During the election , any election we are treated to numerous “persona on the street” interviews where people announce they are “ready for change.” Supporting change is like supporting our troops, willfully dodging the more difficult and concerning act of supporting what kind of change or what activities our troops are sent off to do. Supporting change in general – saying “it’s time for a change in X (the variable standing in for the place where government meets or the large, nondescript category of political activity like “the economy” or “Wall Street,” etc) is really saying that you don’t want to get into the important, specific, researchable elements of why you should support something. You just can’t be bothered to be engaged.

This reminds me of the shocking, and continuously shocking frequency of poor opinion among those who should know better, i.e. professors. Many expressed to me no concern that young people were devouring the Harry Potter books at breakneck speed, claiming “well, at least they are reading.” When I pointed out they would have a different opinion if it turned out they were reading Mein Kampf, I was met with silence. Many colleagues opposed this with that bane of evil, the mobile phone: “At least they are reading and not on their phone all the time.” With the average mental age and culture of my colleagues hovering around 78 years old, I suppose they wouldn’t know that what one primarily does on a phone is read and write. Professors pine for the epistolary age, not even thinking about counting the thousands of words that students write every day on text message, mostly about the ineptitude of the professor to provide a meaningful class. I resolve in 2025 to eliminate my expectation that a professor should know better.

Supporting change, or reading, is also like supporting the university, or tenure. What good are these things as they are? Should they be defended for merely existing? There are many good arguments out there for tenure or for having universities, but we have abandoned most of them. In our froth to retain students, stay open, be competitive, we have reduced the entire arsenal of arguments to one: You’ll have no chance of getting a good job without these skills. But this begs several questions: What good jobs are out there that are directly connected to the university experience? And secondly, does the university teach or provide skills?

It’s anecdotal to be sure, but most of my students are ready to go for a career that isn’t much of one. They will work at one place, then another, then another – skills notwithstanding. What does work is their ability to speak, listen, communicate, and most importantly – rearticulate ideas back to the people who are sloppily groping their way toward a conclusion. The university provides a practice ground for expressing opinion in a meaningful way, a way that gets people to speak back to them or rearticulate their ideas to them so they can be re-expressed in a different way. This practice is somewhat essential not only for career oriented people, or someone who wants a job, but for people who plan to exist and function in a democracy. Expressing doubts about an opinion seems like an ability that the university could really get behind, particularly in a world where we frequently see someone shot or stabbed because of a disagreement about who was in line first.

Skill is a fraught term at best, generally a cover for discrimination – “She didn’t have the requisite skills for the position” is an unassailable position to take for an employer that discourages pushback. However, critical approaches on what counts as a skill reveal the term to often serve as a discriminatory smokescreen. Irena Grugulis, Chris Warhurst, and Ewart Keep note in the introduction to their book The Skills that Matter, most are your race, class, and luck of your educational experiences at a young age. Transferable skills tend to gravitate around whiteness, maleness, and middle-classness. So serving the corporate demand for “communication skills” or “teamwork” need to be interrogated by the university to determine if this is something that is actually demanded. Better yet, the University could just ignore the corporate demand for skill and teach appreciation, practice, and evaluation of critical thought through speaking and writing.

Tenure is another thing that’s easy to defend without a lot of specifics. Defending this as the ability to set the agenda for your research and then what becomes of your teaching seems pretty straightforward. The discussion of this kind of research freedom becomes easy to eliminate when the university, such as mine, pulls back all the research support it can. There’s little value to a tenured position if there is no sabbatical, no course reduction, no office to help you secure a grant or apply for a fellowship, and so on. A redefinition of tenure as having the expertise to evaluate whether students have demonstrated evidence of grasping, understanding, grappling with, or taking into consideration the elements of the course could be helpful. Things like assessment on objective measures fail because we then seek out what is easy to measure and measure it. It’s much more difficult and complex for a teacher to make a professional judgement on the quality of a student’s work and defend it. What is it based on? The professor should be able to show some example of what that quality would be like and explain the gap. This is the function of a rubric, as far as I understand it, but so many rubrics are boxes that contain points and serve as ways to distribute points to students who, from the first day of class, are preparing their case for passing during the last week based on the distinction between a 2.5 and a 3. The ancient argument of the sortie consumes many professors’ time at the end of the term as they hear “Well there’s not much difference here between getting 3 points and getting 5.” This reduces the professor and the student to equals who are at the mercy of the “syllabus as a contract” and interpreting it based on the objective standards of point distribution based on the rules established in this document. Instead, the professor should work on the articulation of what excellence is and how to meet it, with them as the gatekeeper of their field. Tenure is about quality standards, not a permanent protection from political disagreement. It should be thought of as where the power to interpret quality lies. This can of course extend to research as well at those institutions that are not quite to the point of being a “skill factory” like mine is quickly becoming. These confrontations on the level of critical interpretation are vital for students to practice articulation of why and how they might have met these difficult, non-objective standards of excellence set up by someone very well read, very practiced in what they are teaching.

Most young people are not invested in a career unless they want to be a doctor, an airplane designer, a bridge inspector – something like that. There are more than a few of them, and for these disciplines there are hard and fast abilities that need to be learned. Teachers are the best resource for determining what and how these things should be learned and understood. The core curriculum and the liberal arts come in to the grey areas of this – what to say when your boss indicates that perhaps a reduction in final checks of a wing, or a reduction in the quality of bolts on construction of a bridge would save millions, how will the former student engage? Will they feel a need to, or will they feel like they’ve done their part for the points in the box? Will they have a taste for engaging with those who are empowered to decide in ways that matter?

Getting into the specifics of change, reading, tenure, skill, etc is what the university should be up to. It should be a begged question detector – opening up the more difficult and taxing conversation that we are too lazy to have these days. Much easier to binge a series on streaming media which requires all the effort of a finger to indicate that you are “still watching” – yes, you are active! The university can be one of the last places where we have space and time to have this kind of tough and taxing engagement, an example of how it can be rewarding to “end” a conversation unsure, unrewarded, and unexpectedly thinking about it hours later when trying to go to sleep.