Over the last two weeks, I’ve been working on a paper titled “Teaching as Activism during a Campus Crisis” for an edited collection of papers on contemporary responses to campus crises. You can read more about here (and then follow the links to earlier postings).
Earlier this week, I worked on the section describing the actual class. I figure that I’ll have to revise this heavily, but I’m satisfied enough with it right now to keep writing and come back to it when I have the rest of the paper put together.
Teaching a Class on the University Budget
In describing my approach to teaching during the budget crisis at my institution, I am not proposing a template, a guide, or some kind of prescriptive solution. Instead, I am attempting to show how my teaching responded to the heightened experience of certain structural inequalities which came about as a result of the 2016-2018 budget crisis at UND. Consistent with the teach-in movement, the crisis inspired the series of classes that I offered and my interest in preparing students to become more informed participants in the campus community. These courses differed, however, from those offered in Vietnam era teach-ins which were very much a top down phenomena, at least as described by most of the scholars involved. Instead, the courses described below draws more fully on more contemporary approaches to student empowerment as articulated in Ira Shor’s and Paolo Friere’s work, which recognized in the classroom a space where structural inequality could be identified, questioned, and overcome.
As with many crises, there was a whelming sense of institutional change. In the spring of 2017, for example, we received news that our department’s long-standing and successful graduate programs in history would lose funding. When this news came out, the last class of funded graduate students in history were enrolled in a graduate historiography and methods class typical to most graduate programs. They were understandably upset about the news and we pivoted as a class to discuss the conditions both locally and nationally that allowed this change to happen. As I tried to continue the class as a traditional history seminar, the events of the semester quickly overtook this possibility. The students were distressed, distracted, and angry even though the department assured them that their funding would continue. This assurance did little to elevate the mood of the class nor did my rather facile efforts to explain the calculus that led to the budget cuts which struck the students as ideological as practical. As our conversation continued during class and afterwards, the students’ frustration manifest itself not through the the surly unresponsiveness and disengagement of Shor’s first-year undergraduates, but in a growing desire to engage, to decry, and to lash out at perceived injustice. We decided that rather than traditional papers, which asked the students to consider how the readings of the class shaped (or would shape) their practice of history, to prepare a series of essays that loosely cohered as a manifesto of sorts. The class then critiqued, edited, and compiled their essays together in a little open access digital book titled, The Graduates Manifesto: Defending History. The book consisted of chapters that situated the study of history in the history of the university and considered the role that the university played in life of the community, the nation, and diverse “imagined communities.” The book was raw and immediate and carried traces of the frantic feeling the loss of funding imparted in the class. They circulated this book via email, social media, and my blog as a statement to anyone who might be interested.
My experience in this class made clear to me that students not only saw themselves as deeply invested in the institution, but felt alienated from the bureaucratized administration and wanting to be heard. In response to this, I worked with a student in this graduate seminar, Joe Kalka, and another graduate student, Andrew Larson, to develop an undergraduate class focused on the university budget over the course of a independent study in the fall of 2017. We read classic works on the history of universities and colleges in the US and sampled recent scholarly and professional works that dealt with the growing sense of crisis across higher education. These readings both informed Andrew Larson’s DA project “Not Your Advisor’s Doctorate: The Doctor Of Arts And The Modernization Of Higher Education 1945-1970” and helped us prepare readings for the undergraduate class. The results were two documents: one was short history of American higher education written by Larson and the other was a “Document Reader” on higher education and budgets. A version of the former ultimately became part of the Larson’s DA project and the latter was a rough and ready document designed to give students access to sample of public documents related to budget cuts both at UND and across the US. We used the Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine” to create archival links to the various documents lest they succumb to the internet’s ephemeral character. Both Kalka and Larson continued to participate in the planning and development of the course, but they were also students navigating their own way through their degree programs and involved themselves selective. They injected the sense of urgent frustration manifested in the graduate seminar into the planning for the undergraduate course.
For administrative reasons, the department assigned the undergraduate course on the budget with an existing course number — History 220: The History of North Dakota — and the university honors program afforded the class an honors designation. This would ensure that the class enrolled a sufficient number of students to make the minimum required to be taught. That said, despite the recycled course number and gratuitous “honors” designation, we were explicit about what the class would teach in the marketing material for the class. It was a result of this marketing that the class almost immediately filled with a combination of honors students, non-honors students, and history students. In fact, the honors program, whose academic rigor was significantly surpassed by student affection for and attachment to the experience of honors courses, was undergoing disruptive changes as well and this drove an interest in the budgetary situation across campus.
My work with students in the graduate historiography seminar and the subsequent reading course help develop the four goals for the undergraduate course on the budget.
1. To become more familiar with the complexities of the modern university and UND, in particular.
2. To encourage critical thinking about the institutional structure of higher education in the U.S. in a historical context and local context.
3. To understand the relationship between the institutional organization and the purpose of the university.
4. To produce a short guide to the UND budget for students that allows them to be more critical consumers and participants in university life.
The course centered on three main sources: one was the two readers prepared by the students in the graduate reading class and described above. The second was a series of readings in Christopher Newfield’s The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (2016) and David Labaree’s A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendency of American Higher Education (2017). Both texts seek to situate the changing nature of American higher education in its historic context. We complemented our discussion of these readings with visits from many of the key stakeholders in the budget crisis: a member of the state legislature (and the higher education committee), a vice chancellor of the statewide university system, the provost the university, the head of the university’s alumni foundation, our college dean, an assistant coach of an impacted sports team, and a panel of department chairs. Each offered perspectives on the institution from the mechanisms and formulae present at the state level for funding institutions to the way in which funding is incentivized and distributed within the university, the challenge of raising donor funds and the impact of budget cuts on instruction and coaching.
The students largely led these conversations especially as they become more comfortable in the class (and when the interlocutors were particularly engaging or forthcoming). At the same time, the students began to bring together the framework for a guide — of sorts — to the budget crisis. This guide took as a point of departure the feeling of confusion and anger surrounding the decision to cut the UND Women’s hockey team which at the time was led by Olympians and local stars Jocelyn and Monique Lamoureux and the successful music therapy program whose cause high profile musicians took up across social media. The resulting book titled: Hawks, Hockey, and the Budget at the University of North Dakota featured four chapters, an introduction, a preface, and a glossary of key terms. Each chapter included a case study relevant to the situation in North Dakota and a reflection on the broader situation in American higher education. This not only paralleled the organization of the class, but the students also reckoned that it would help readers connect the crisis at UND to larger national trends in higher education. Each chapter was reviewed by the class, edited by the class, and then I typeset them into a PDF digital book. The conversations among the students were vigorous, respectful, and ideologically diverse. The book embodies much of what occurred in the classroom.
Once the book was complete we circulated it to the various stakeholders and encouraged the students to circulate it in their social digital and analog networks. It remains unclear whether the book had an impact beyond the classroom, but as an object of student engagement, the experience of writing, reviewing, and editing helped the students to refine their understanding of local and national trends, articulate the various positions encountered in the class, and offer critique. In this way, the book represents evidence for the successful accomplishment of the course goals.
Archaeology of the Mediterranean World 