Summer is upon us, and for many in academia this is traditionally a time for travel, rest, writing, or other pursuits outside the formalities of the classroom and spaces of faculty governance. It is almost certainly underestimated how much energy it takes to be a teacher and facilitator, not only as a function of reading papers and preparing class lessons, but perhaps even more so in terms of investing personally and professionally in the issues being discussed and the opportunities for students to engage them in a meaningful way. Teaching is, indeed, a blessing: one that is earned through reflection and commitment.
Increasingly, however, summer is not the period of ‘down time’ that it used to be for many in academia. More and more faculty occupy tenuous lines (as opposed to tenured ones), working as contract employees, adjunct instructors, and the like. Faculty work lives often span a full-year calendar, with summer teaching duties, administrative work, and field research bridging across spring and fall terms. While in principle there is nothing objectionable about being engaged yearlong, the reality of many faculty members’ insecure situations casts a different light on this scenario. As noted above, teaching can be a very intense experience, and without sufficient time to step back, people can and do burn out.
I write this not as a lamentation but simply to offer a context for how we meet the world around us. Conversations with colleagues in a wide range of fields and settings reveal a steady impetus toward increasing workloads, less secure positions, decreasing benefits, greater expectations, and more uncertainty about the future. A sense of creeping bureaucratization is a frequent observation, as is the expansion of zero-sum resource allocation and less support for professional development opportunities. Tenured positions often are replaced (if at all) with non-tenured ones, and adjunct instructors (generally sans benefits) increasingly hold down significant portions of the curriculum. This is all obvious by now.
In some ways, academics have been fortunate to resist such trends until recent years, as compared to those in other fields. And yet, given the centrality and influence of education in society, it is worth considering the overall impacts of these marked trends. Do we want teaching to be reduced to rote instruction? Should we replace dialogs with rubrics and evaluations with algorithms? What are the implications of viewing faculty members simply as employees, fungible in their efforts and flexible in their labor? In an era of rising tuitions (and concomitantly rising student debt), the implications of offering students a less robust educational experience resonates ethically, and societally as well.
Indeed, if we consider the role of education as a potential bastion (perhaps one of the few remaining) for critical thinking, skills-building, and visioning capacities, these issues come into even sharper focus. From the earliest grades onward, young people are increasingly coded as consumers, being marketed to in myriad ways and having their profiles cultivated toward identification with images and products alike. Standardized high-stakes testing becomes the benchmark for student and teacher performance equally, stripping away context and promoting uniformity (and conformity) of perspectives. Technological ubiquity moves learning experiences away from mentorship and toward crowd-sourced peer pressures. Personal development is truncated as students become commodities and commodifiers in equal parts.
Again, none of this is altogether surprising or revelatory. Yet it is important to be reminded of the stakes, as we occupy an era defined by escalating alienation, populist authoritarianism, ecological destabilization, and punitive policy-making. In different but synergistic ways, the articles in this issue address these core themes, positing not only points of critique but pathways for contestation as well. As always, you are invited to interact with these topics and the authors, and to add your voices to the mix.
Program on Justice and Peace, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA
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