The Graves of Academe - Richard Mitchell (electronic book reader .txt) 📗

they start taking education courses and start worrying more about enhancing their personological variables than about collecting more knowledge. (Furthermore, teaching obviously has to be done in a school, and many of our schools, after decades of eschewing “mere information” in the cause of “worthy citizenship,” have turned into lawless encampments of armed barbarians where no one can teach and no one can learn.) Those who are short on intelligence, diligence, and talent, however, find their luck much improved by the fact that the teachers’ colleges are designed for just such people.

Thus, partly because so many have incompetence thrust upon them, and partly because so many are born to incompetence, in every faculty there will be people who just can’t handle the entry-level position. In industry, or even in a fast-food restaurant, they would be washed out; but we don’t do that kind of thing in the schools, especially since public school teaching is more and more used by government as a jobs program for the less able. In the schools, those who cannot do the work at the lowest rank are simply promoted into higher ranks. Weirdly enough, given the nature of the educational enterprise, this makes perfect sense.

In those realms where the Peter Principle prevails, it is often true that higher rank and higher pay do go along with harder work. In the schools, where there is no harder work than teaching in a classroom, exactly the opposite is true. In fact, it is not at all absurd to imagine a perfectly splendid school in which there are only teachers and one clever and industrious handyman who can also type. On the other hand, think for a moment about the school toward which, as all the statistics suggest, we might be moving, a school made up almost entirely of administrators and their own “support services.” (They usually call them that.) In such a school we would see clearly what we now can see only darkly, through the frosted glass of governmental mandate and educationistic dogma: that almost all of the work done by those above the rank of teacher is contrived so that there may be more workers. Thus it is that so much of the administrative work done in schools is intended not to do work , as a physicist would use the term, but to occupy time and justify the existence of some administrative post.

It turns out, not surprisingly therefore, that the mindless and inflated jargon, superbly suited to the darkening of logic and the interminable belaboring of the obvious, is exactly the language that an educationistic administrator needs in order to conceal the fact that the work he does simply doesn’t need doing. If you want to rise in the school business, you have to master the lingo. This is another reason why good teachers don’t become principals and superintendents: The very attributes that make them good teachers also make it impossible for them to talk about experiential remediation enhancement strategies with straight faces. And if there is one attribute a principal or superintendent needs, it’s a perfectly straight face. You have to believe. Solemnly.

When those who can’t teach want to improve themselves by becoming supervisors of those who can teach, they must go through, once again, the strait gate of the teachers’ college. Outside of that church, there is no salvation. They must return, perhaps on Monday and Thursday evenings, to the study, if that’s the word, of such arcana as Curriculum Development and Supervision, Career and Guidance Counseling, and Educational Administration/Management. Since there is little to be learned about such matters, the courses are easy, requiring mostly the ability to tolerate ponderous recitations of the trivial and obvious and a mind just weak enough to fall without a struggle into an habitual inanity in language. These are the very proclivities that have made the poorer teachers what they are, so there is no shortage of suitable candidates for graduate study in the schools of education. While the steady stream of aspirants to lofty (nonteaching) rank assures perpetual public funding for the teachers’ colleges and pleasant, permanent employment for professors of education, it has some even more unhappy consequences. It assures that the anti-intellectual climate of the public high schools will prevail in the colleges and universities as well. Except for the uncharacteristically depraved, professors of chemistry or history, or of any traditional discipline with a concrete and growing body of knowledge, simply don’t want to do the boring and empty work of administration. They gladly leave that to the educationists and other nonacademic arrivistes in higher education, who gladly take it. Thus it comes to pass that in most of our colleges and universities policy decisions about academic matters are regularly made by direct descendants of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, to whom intellectual discipline and mere information are pesky impediments to worthy ethical character and right emotional response.

The work of school administration, therefore, usually has two typical attributes: Because it must justify the very existence of school administration, it must seem time-consuming and difficult. Because it is an instrument of educationistic ideology, it must be “humanistic” and “democratic,” as the educationists understand those terms, which is to say emotional and collective rather than coldly knowledgeable and authoritarian. You can recognize in the typical administrative committee, therefore, a long-trouser version of the social studies class envisioned in Cardinal Principles, where it is imagined that ignorant but right-feeling children will corporately hatch out wisdom.

Here, from the pages of The Underground Grammarian, is an example of how the administrative work of an institution of higher education is actually done:

Ask a Stupid Question…

Glassboro has so many low-ranking, junior administrators that it’s hard to find them useful work. We don’t even try, in fact; we just find them things to play with.

George Wildman and Robert Harris are co-chairmen of the Task Force on Recruitment, Retention, and Image. We don’t know how they produce their prose — whether by one as told to the other or by taking turns word by word — but here’s how it comes out:

In the first two sessions of the Task Force, the group explored the task facing them. Discussion ensued during these sessions concerning the goals and objectives to be accomplished. The Committee began the task of gathering supporting data by virtue of reports supplied by the offices of Admissions, Counseling, and the Registrar. Considerable time was spent attempting to define terminology as a basis for functioning, and much thought was given in an attempt to identify some of the major concerns which the Task Force would be facing in its work.

The first, second, and fourth sentences of that paragraph say the same thing, although the fourth does add that bit about defining “terminology [terms?] as a basis for functioning.” The third sentence actually has its own thing to say, but only that they “began the task of gathering.” Does that mean that they began gathering or that they began getting ready to gather? This sentence also uses “by virtue of” as though it meant “from.” Never ask a junior administrator to say something straight out. He’d rather be knocked flat in an airport by O. J. Simpson. (Good idea.)

Since the combined salaries of the twenty members of the Task Force must be more than half a million dollars a year we’re glad to report that their labor has had some results. As early as their second meeting, they divided themselves into three “interest-area subcommittees” (shouldn’t that be sub-Task Forces or Task Forcelets?), one each for Recruitment, Retention, and Image.

They did more. Each interest-area subcommittee undertook to “define its term.”

Now you would think that any fool could define recruitment, retention, and even image, although why that should be necessary is not clear. We have to guess that many members of the Task Force were unacquainted with those words and needed remediational input.

Discussion ensued by virtue of input, and tasks were explored. Thought was given in an attempt, and time was spent attempting.

By the next meeting, each “interest-area” subcommittee had defined “its term.” Here’s what they found — as a basis for functioning:

recruitment: the institution’s philosophy and procedures by which we attempt to attract students to continue their education…

retention: the ability of the college to hold students who are pursuing a degree program (B.A., M.A., including certification) .

image: the reflection of reality and substance.

The language of these administrators is symbolic, as language always is, although in this case not consciously symbolic. They do on the page exactly what they do in their jobs. They say over and over again a thing that needs no saying in the first place. They set themselves, at public expense, to the silly task of defining, in groups no less, terms (or, as they prefer, terminology) that need no defining. If their labors were successful, they would learn at great expense of time and money what any thoughtful person could have told them at their first meeting, and they will inevitably propose the obvious. They will urge more recruitment and retention along with image-enhancement.

It is important for the ordinary citizen to realize that such committees, through whose agency almost everything is done in Academe, are not composed entirely of administrators. There will always be some members who are only incipient administrators making themselves useful and noteworthy, some junior professors bucking for promotion and not at all reluctant to be parties to a lengthy and arduous reinvention of the wheel, and other faculty members somewhat less than passionately devoted to their chosen disciplines. The latter, of course, are usually from an education department, where a passionate devotion to discipline is precluded not only by the questionable nature and content of what is taught but by the traditional animosity to discipline itself.

If you can assemble enough such people and assign them an especially ambiguous errand, neither of which is at all difficult in a school, you can easily devise an educationistic enterprise that can go on, literally, forever:

The Future Lies Ahead!

Early in the Fall, the Needs Assessment Task Force was asked to study the process of Academic Planning as it presently exists at Southwest Texas State University and determine whether we should implement a different process. (From the works of Joseph Caputo, VP for AcAff.)

As the time for dinner approaches, the standard American amateur looks in the refrigerator. He notices some food. He takes some of it out and cooks it. Then he eats it. It’s so crude; any savage could do it. Here in Academe, we are “professionals,” and we have better ways of doing things.

First we establish a committee to consider whether or not there should be any dinner, and, if so, whether or not it should actually be eaten, and, if again so, where, and when, and by whom. Then we form a subcommittee to decide what, if anything, to cook, and how. Now we discover that we need a study group to consider whether or not dinner-planning is, in fact, all that simple, and to establish its parameters and to explore the implications of fiscal, curricular, and societal restraints that may be perceived as existing. Or maybe not. But the study group cannot do its work until we have definitive findings from the Needs Assessment Task Force, which is “to study the process of Academic Planning as it presently exists…and determine whether we should implement a different process.”

The Needs Assessment Task Force down at Southwest Texas State University, where the squirrels also rush around the brush, has done its work. Here’s some of it:

An Academic Planning Model must involve a futures planning component. Goals should be set for some time in the future. These goals should be translated into shorter-term objectives for which the degree of detail and concreteness varies inversely with the lead time. There should also be reasonable suspense