From Rachel Toor
“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Some years ago, after getting pulled over on the highway, I learned many lessons. The first: I had lost the privileges that accrue to being a young white woman. Instead of being let off with a warning, I got a speeding ticket.
The cop also offered a pamphlet that said if I went to bad drivers’ school, the ticket wouldn’t count against my record.
Fine, I thought. I’ll give up a beautiful Saturday in August, take my computer, and write about these jerks people.
I did just that. Because as soon as the training started, I realized the Spokane police department did an extraordinary job teaching. I attended the session the day after I’d gone through a painful half-day training led by two faculty members at my university. The difference was striking and informative.
The Times Higher Ed/Inside Higher Ed summit for US Universities (should have read “and Colleges”) was the first time London-based THE, which puts on events all over the world, did a conference for U.S. presidents and provosts. Hosted by Stevens Institute of Technology, directly across the Hudson from what Melville called “the insular city of the Manhattoes,” it would have been a prized location if only President Nariman Farvardin had been able to follow through on his promise to me: get the monsoon to stop earlier so we could enjoy the stunning views and stroll around a gorgeous campus without enduring horizontal rain.
But as I sat in the same room for two jam-packed days, I kept wondering: Do higher ed gatherings replicate the problems of higher ed? While newer faculty members have adopted and pioneered different ways of teaching, our insular gatherings haven’t done a whole lot of changing.
In my first career as an acquisitions editor of scholarly books, I attended the alphabet soup of scholarly meetings. I stopped going 20 years ago when I became a faculty member. Just before the pandemic, I was invited to be on a panel at one of my favorite associations and was excited to see what had changed.
At the annual meeting, I walked around humming, “Let’s do the time warp again.” While delighted to see old colleagues (they had aged, while I’d remained unaffected by time), I was shocked that academics were still reading their papers.
We know that lectures are not an effective way to teach. Neuroscience tells us humans can’t passively take in information for more than about 20 minutes. Many of us who write for a living suck aren’t always the best at presenting our work (how many great audiobooks are read by the author?). PowerPoint was new and cool a zillion years ago; now it seems like just another crutch for bad presentations. The flipped classroom has been around for a long darned time, just not at our own meetings.
What everyone longs for, especially after the pandemic made flabby our social muscles, is connection. We need places to talk to each other, exchange ideas, disagree (civilly), and make friends with folks we wouldn’t naturally bump into.
Our conference was good in many ways, and I loved getting to hang with some of my favorite presidents (not that I have favorites). It also showed why students are frustrated by their experiences in gen ed and other classes. Looking around the room, I saw many presidents on their phones scrolling through cat videos rather than attending to the sages on the stage, even though these folks were unquestionably great.
Almost no panels left enough minutes for the audience to chime in. As always happens in groups, a few people do most of the talking and tend to ask “questions” that are actually comments. And there wasn’t enough time to digest the information before the next session started, let alone discuss it in small groups.
It wasn’t just the lecture format that made me want to knock off hats. We’ve all been in meetings where a handful of people do all the talking. (I can be among the offenders.) And we’ve all taken (or taught) seminars where that happens. That’s bad classroom management. You know who consistently fails at that? Moi.
In the first of two Sandbox roundtables, with too large a group and me hopped up on caffeine and nerves, I did a bad job facilitating a good conversation. In the room there were a bunch of smart and innovative thinkers who didn’t manage to get in a word. Humans are imperfect, and yours truly lacks the social skills to shut people down in polite ways. Afterward, I did tell one of the dudes he talked too much. (We’re still friends.)
When I went to Sara Custer, my nominal boss (whom I would not allow to attend a presidents-only closed door session), to flagellate myself about how things had gone, she consoled me but said we can’t allow people to be intellectual freeloaders and not contribute when they’ve signed up for a roundtable. “But it was my fault,” I said. “Some of them got carried away with excitement and I didn’t step in to redirect. They’re presidents. And I’m chopped liver.”
“You’ll learn, grasshopper,” she said.
So, at the second session, I went full-on schoolmarm. I asked folks to wait for three or four others before they spoke again. I cut off a long-serving president and told him he wasn’t allowed to talk about his own institution. We had a robust and confidential discussion about leadership issues that never get airtime in open sessions. (You know what they are.)
So here’s a serious question: How do we create gatherings of leaders where we do what the best teachers do? The most exciting and useful sessions came toward the end of the second day. One panel shared innovations on workforce integration and then put people into small groups to discuss and steal share ideas. Others got real about their experiences in ways that were human and vulnerable and addressed extremely timely (like we have to deal with this today) issues.
To be clear: I’m not throwing my colleagues under the double-decker bus; they did a ton of work to plan this event from an ocean away. Rather, I want to point out that our conference wasn’t unusual. It simply represented many of the ways higher ed has not adapted to the current world. Whether we want to say so in public or not, some of the critiques of higher ed are right, and we may not be doing what we say are in terms of teaching. It’s not about “woke” content; it’s about delivery.
Part of that is our training. For decades I ranted wrote for another leading higher ed publication that if academics wanted their research to make a difference and their work to be read, they had to convey it in ways that took into account not just their information but the reader’s pleasure. This is what the best teachers do. It’s both-and, always.
We did have a field trip and were bused to have dinner on the river. One attendee said he learned lots of things at the conference, including that it’s possible to get seasick on a docked boat.
We’re looking to do this event next year, and we want it to knock people’s socks (not hats) off. Please, friends, write me with specific suggestions about how to do something where people come away with a notebook filled with actionable ideas that provide answers to real and pressing questions. Perhaps I should ask the Spokane cops for tips.
Or maybe it’s just time for me to go to sea. But not during a nor’easter.
