Survey Time at Enema U

Enema U has declared war on classrooms again.  There are administrators who firmly believe a perfect university would be divided into two spheres, a large area consisting of administrative offices, and a smaller area consisting of dorms, cafeterias, parking spaces, and a bookstore.  The purpose of the latter area is dedicated to separating students from their money as fast as possible.

It goes without saying that all of the above is just a carbuncle on the backside of a bad football team that loses millions of dollars annually.  There is evidently no reason to have an institution of higher learning except to serve as a life support system for poor athletics.  Exactly why politicians in one of the poorest states in the union continue to pour millions and millions of dollars down a drain so the state can have two losing college football teams is still a mystery.  (Personally, I believe it has something to do with coaches in possession of photographs of certain plutocrats in bed with either live boys or dead girls.)

For years now, the administration has pushed as many classes as possible onto the internet, believing that “distance education” offers the best chance of collecting tuition while not having to actually see, hear, or speak to a student.  Or the disgusting faculty.  For a moment, putting the entire curriculum online seemed within reach…. but students started complaining about the logic of being forced to live in the dorms and buy those expensive gruel plans to use in the cafeteria if they were never going to be allowed inside a classroom.

Administrators don’t care to learn what most faculty have long since known—distance education is a piss poor way to run a classroom.   While the occasional autodidact will learn in spite of the delivery system, for the most part students will pretend to learn while the faculty will pretend to teach.  Rarely does anyone ever address the real question on everyone’s mind:  If online education really works, why would a student enroll for classes at Enema U, a poor agricultural school in a poor state?  Why not enroll at Stan-Bridge-Ford University, Incorporated?  And don’t think that idea isn’t being discussed at some large Ivy League university looking for more money to support their own losing football team.

Suddenly, students are being inundated with surveys about what they think the campus should look like.  The survey questions are carefully written to steer the responses towards the results that will support what the administration has already decided to do.  None of the questions allows the student to describe his real opinion:  rather, he is asked to pick his preference from four tiny pictures, three of which depict a pig pen on fire.

I’m not sure why the head squirrels even bother with the charade of hiring an expert—always being an out-of-town friend of someone in the Administration who will someday return the favor—to write these phony surveys.  Students get so much of this nonsense that the response rate is probably no better than the average Nigerian prince gets from his spam emails.  Nor would it matter since the results of the survey are as predetermined as a Russian election.

I have seen this charade before.  Years ago, I was selected to serve on a faculty committee to determine the design for a new classroom building.  For months, we met with architects—none of whom had ever taught a single class in any subject anywhere—who nevertheless told us that all of our ideas about what a classroom should look like were outmoded, obsolete, and ridiculous.  Since most of us wanted an improved lecture hall, we were obviously retarded.  No, the modern classroom was completely different.

“The ‘Sage on the Stage’ is dead,” we were told.  No longer would students sit in a tiered classroom watching some egghead on a raised platform lecture.  Instead, learning should be collaborative, the furniture should be on wheels to facilitate group learning, and every wall in the room should be a ‘learning wall’, which presumably meant that it would have some kind of electronic screen.  

It didn’t matter that no faculty member on the committee had ever even seen such a classroom, or that none of us believed that we would ever teach that way:  we were overruled, and a final blueprint was finally approved whose classrooms no faculty member would ever willingly use.  As it turned out, it didn’t matter, since the approved blueprint was thrown out by the administration and a completely different design was used (one with fewer classrooms and more administrative offices).

The resulting building did have something that the recent student survey really focused on—collaborative learning spaces.  These spaces, which are so very important to people who have never taught, are large open spaces outside of classrooms, where students and faculty can meet informally and discuss important matters.  Deep, deep important matters!

What horseshit.  Before a lecture, a good professor is reviewing lecture notes, checking email, and making sure the PowerPoint presentation is loaded into a computer.  After a lecture, a good professor is headed directly to his office to recover and to start grading papers.  Unless, of course, he has back-to-back lectures and must hurry on to the next classroom which is probably located in a different building.  Neither the students nor the professor has the luxury of sufficient time to lounge around those common areas and hold court.  The whole idea of ‘learning spaces’ is foolish.  If students have the time between classes to study, they are going to do it in a library, in their dorm, or in a computer lab.

For some reason, the administration does not see the obvious contradiction of its two desired goals:  How do you promote distance learning while holding on to the ideal of collaborative leaning spaces?  

Increasingly, when classrooms are built, they are crowded, smaller rooms, without tiered seating.  The old heavy furniture is being replaced with lightweight small tables and seats not much larger than those provided by budget airlines flying people unfortunate to be traveling peasant class.  While every room is guaranteed to have an expensive computer and projector, the screen is most likely covering most—if not all—of the white board.  (And damn it, provide the faculty with unlimited amounts of black dry erase markers.  Have you ever tried to read pale green handwriting on a small board inconveniently located in the far corner of a rectangular classroom?)

I suspect, but cannot prove, that most of these silly ideas come from people teaching elementary and secondary public schools.  This is an area where I have almost no experience outside of teaching a single history course one summer for high school students with disciplinary problems who had been expelled during the regular term.  (I taught it like a regular college course and after beaning a rude student with an eraser the first day of class, the rest of the summer went perfectly normally.  In total, they were much better students than you would find in the College of Education.)

The needs of teaching at a university are nothing like the needs of a third-grade classroom.  Students are required to spend the entire day in the latter while a decade later those same students have to pay to spend an hour in the former.  So, there is no reason to design a university lecture hall to look like a kindergarten classroom.  And yes, if I have only 55 minutes to explain the Protestant Reformation to 100 students who can’t spell either word, you can be damn certain I’m going to lecture because I am the ‘Sage on the Stage’.

And you better take notes on that tiny little wobbly desk, as there will be a quiz on Thursday.