Paul Cantrell
From @tzimmer_history:
“Here is what actually happened in class: We had a calm, nuanced, and deeply serious discussion. That’ it. That’s the everyday normal on college campuses. But if you read the nation’s major newspapers and political magazines, you would not know that.”
I teach college too, and I am here to say: 💯 College students are so, so much better at having a thoughtful discussion about difficult issues than most of the people covering them in the press.
Paul Cantrell
I’m not going to say that college students have it all figured out, or are all perfect. They’re struggling with the present moment just like the rest of us.
But folks, I simply cannot express to you strongly enough how wildly popular press descriptions of college campuses fail to match my own experiences. These bullshit “cancel culture” screeds read to me like Orientalist Europeans describing foreign cultures. They’re just embarrassing.
Paul Cantrell
Don’t get me wrong: college students have all sorts of misconceptions about issues of the day, lose their perspective, and put pressure on people who disagree with them — ••just like the rest of us••.
Are my students worse on these fronts than what I hear in a typical Minneapolis municipal election? No.
Are they worse than what adults post on Nextdoor or FB? Oh hell no.
Are they worse than the very same news orgs publishing pundits who opine about the decline of tolerance? AYFKM.
Paul Cantrell
I have a useful point of comparison: I was once a student on the campus where I now teach. Not quite apples to apples (I’m older, now a prof), but with that grain of salt:
Students are if anything somewhat •more• tolerant of differing views and •more• tolerant of diverse groups who are unlike them than when I was a student. There is if anything •more• assumption that we should reach out across differences and listen.
Paul Cantrell
@Dseitz
One of my pet peeves is the use of students feeling “discomfort” as a metric of whether they’ve experienced intolerance.
I have a whole soapbox I give to students about how discomfort and frustration are often what learning feels like — and I teach •computer science•, for heaven’s sake. Discomfort is a goal!
Dan Seitz
Also let's not forget the entire root of this was right wing students complaining that their peers and professors didn't take their opinions seriously. And it's like...well, kid, your opinions came in a can. You haven't thought about them at all. What'd you expect?
Dan Seitz
Every time I have heard about cancel culture, without fail, one or both of these things is true:
1) The incident is vastly exaggerated in both scale and vitriol.
2) The person claiming to be "cancelled" has omitted important facts about the incident, most commonly what the protestors' grievance actually was.
Paul Cantrell
@steve
They are indeed, can confirm from direct observation. Just hoping we can hold the world together long enough for them to take over running it.
Steve Canon
@inthehands @tzimmer_history The kids are alright!
Paul Cantrell
There •has• been a shift on college campuses, one I suspect is relevant here: expectations of human care from faculty and institutions have increased.
There used to be a much larger tolerance for profs just pushing content at students and letting them struggle. There’s more baseline expectation now that we’ll actually think about whether our pedagogy •works•, and take into account the well-being of our students.
The pandemic massively accelerated that, but it’s a ~20-year trend.
Paul Cantrell
Next time you real a screed against “cancel culture” from somebody who teaches college, ask yourself whether it could in fact be this:
“I’m good at my discipline, but kind of bad at teaching. I cling to broken pedagogical approaches, and am used to making my job easier by not thinking too much about my students as human beings, even if that makes me an asshole. That used to be acceptable, but now people are in my face about it! That wounds my ego. Kids these days!”
6/
Paul Cantrell
There is a real and important version of that same underlying thought:
Teaching •well• and offering real human care to students both make teaching a whole lot harder. That is •work• right there. And this (reasonable! positive!) shift in expectations means that faculty jobs are hard than they used to be — while at the same time they pay less and less, especially because of adjunctification.
This is not sustainable.
7/
Paul
@inthehands it always annoys me when I see a related sentiment in other places - "it was really hard when we were going through it, and we didn't have this support, so you shouldn't either"
Paul Cantrell
As a faculty member, I’d like to see a whole hell of lot less attention paid the the Cancel Culture Grumpus Patrol, and a whole lot •more• attention paid to this question of how we make human care on campuses something that’s •sustainable•. The need is real. The challenges are real. And the implications are far more daunting — and far more important.
/end
Paul Cantrell
This isn’t limited to college, and it isn’t even limited to education. Optimization, cost-cutting, downward wage pressure, all these things make human caring •harder•.
The airline rep who leaves you out to dry, the doctor who can’t take time to listen, the developer who makes software that’s not accessible — they’re responding to structural pressures.
We need to give a shit about each other. And if we want that, we have to make giving a shit sustainable.
How? •There’s• the question.
/end
Paul Cantrell
@sidereal
I am pleased to report that in both college and K12 ed, at least within my sphere, things are shifting sharply on both counts. My department colleagues are lovely human beings. And my kid’s public school teachers have been magnificent. (I’m sure the streak won’t last forever, but there it is.)
sidereal
@inthehands Miserable people like this being like 80-90% of all of the teachers and professors I ever had are
1. Why I never went into academia (who wants to spend their working lives around these jerks?)
2. Why if I ever have kids I am going to homeschool them (these jerks absolutely killed my love of learning and I intend to save my hypothetical children from a similar fate)
Sam Armstrong (pseudonym)
@inthehands I get the impression that it is highly variable by college and even departments/classes. From friends who have been in college recently, their experience has been very different in schools in Indiana vs Harvard or Duke as examples. Friends in engineering, computer science, and business have had different experiences than my friends in pre-law or similar.
Paul Cantrell
@SamStrongTalks
It’s certainly variable by department, by class, and by student at my institution. That makes it especially hard to gauge whether there’s change over time.
I would venture that one underlying source of distress here that people walking into a new discipline or a new geographic region encounter an unfamiliar subculture, and mistakenly think “college is weird!” when it’s really “I just discovered there’s a world outside my previous bubble!”
Paul Cantrell
@sidereal
Yeah, I’m really sorry you had to live through all that. You deserved better.
As for why it’s so hard: that’s a very, very long answer, but the short of it is that other people’s problems look small when they’re at a distance. (If you ever want to enrage a software developer, say “Can’t you just….”) There’s a whole tangle of complex and truly difficult challenges — personal, procedural, cultural, institutional, and systemic — one has to overcome to improve teaching.
sidereal
@inthehands I've heard this from many people and I'm glad things are getting better but extremely bitter that it happened too late for me, especially when it seemed [to me] pretty obvious what most of the issues were at the time. I guess what I'm saying is I don't understand what took so long.
Paul Cantrell
(Addendum: I realize my thread ended up being about this accusation of “coddling” at least as much as about “cancel culture.” Those two lines of curmudgeonism have become so entangled that I don’t separate them cleanly in my mind.)
Moto :rainbowinfinity:
@inthehands Normalize workers violating “corporate policy” in the name of human kindness
Paul Cantrell
@cmdrmoto
Yes. Absolutely. 200%.
Though to my point: it starts there, but it can’t end there. Caring is work. Work stops if it’s not sustainable. We need to make this work sustainable.
Violate institutional policy — and also •change• it! And beyond broken policy, think about what kind of support it takes to sustain the work of caring over time.
Paul Cantrell
@Halpin
Always pleased to cross paths with an English prof. My mom, now retired, taught English at CSU for many years. The field has a special place in my heart!
The conditions you describe here [https://zirk.us/@Halpin/111153849748263758] sound utterly intolerable to me, and also sound like they’re the •opposite• of caring more for students. Instead, your institution is asking you to care about process & paperwork. Hot garbage.
Jenni Halpin
@inthehands I need at least 8 more stars on this. Thank you for articulating it.
Paul Cantrell
@violetmadder
Being the foolish optimist that I am, I’m firmly opposed to “everything has to be different for anything to get better” thinking. There are always:
(1) things we can do where we are, right now, in the moment,
(2) things we can do in the near-to-medium term, working both with and against existing systems, reshaping them, and
(3) distant destinations we can imagine in a far better, radically different hypothetical world.
All matter. Living with (3) alone is a kind of nihilism.
violetmadder
In a predatory culture that has totally devalued care work, emotional labor, kindness, and basically anything that isn't vicious competition, abuse is normalized.
Until this stops, we're screwed.
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