enormously coercive power that can bend all truth. It, too wants ‘critical thinking’: but critical thinking within the boxes! Yet to think critically is inherently to find our way out of the boxes. It is here that we begin.
The critical thinking issue connects to the question of books. “We owe it to ourselves,” says Helen Vendler cited in Habits of the Heart,
to show our students, when they first meet us, what we are: we owe their dormant appetites, thwarted for so long in their previous schooling, that deep sustenance that will make them realize that they, too, having been taught, love what we love.
“What we are” is readers of books. Go into our studies and you will find myriads. Not textbooks, those aren’t what we love, but real books -- ‘texts,’ in the cultural studies sense of the term (and our music, art on our walls, video collections, etc., may also be ‘texts’). How do we pass this on to our students -- who own no books? What should they buy in the bookstore, on our watch?
With regard to writing, we need to understand that in philosophy, in the humanities generally, and probably in the humanistic side of the social sciences, there is really no alternative to assigning writing in our courses -- and to writing ourselves. Writing is part of our respiration: if reading is breathing in, writing is breathing out. How did all these books get here? People wrote them. Are we to be just spectators? Writing, of course, is difficult. Facing the blank sheet of paper is the start of judgment, creativity -- holistic thought. “How should I frame this?” “How do I want to begin?” “What do I want to sound like?” The students are terrible at this. All the more reason they need to start now! But do we write ourselves? Have we let it atrophy? Do we write before our peers, our publics, and our critics? The reading and writing in our times is at a notoriously low level. And we have been swayed to teach ovals?
With regard to dialoguing, we might first ask ourselves: Are we involved in our times? Do we regularly exchange ideas with other professors at other colleges and universities, and with the educated public? Are we part of the vigorous debates of the era? Do we, as Camus once said, “insert our art into our times”? Do we insert our voice with appropriate virtues (not shrill, hectoring or blinkered)? Then, are our classrooms filled with that aura: are they participatory, alive, informed? Are students “listened into speech” (as Parker Palmer has phrased it)? Are students frequently talking -- on task -- and is this given importance and dignity as a main goal?
The Course
My Philosophy 101 course draws on the above four areas of concern. The difference (between my course and the more cookie-cutter model) begins the day the students buy the books. I have my students buy six:
Plato, The Symposium, Nehamas translation
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Kaufman translation
Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, Hannay translation
Marx, Selected Writings
Gandhi, Selected Political Writings
Westphal and Levenson, Life and Death.
Virtually everyone else in the community college has assigned a ‘textbook.’ But when the students begin my course, they come home with a bag of small, beautiful books, of the sort that might begin the home library of an educated family. (When I was a young man, I hung around with literate working class people, often union people, and organizers. Many had books such as these on their shelves – hundreds! This inspired my vision of teaching ‘the common’ man and woman. Of course, the upper class, too, prefers books. In my first week back to school – spring 2004, Religion 352, Princeton -- I was sent to the bookstore, and came out with a stack of 14 books. I also browsed through the aisles to see what everyone else was reading. This is part of the excitement of being in school.)
The titles above are, in a way, idiosyncratic to me; but they are not at all arbitrary. The trained eye of the profession might say, “Yes, let us grant that Conroy may use six books. But why these? Wouldn’t there be more obvious choices: Descartes’ Meditations and Hume’s Enquiry on the Human Understanding, for example?” I used those at one time. Here is where a quarter century of experience with community college students comes in. I have found, over the years, that such students (who have a considerable range of abilities, by the way) are better able to cope with the predictably staggering vocabulary and forbidding conceptual level of almost all works of philosophy if the book is also urgent, beautiful, funny, outrageous, or otherwise compelling. The drier treatises may teach the epistemological lessons we want; however, if the students can’t or won’t read them, they are of little use. I find it works better to inject a little Hume in the context of A.J. Ayer’s 1989 essay “The Meaning of Life,” for example, than to assign Hume himself.
The ensemble of the books that I work with reminds me somewhat of the formula for good music at a dance or wedding: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. Like Glenn Miller, I find part of my job is to be a doctor of moods. Another part is to take care of my own mood: if I stick close to teaching what I love, the whole project has more of a chance of getting off the ground. And if I also teach what I truly understand, then there is even more chance. Then I am so at home with what I am doing that my main focus can turn to listening to the students.
The opening must be very special: I have to love what I do the first week. Here I juxtapose Gandhi and Camus. My love of philosophy comes out of both the inward (the inner life) and the outward (social and political imperatives). These two men both question violence – killing -- deeply, but one (Camus) as pure human assertion rising out of what he calls “these deserts” (the existentialist moral landscape); the other as gentle listening, coming out of sacred metaphysical holism: Sat (Being), satyagraha (truth force), ahimsa (non-harming),and swaraj (freedom).
After the opening, the first unit begins in earnest. Our focus is Life and Death. (I have often considered using another book from the Hackett series – maybe Reality, or The Good Life, but I keep coming back due to the urgency of this title.) We proceed from the existential – Camus -- to the analytical, Ayer and Nagel; then to two feminine voices Simone de Beauvoir (a feminist) and Simone Weil (a twentieth-century mystic). The students finish the unit stunned: how strange philosophy is – so unlike any other discipline!
From the largely skeptical 20th century moods of the existential and the analytical, we turn now to the social, celebratory, visionary, and riotous: Plato’s Symposium. To make the contrast more vivid, in the third week we try acting it out. In an uncanny way, our mood is always ready for the shift to Plato, both in content (metaphysical) and form (dialogue, play).
Next comes Nietzsche. I use the Nietzsche of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, critically relentless but also full of adventure, war, laughter, dance and sneezes, rather than the Nietzsche of The Genealogy of Morals, also deconstructing, better organized, but hard to take (he needs to” lighten up,” as my students, who used to hurl this book into the trash can, might put it). Nietzsche advances our boldness and widens our range concerning how to think critically: by now we have gone through Camus’s existential approach, and Ayer’s analytic; de Beauvoir’s feminist, and Weil’s ‘detachment’; the Socratic model and Plato’s own dialogic one. Now Nietzsche ups-the-ante with ‘the will to power’ and ‘re-evaluating all values.’ In the unit we build toward a day of student small-group attempts to interpret Zarathustra on warriors, the state, friendship, the neighbor, pity, marriage and women. More of the men come alive in these weeks; Nietzsche doesn’t condemn aggression.
After Nietzsche I always find we need a dose of Kierkegaard. (God can be left dead only so long.) My experience is that students who wouldn’t otherwise even attempt to read such difficult prose find The Sickness Unto Death urgent and stunning. (We have to face that many students in community college never read the assignments. We must continually entice them into reading.) One mother of three, just back to school after fifteen years as a housewife, told me last semester concerning Kierkegaard’s internal dialectic of the despairing self, “I didn’t know people wrote about things like that.” I have students work in small groups trying to figure out the various forms and disguises that despair takes; then they present their findings to the whole class.
Kierkegaard sets us up for Marx. The link is dialectic, and comes by way of Hegel: both reacted to his Phenomenology of Spirit, yet in such different ways that the split permits us to move all the way from existential inwardness to social justice and action. In some ways this brings us back close to where we started, with Camus and Gandhi. Gandhi’s issues inevitably resurface when we do Marx. The question of non-violence is always on people’s minds.
With Marx, we confront the arguments for philosophical materialism, which we can contrast with idealism and other alternatives. We also connect to what’s going on in the world: to economics, work, class, social change and war. And we get another way of thinking critically about contemporary society: rather than ‘regimes of truth’, the concept of ideology. Many students are slow to warm to Marx. Many are a-political. Many also vaguely (and paradoxically) have the sense that we Americans shouldn’t even be allowed to study this. These considerations seem to me all the more reason to include Marx.
My own doctoral work in the 1970s on Marx, Kierkegaard, and non-violence led to a very personal manuscript Either/Or: Meditations on Ontology and Social Action from the Late Vietnam War Era, which I keep on reserve in the library. For a few of my students, my sharing with them the very personal thinking that I do in these pages becomes the most important thing they get out of my course. The personal, I have found, has its place. The really influential teachers in our lives let us know a little of the real person behind the role.
As the students wind their way through the fourteen weeks, they keep journals, giving responses to each philosopher. This inclusion of writing is a central and indispensable component of the course. It is hard to imagine the course without it. In my experience, if the readings and classroom activities lead only to multiple-choice tests, the whole atmosphere changes. The students switch gears from what Spear and McGrath call “texting” -- a nuanced and holistic art that opens us to see complexity -- to “bitting,” a narrowing technique that redirects us toward the high-schoolish goal of trying to figure out what the teacher wants.
Nevertheless, my course is not altogether free of multiple choice. It is here again that I can offer, for what its worth, the fruits of 25 years of experience. Taking into account realistically the limitations of the community college professor’s situation –
-- taking into account all of the above, I do include a small, highly sophisticated multiple-choice test with each unit. Using questions that really get to the heart of whether the student has understood complex reading, I cure many students of lazily expecting the social ‘B’ for their journal entries by showing them, in 30 multiple-choice questions, that they unfortunately still misunderstand the text. When a student sees that the class’s test results are spread out between ‘40’ and ‘100,’and he or she received a 40, the student is more likely to acknowledge that there is probably something lacking. It’s not just that ‘the teacher doesn’t like the way I write.’
I say in the syllabus that the heart of the course is the writing. This is consistent with the grading ratio: 50% of the weight goes to writing (30% journals, 20% final in-class writing) and only 30% to the multiple-choice tests. The other 20% goes to class participation, an unusually high proportion. My purpose here is to give students still another way to show me that they are learning. Some students have horrible blocks: test anxiety, writing blocks, or extreme shyness, but if I get multiple readings on them, I can then make adjustments.
One more thing about the journals: I make it a point not to take these home until the end of the semester. I check them in class, using the best speed-reading skills I can muster, while the students are taking each unit test. I write a few crucial comments. Sometimes I add, “See me!” The last week in the semester, when I need no more preparation time for classes, I can immerse myself for a week in student writing. I find that if I bog myself down in 101-student writing every week, my preparation for class falls precipitously and the stress level becomes unhealthy.
My approach to Philosophy 101 bears my mark as an individual. I would assume the same of any other professor in our department. In fact, there is only one full-time: my colleague Anne Miller. What connects Anne’s and my sections is a list of 12 mutually negotiated objectives. These emphasize fundamental matters: “demonstrating an ability to reason logically and critically,” “recognizing, analyzing and evaluating alternative views of the nature of reality,” “demonstrating an ability to approach new ideas with an open mind.” We also require that all PHI 101 students do a final in-class essay on a question they don’t know in advance; and that at least 1/3 of the weight in evaluating students be given to their writing. We have no common list of required philosophers or readings. I wouldn’t want Anne to have to teach Nietzsche and Marx; she wouldn’t want me to have to teach Aquinas and Descartes.
The worth of such a set-up, with its natural kind of accountability, seems obvious to me. It stems from what I learned as a student at Haverford College in the late 1960s and early 70s. I studied in a department that Choice magazine called “classical to the core,” one of the country’s “ten best.” It was put together by Paul Desjardins, a warm, chaotic, authentically Socratic genius, whose loves stretched from Plato and Hume to the Confucian Analects. He assembled a collection of individualists: he himself was a passionate Augustianian Catholic, but he brought to Haverford Richard Bernstein, a New Left intellectual who taught and wrote on Marx and Hegel; ‘Tink’ Thompson, a brilliant student of Kierkegaard and an expert on the Kennedy assassination; Areyeh Kosman, a Jewish Aristotlean wise man who taught Aristotle and the Early Moderns; Bob Kane, a talented philosopher of science; and Ashok Gangadean, a logician who loved the logos of Krishna and Gandhi. Each professor taught a section of the introductory course. These sections would clearly bear the mark of the professor: only with Paul would the introductory student study Heraclitus, Parmenides and Augustine; only with Thompson, the existentialists; only with Bernstein, the 19th century Germans. Everyone included Plato, but the dialogues varied: only Paul, the Phaedrus.
The members of the department were deeply respectful of one another. Each knew the other’s work well. They were accountable to each other, as well as to a broader network of professionals. They had, what I would call, a “back-stretched connection.” I have adapted the term from Heraclitus, who had the insight that night and day, summer and winter, war and peace were in a sense the same. This turned around was that. Opposites were united, in a paradoxical way. Such back-stretched connections, I would argue, are an appropriate way of keeping order in the humanities, a kind of consistency that is not the hobgoblin of little minds.
Desjardins was quite different from Bernstein, and today Conroy is quite different from Miller. Yet such pairs are united – this is the genius of the classic department -- in a subtle and crucial way. The student is in for a different treat if he/she signs up for Conroy’s section rather than Miller’s. But this is the way it should be. The logic of the humanities defies the grids of science and technology. In this way we preserve the chance for individual brilliance to flourish, and for memorable teachers to breathe. Of course, to get to where this is possible, faculty need to be hired well, tenured well, nurtured well – and they need to be expected to get to know each other well. Then they do not have to be on the same page on the same date. They don’t even have to be in the same book.
Inappropriate Accountability: Enabling the Addiction of Outsourcing
It is with the advent of the corporate model, and the emergence of its current social-structural imperative to outsource, that all this falls apart. Ironically, the social structure now asks us full-time faculty, with our heritage of true departments and back-stretched connections, to become enablers for outsourcing.
I will call the trend of replacement of full-time faculty by low-paid itinerants ‘outsourcing.’ Although the term doesn’t fit perfectly, it conveys a sense that men and women with sustainable incomes, reasonably dignified conditions of labor, and health and retirement benefits are being replaced by people who will work for less, accept less dignity, and hope they will never get sick or old. I want to argue that as enablers for outsourcing we face a double irony: (1) We have to take away much time from our own creative work to construct and maintain the grids by which a McDonaldized instruction comes to prevail. (2) We are then required to go back and change our own courses to better fit the McDonaldized model that we have created for adjuncts.
I use George Ritzer’s term ‘McDonaldization’ here because it is the only term comprehensive enough to fit. Ritzer notes that there are four components of McDonaldization: efficiency, calculability, replicability, and control. The vast outsourcing enterprise toward which the corporate agenda compels us needs desperately to put many, many adjuncts – the majority of whom are relative strangers – under the control of management. This is such an overriding imperative that the college administrations, the textbook companies (themselves giant corporations), the bookstores, the regional accrediting agencies like Middle States, and even the Secretary of Education in Washington all join together to facilitate this control.
These constitute the “barrage of forces perched to destroy” the course described in the first half of this essay. Every element in my Philosophy 101 course is inconvenient, dangerous, even anathema to that process of control. Books rather than a textbook? writing rather than multiple-choice tests? class participation as a major component of evaluation? out-of-the-box critical thinking? – all are anathema. In terms of books, how is a college going to deal with a dozen adjuncts, each with her own “six beautiful books”? In terms of writing, how is the administration or Middle States ever going to have the time actually to read from the vast files of student writing that each professor keeps? (“Can’t the results be quantified?” the outcomes police always ask.) In terms of critical thinking, the situation is complicated by the fact that the institutional goals already call for critical thinking – and specify that it must be measured and quantified. This may be the ultimate irony -- critical thinking itself has to be within the boxes, tamed. Of course, this would certainly not be what Hegel meant by critical thinking, nor Marx, nor Nietzsche, nor Socrates. An apparent corollary: we are never to teach -- or practice -- critical thinking about the conditions of the emergence of the system in the first place, i.e. the system of efficiency, calculability, replicability and control.
Of course, we do not want to be too harsh on individuals. The Academic Vice Presidents are under the gun like other corporate managers. They have a daunting task. The typical community college must prove to the outside world that, while it may have converted over the last ten years from 70% of courses taught by full-time faculty and 30% by adjuncts, to 30% of courses taught by full-time faculty and 70% by adjuncts, that there has been no loss in quality. This could be difficult. I humbly submit that this may encourage emphasis on presentation more than substance. By expert paperwork and the enforcement of grids, we make up for the loss of sustainable faculties with back-stretched connections.
When Middle States visited Burlington County College five years ago, it witnessed a college turned upside down by the startling conversion rate to adjuncts. And yet, in its mandates for five-year review, it emphasized only ‘outcomes assessment.’ What are we to conclude?
Suggestions
Let me close with three simple suggestions that might get things going in the right direction: