Against Student Success? No, I'm Not a Monster

Because I love my students, I am against student success. 

When I told a friend recently that I hated when I'm asked to do something in the name of "student success," she looked at me like I had just said the most blasphemous thing, and asked me, "but isn't that what we're all here for? Student success?" 

Let me explain. Of COURSE I'm a professor because I like students and I like to think that the work I do helps them succeed. OBVIOUSLY. It goes without saying. 

But I worry that institutions use "student success" to justify the demands they put on everybody who works for them. I worry they are taking advantage of the love we all feel for students. 

Work loads creep further and further into all the corners of our lives. I know too many colleagues who work upwards of 80 hours a week, and are just crumbling under the pressure. They love their students. When asked to do more, they are convinced that it supports student success, so they can't say no. 

Student success is hard to say no to. Who wouldn't want it? It can make all kinds of sacrifices seem worthwhile. "Student success" is used as the reason we are asked to increase our class size, take on more advisees, learn a new software for early-alerts, make ourselves compliant with loads of new pedagogical best practices, learn a new software for assessing student success, measure success better, do more, and more, and more... you get the idea.

Uwe Poersken, a Polish philosopher, describes "plastic words" as those that "silence" because they signal "science." That is, they are hard to say no to because they seem to be morally air-tight, unassailable, inherently good and right. Plastic words are "malleable" and have an "uncanny way" of  being "used to fit every circumstance. Like plastic Lego blocks, they are combinable and interchangeable."* 

In the context of my own work on a CSU campus, "student success" has become like "development" or "sustainability," a plastic word. It gets rolled out at administrative meetings and extolled as the justification for every decision, even ones that seem to undermine student success. Like, "In support of student success, we will need to go ahead and defund a great resource called the Institute for Student Success, which inspires the entire staff, faculty, and administrators to come together once a year to collaborate and get pumped up to start another year of teaching. Too bad it was working so well for you!" Or, "For Student Success (because that's all we care about), we will need to get rid of half our janitors."**  

"Student success" seems to be used for all kinds of purposes that have either nothing to do with student success (although most students I talk to really do feel that clean toilets are essential to their feeling of belonging on a campus, and can you blame them?), or they seem to even undermine it.

It raises the question, "who's defining 'success' here?" Like all plastic words, success is subjective, and without really clear, concrete, and narrow definitions, it can just swallow everybody up.

I hope it's clear that I'm not against actual student success in theory and as a worthwhile goal. I think people who pick it up as the beacon to guide all our budget cuts and programmatic decisions are genuinely trying to turn the university's focus toward students, in protest of the ways some universities have become about other things, like making money or building big (corporately-funded) research centers. 

I appreciate that very much. Yes, please! Let's get back to why we're all here: students! How democratic and grassroots. How... refreshing. I wish this is the honest motive. For the most part, I think most administrators who cut student success initiatives in the name of student success, as crazy as it seems, genuinely think they're doing the right thing. But you can see the plasticity here, no?

What I am against is how the term student success is used as a bludgeon to exploit my relationships with students to make me do more for an institution that keeps cutting resources. I am also against the fact that it seems like nobody sees how this is happening. 

It feels uncannily like... home.

The reason student success is so hard to say no to is the same reason I have a hard time saying no to my kids. If I love them, I will do all the things they ask from me in order to prove it. This assumption about maternal love is at the root of patriarchy. Exploiting maternal guilt is how the world goes round. Just like moms in the arena of domestic labor and "care work" don't keep score about how much work they do to care for their kids (they'd seem selfish and heartless if they did), so too are teachers and staff at my university expected to go the extra mile without protest, for love of their students. Why ever would they not? Don't they want success for their students? Tisk tisk. 

And, just like it is hard at home for me to say no to my family's requests for more mom, for fear they will not feel loved, it is hard for me to say no to any request made of me in the name of my students' wellbeing, happiness, good grades, full stomachs, feeling of being safe, access to educational resources, opportunities for mentorship, real-world applications of their education, fellowship, fun, clean toilets, and whatever else gets snuck under the plastic banner of "student success." 

There's an analysis of power here that I'm trying to offer up. Those in power use emotional appeals to extract labor. Such appeals distract us from the structural sources of the problem. 

I worry about being gaslighted for not caring about my students when there's an untenable structural arrangement that keeps pushing work onto the fewer and fewer people left standing after budget cuts. 

It's like we're in a boat. Somebody (I won't name names. No need to get nasty. It's complicated anyway) poked holes in this boat. Then, those same people started asking us to plug the holes with the tool they know we will be unable to resist supplying in these moments of "crisis"-- our loyalty to students. Meanwhile, the boat is made of straw and there's a huge storm going on. No amount of love for our students will plug these holes, so please stop talking about how plugging the holes is going to do the trick.

As much as I wish it did, loving my students (or my kids) doesn't magically produce more time or energy in my life. Pressuring people with guilt is a classic move by people in power. 

At some point, all of us who love students are going to get so burned out by the extraction of our care labor that we may start to ironically direct our resentment toward the very people "student success" is supposed to serve-- the students themselves. I, for one, confess to having started down this path more than a few times. Then, like I do at home when I get overloaded, I remind myself of the analysis of power: I don't have to sacrifice myself to prove my love of anybody. I cannot just love everybody's way out of these problems.

Maybe it's only the people who don't constantly battle internalized guilt about parenting who feel it's perfectly reasonable to weaponize love and guilt in work places. That's the only way I can explain why they think it's acceptable. When I hear the kinds of arguments at work that I hear at home to get me to do more stuff, I can't help but think there's something fishy going on.

The problem isn't the students. Just like we shouldn't hate our kids for having needs, we ought to look at the structural conditions that make it hard to meet all of our students' needs. Why are we losing so many forms of support for them, and for all of us? We also need to challenge the myths we carry around in our minds that cloud our awareness of how those in power manipulate our emotions. Let's wake up to our own exploitation. 

To be really for student success, we needn't just become obedient when the word is waved around at meetings. Instead, we can:

1. Define what student success means in our own work and lives. Seriously, write it down! Even better, model student success and ask your students to define their own success for you. That'll blow everybody's minds.
2. Hold yourself accountable to your own definition, not to the top-down terms laid out as some amorphous plastic concept that can encompass any and all policy decisions made by the powers that be to put smoke and mirrors up around unsavory budget goals.
3. Take care of yourself so you can keep being there for students and not burn out or resent them. 
4. Work to protect and create, if not demand, structural forms of support for students and for us.

If the ship is sinking, it may not be the holes that need plugging.

*Thanks to Clare Follman for letting me know about plastic words. See her Evergreen State College Master's thesis, "The Art of Arguing Science".

** Examples are fictional.

A Rant: Love, Quid Pro Quo, and Teaching

I love being at a teaching institution. I became a college professor because I am compelled to teach. When I was a kid, I'd pretend to be "sick" so I could be taken by my mom to her college and hang out on campus, just imbibing the whole college thing.  I'd watch her teach and scribble notes, pretending I was a student. I grew up thinking college was awesome and teaching was glorious.

When I went to grad school, people poo-pooed teaching.  I was at an R1 institution where "research" mattered more.  Teaching was to research as female was to male.  Get honored for teaching and lose respect among your colleagues, was a standard warning.  Yet I insisted that I wanted to teach, I wanted a teaching job at a school that valued teaching, like the place my mom taught and like the place I went for my own undergraduate degree.  I am sometimes sad for professors who want support in teaching but who are at research institutions, where their fabulous and liberatory innovations are ignored, or worse, actively discouraged.

I was shocked when I got my first job at a teaching institution that many curmudgeons would be annoyed when asked to learn to be better teachers.  Aren't you here to teach?, I thought.  Wouldn't you want training?  At R1s, training to teach is borderline taboo.  And here we are, at a teaching institution, proudly waving our love-for-teaching flags.  What was wrong with these old fogies who were insulted by the suggestion that they weren't already teaching well enough, allergic to "teaching and learning" professional development opportunities, and resistant to being evaluated for retention based on their effort to improve their teaching.  I just didn't get their issue.  I thought they were selfish sticks in the mud, that they didn't care about students, and that they were only interested in consolidating their own forms of tradition and power.

Then I got my second teaching job at HSU, where I have, over the past four years, loved teaching even more.  When I read bell hooks' writing on love for students, I cry.  Ask my students; I really love them.  I love teaching.  I feel it's a calling. I feel it is what I was put on the planet to do. I write an almost daily journal of things to improve and tweak.  I agonize at night over whether each and every student in my class is ok, whether my words are ever violent to any one of them, whether my white privileged ways of teaching made anybody feel silenced, whether there's anything more I can do to support them.  I go through a checklist of each student every day to make sure I think they're ok.  I feel like their mother.



I know this is wrong, and exploitative, and that the institution loves that I feel this way. I know that student evaluations expect this from me, and so I'm punished more by them if I'm off one day and can't provide that motherly love.  Even though I know these expectations are gendered and unfair, I still love loving teaching and I still love loving my students.  Sorry, that's what I'm here to do.

And I have spent years realizing that teaching is my own form of activism in a troubled world.  I agonize-- as many of you do-- over how I, as an American, middle-class academic, can contribute to assuaging the many evils my own presence on this planet has spawned.  I agonize over my relative lack of power: lawyers, engineers, politicians, movement leaders, media pundits-- they dictate the conversation and move worlds, not stuffy, jargon-prone, elitist academics, right?

I wrote a book that I thought was awesome when I wrote it, but have wondered ever since, despite the social-justice, strong politics of the argument, whether it will ever "make a difference."  Peer-reviewed humanistic social justice scholarship just collects dust and doesn't ever make it into public dialogue, in all reality, for the majority of us non-rock-star scholars, anyway.

And I just don't have any other kind of radical activist gene in me. I don't march the streets. I never called my congresspeople until 2017.  I have the luxury of being able to not pay attention to the news when I don't want to.  I'm not a movement solidarity type. Just not in my blood. But writing? YES. Teaching? HELL YES.  So, teaching is my activism.  I may love research and writing, but I don't delude myself that they are really making immediate, material changes in the world.  Teaching-- reaching, mentoring, challenging, learning from, and lighting fires with students-- is where it's all at for me.  Whenever I think, "I need to do more, I need to be more civically engaged, I should run for office, I gotta get out in the streets, I gotta donate more, I gotta be better and show up everywhere! AAAAAHHHH!!!", I remember, "Wait, I TEACH for God's sake."

So, that's how much I love and believe in teaching and in the mutual learning of being around college students. It transforms me, hopefully them, and ideally the real world.  No dust collecting here. Just passion and saving the world.



I'm never going to feel differently, but I'm getting really tired of being told that if I just loved my students a little more, if I just said hello with a bit more of a smile, if I made myself just a bit more available, if I responded to emails just a bit faster, if I held their hands as I take them to Counseling Services, if I help them move in to their dorms, if I make pancakes for those who can't go home on Thanksgiving, if I wipe their asses (you get the idea), we wouldn't have such an abominable retention rate.  (In case you're wondering, it's 11% that graduate. And that's over 6 years. Don't ask what we graduate in 4 years!)

Yes, there's evidence that suggests that students are going to stick around if they think a faculty member cares about them, gets to know them as people, respects them as whole individuals with problems, challenges, etc.... We are their ground zero, their daily interface with the campus, the pulse of student wellbeing.  That's an awesome responsibility and opportunity.  Each micro-interaction has the potential to make or break a student's career at college. It's not just statistically true; I see it in my evaluations too.

But can you ever do enough? No.  Sometimes I feel like I should hook a line up to my veins and just let the students drain the life out of me.  I'm sure my institution doesn't explicitly conspire to exploit my love of students, but it would undoubtedly benefit from its staff and faculty all to be like the fucking Giving Tree, never drawing a line in the sand to say, "I've given you all I have. How can you possibly want more?"

Let me be clear, this situation is not the students' fault, and that's the purpose of this post.  I resent being asked to be a Giving Tree while the institution cuts all kinds of supports for students, reduces staff support, enacts all kinds of "efficient" budget-cutting strategies, and leaves students without forms of support that they once had.  It seems there's all kinds of "creeping" here: faculty and staff (and even students) are being asked to provide supports where once the infrastructure did.  While student mental health issues rise across colleges students nationally, students are increasingly coming to college with all kinds of traumas (intergenerational, veteran, sexual, you name it).  Some call these students "underprepared," but it's really the institution that is underprepared for the new face of college student.



Don't ask me to solve budget problems with more love. It's pissing me off. Love isn't free, you patriarchal nincompoops.  Now I'm getting wise to the albeit probably unintended strategy.  Sharp as a tack, this feminist. Yup.

So, the institution is, understandably, going to take the path of least resistance.  Not maliciously, I know, it leverages my love for teaching and for students in hopes to increase retention and speed students across the finish line.  Cha-ching.  Guilting me into loving them more is easier and certainly cheaper than providing students basic needs, so they can come to class ready for our academic work.

(I'm increasingly shifting focus away from academic content and more to survival strategies for students, as a result. Anybody else?)

You can put a dollar sign on hiring more therapists, or adding another staff member in student affairs. So those can't be added to a cut budget. But you needn't bother counting "love."  Just keep the guilt trips coming, and all that great data on the transformative impacts of faculty love, and you'll keep extracting love from faculty.  After all, it's all we got.  It's what we do. It's our calling. It's our identity. It's the only way we can feel we matter in the world. We're suckers.  At least, I am.  After all, I'm a woman and a mother and so I can't resist a little trip on the guilt train of not loving enough.

As feminists have long argued, love is the most exploited of our labors.  Love is natural, free, unquantifiable, and selfless.  Right?  As a woman, I know love is expected more from female teachers, and I'm the worst culprit.  I do love my students, but that's not what's at issue here. What is at issue is how my institution leverages that love for its own ends while not supporting students in their psychological needs, housing, adjusting to being in a rural, predominately white town, etc.

Make no mistake, dear reader, this is about the politics of care.

Thank God she's smiling. I almost felt sorry for her! She must love this!

This brings me back to research. In my most resentful moments, I envy my research-oriented colleagues for being valued for their labors, for their institutions not pressuring them to love their students more (on the contrary, those colleagues' love of teaching is hidden in the R1 closet).  The gendered aspects of this current state are not lost on me. Research is valued work in those settings, while and teaching isn't, just as public is to private, or job is to housework, as male is to female.

But here, because HSU is a teaching institution, if you leave our "home" to do work outside-- e.g. research or professional service beyond the boundaries of this house-- you're abandoning the family.  I sometimes feel like doing research is to my HSU family the way working away from home is to my nuclear family.  Both make me feel guilty, that I'm not providing direct care, and so therefore I'm being selfish.

That is, I get the sense that my love of research may be perceived by colleagues in my institution as taboo; I'm not sacrificing enough to meet all the (students') needs on campus.  When I hole up with my computer to write, no matter how relevant or interesting that writing may be to students intellectually, I'm indulging.  If the work doesn't directly meet their material or emotional needs or can be tied in some measurable way to "student success," good luck getting any respect, support, or value for it.  If it doesn't result in the deliverable that the institution wants-- graduation, or other statistically measurable metrics of "student success", then it's superfluous.

So now I'm starting to empathize with those curmudgeons from my first job.  Perhaps it's not that they didn't love teaching.  Perhaps it was that they were sick of being asked to give, give, give without some giving on the part of the institution. Some quid pro quo.   And perhaps they wanted more recognition that the work that sustains them-- teaching, but also research and meditation, professional leadership and dancing (e.g. non-student-interfacing work)-- is just as important for so-called "student success."

It's one thing that an R1 might undervalue teaching. But my institution is a self-avowed teaching-centric place. So it's all the more egregious that the thing I love-- teaching-- gets undervalued here (not unlike housework, eh?).

Don't tell me that if I loved it, I'd do it for nothing.  Don't tell me to love students more, so our graduation rates can improve, which will get us more resources from the state, which will trickle down into some form of relief... somewhere down the line.

What evidence do I have to trust this promise?  Why should I keep sacrificing myself in the name of love for students when students keep losing various forms of structural support?  Why should the onus of providing these supports creep into my workload, just because I love my students?


Ok, enough complaining. Time to get constructive.

What would it feel like to be supported by (instead of resentful of) my institution in my love for my students?

Oh, let me count the ways.... Any combination of 2 or 3 of these would be an improvement:

1. adequate psychological and health services for students
2. adequate and nondiscriminatory housing for students of color
3. being asked, "what would you need to feel supported?", then see follow-through-- even if that follow-through is "sorry, here's why we can't do that."
4. explicit follow through on any number of the thoughtful suggestions outlined by several devoted faculty and staff in supporting minority and/or female students, faculty, and staff. (If you're interested, one is a letter with detailed suggestions written by concerned faculty after the tragic and race-motivated murder of one of our black students, Josiah Lawson, on April 15, 2017.  About a year earlier, our director of the African American Center for Academic Excellence, John Johnson, also compiled a list of brilliant requests from students in a document.  Despite detailed, concrete requests drafted by a major student-led movement in 2014/5 responding to the abrupt firing of a beloved Native American staff member, Jacqueline Bowman, very little has been done, to my knowledge. These impassioned and thoughtful letters serve as roadmaps for the administration, should it really choose to act in accordance with its stated mission. Argh.)
5. action on any number of the brilliant items under "diversity and inclusion" in our recent Strategic Plan.  It's a thing of beauty. I'm really proud that HSU has created such a beautiful ideal. I'm committed to working with HSU toward these ideals.
6. that the campus community at large feel that the administrative leadership hears and is following through on requests to support them better
7. professional development resources (e.g. how to address the fact that students' basic needs are encroaching into the classroom)
8. not ask faculty to do contradictory things (e.g. implementing a "writing across the curriculum" initiative while increasing class size, or work-creeping the jobs of recruitment, development, website management, course enrollment analysis, or alumni relations that used to be done by units/staff that no longer exist, while also asking us to learn new software and related forms of assessment, make us fill out multiple evaluations about everything that happens on campus, but never close the loop.... You get my frustration here.)
9. Provide somebody competent and full time in our college who can work on development, so we can make our own money to compensate for the ways that the state is cutting staff and other forms of student and faculty support
10. Provide a full time person who can manage the college's websites, so we're not asked to do so
11. Provide a full time person in the college to advise all our first years in the basics of understanding their degree audits
12. Hire upper administrators who aren't trying to glide through the last five years of their careers, and so actually care about accountability, faculty morale, and the community of the campus
13. improve vertical communication accountability; administrators shouldn't behave as if they're in a vacuum.  Student and faculty concerns should receive responses, even if nothing can be done about them. 
14. Don't get rid of things that really work, like our Institute for Student Success, and our Office of Diversity and Inclusion, and, and, and.... (WHY, oh why? And why didn't you tell us why?) You're killing me.
15. Take responsibility for structural reasons that students aren't succeeding, instead of telling me I need to love them more.  That really kills my morale. Can you tell? I'm a lover, people.

If any of these things are already happening, then I want to know, and I want to celebrate the awesomeness of my institution!   So WHERE IS THE TRANSPARENCY??? Why don't we know that the institution is doing such awesome work to fix these problems?  Maybe I missed the memo. Perfectly possible.  But we need university-wide morale lifting, and I think sharing these successes in about 20 memos wouldn't hurt.

(Update from a few days later: I learned that the HSU Strategic Plan folks have a great website to track progress.  That's fantastic, and I'm proud!!!  What I would like is also the sense of community narrative around this-- e.g. the "20 memos" concept-- that doesn't require we each individually bookmark the Strategic Plan webpage in order to know what's happening.)

(Update from an email from our President following her Fall 2017 Convocation: YAY! Look at the things the institution is doing!! I'm pleased that there's some progress, and even more pleased that this memo went out to all of us.  A break in the vacuum, perhaps? Let's hope!)

(Update from Fall 2017 convocation meetings: the institution is developing a Center for Teaching and Learning that will provide a lot of the kind of support I'm asking for here, I hope!  So far, no website to link yet, but I've already started getting my first emails about "teaching tips" etc..  I look forward to working with them to support the students and thereby all of us).

******

I'll never get so cynical that I stop loving.  bell hooks taught me that.  But for reals, peeps.

Any suggestions about how to keep on loving without losing yourself?