Proponents of minimal time on campus profit from manifold cynicismS.
Many colleagues prefer to teach fewer than five days per week. Some have respectable reasons for shaving a day or two off their days on campus. Some travel to collections or laboratories and have papers and monographs to show for their exertions. Some prepare better or grade better over longer periods than in the interstices of advising appointments, committee meetings, and teaching sessions.
Colleagues with sincere, convincing reasons for reducing their days on campus serve as stalking horses for cynics who want more time to themselves for less worthy reasons. Slackers, scammers, shirkers, shuckers, and other cynics use a few outstanding faculty to camouflage headlong pursuit of time off. Every veteran knows some of the worst offenders. Most colleagues, however, do not want to offend the offenders or upend comity by committing candor. As a consequence, faculty of good will are played for saps and suckers, and faculty governance is degraded by chiselers and dissemblers.
Clearly it is time for a guide to the multiple plies of arguments that currently roil campus.
Ply One: Shirkers offer pedagogic premises for eighty-minute periods and a “work” "week" of two to three days. The few premises not risible apply to very few faculty, such as those who have great reasons for showing extended videos during sessions of a course. While a few delusional colleagues have come to believe what started out as sly lies, most cynical shirkers know that they are sacrificing the interests of students, the time of colleagues, the energies of staff, and the patience of administrators to secure longer weekends and less campus face time. Schedulers cannot arrange class times so that majors may graduate when almost an entire department goes Tuesday-Thursday, but shirkers save a Friday commute if they claim that their teaching “needs” fewer, longer periods. Committees cannot meet on certain days because moonlighters are not on campus two or three days per week, but the moonlighting is masked as professional growth. Malingerers’ sick days [tlansration: mental health days or really good Thursday rates at Orbitz] cost students 1/30th of a course but teach students self-reliance and independent learning.
Every member of the faculty should see through this folderol. With perhaps a dozen exceptions, any competent instructor can offer any course at fifty minutes or at eighty minutes. In fact, let’s stay on the Truth Train for at least one more stop: any competent professional could teach an ordinary course in fifteen-minute increments if she or he set her or his mind to it. The vast majority of claims to “need” eighty minutes are not believable. How do we know? Because Ivy League avatars and community-college archetypes and a host of academics in between make do with less than eighty minutes on campuses across the globe. Whatever self-serving specific the shirker summons is easily debunked by “If you wanted to, you could, so need is not at issue. You don’t want to.” Like Bartleby the scrivener, the shirker would prefer not to. Unlike Bartleby, the shirker will never be honest about the matter.
Ply Two: Shirkers beget slackers. Having marshaled their cynical stock of pedagogical premises, shirkers mobilize other faculty, thereby expending time that, put to better use, would advance whatever teaching or researching the shirkers claim to have too little time to pursue. Shirkers encourage colleagues to believe themselves ill-used by a simple job and more money than they had any reason to hope to make. “Souls undone undoing others” (Housman) breed slackers at great cost to the productivity of the slackers. People who actually had time for their pursuits before they started bitching now fritter away that time [and the time and patience of the rest of us] in demagogy and mendacity.
Ply Three: Nobody knows the troubles that shirkers, slackers, and shuckers have seen. Morale depleted, shirkers and slackers repair to salons, taverns, lounges, or the Faculty Club to commiserate with other under-worked, over-paid blowhards about how cruel and punishing is the intellectual life that they never have led but perhaps read about in a novel. Behold the threefold cynicism of shuck artists at great cost to sincerity and honesty! As noted supra, feeble-minded slackers come to believe what once were deliberate deceptions until fictions suffuse discourse and governance and spin displaces sense. Hustlers hustle themselves and others into participation in a curricular cargo cult.
Ply Four: Shirkers, slackers, and shuckers cultivate suckers and excoriate debunkers. Any sentient being may call shirkers, slackers, and shuckers on their subterfuges but does so at some risk. As I wrote in “Who’s to Blame” [10 March 2007] and “S Stands for Scams and Slackers” [10 October 2007], most faculty recognize half-truths and whole lies but do not care to endure the blowback that debunking the buncombe will whip up. Since most arguments for lengthening weekends and reducing face time with students and campus are blowzy vacuities (Mencken), a reasonably skeptical colleague who innocently wonders at this or that self-serving assertion must be rebuked quickly. “It is insulting to suggest that a colleague from whom we have heard only self-serving proposals is insincere or deluded.” How true! Learning from experience is so uncouth. When colleagues make arguments that cannot be believed, that is when we must all pitch in to believe the unbelievable – for fellowship and solidarity. Besides, white-washing is so much fun that it would be criminal if a few skeptics deprived suckers of an opportunity to cover up Tom Sawyer’s fence.
Thus, should anyone raise an objection about facts that are not factual or generalizations that are inapposite to Planet Earth, expect a chorus of shirkers, slackers, and shuckers to bray about "civility" and mewl that detractors are "getting personal." This is how institutions supposedly dedicated to truth and justice devolve into mutual prevarication pacts. Back-to-back-to-back-to-back cynicism, anyone?
Ply Five: Shirkers, slackers, and shuckers seldom deliver. Grant the shirkers' premises but hold them to higher standards for performance and watch them erupt in umbrage. They'll never admit it explicitly, but slugabeds and scam artists who have not fallen for their own ploys know that their time away from campus will likely not issue in any measurable output. Even the minimally self-aware self-serving know that they cannot meet existing standards while maintaining their active social life, their day-trading, their moonlighting, their community service unknown to any community, their movie reviews for their podiatrist’s blog, their dacha in Yelm, and their affairs with imaginary lovers. At great cost to scheduling flexibility, to students' being able to graduate faster than Bluto Blutarsky, to equity among colleagues, and to straightforward decency and integrity, shirkers, slackers, and shuckers decry “administrative prerogative” and espouse the prerogatives of the Leisure Class. Evidence of productivity? We don’t need no evidence of stinking productivity!
Ply Six: Suckers! Among the better arguments for a minimized work “week” would be to enable probationary faculty to meet rising standards, especially expectations for publication. Propose such a helping hand for faculty who could most use it and watch shirkers, slackers, shuckers, and spinners sag. The lightened workload they had in mind would reward sinecures and a few favored probationaries but not lowly instructors or the mass of tenure-lines. Let’s dragoon the untenured and the untenurable [along with a few senior suckers and people who teach labs and such] into teaching five days a week. If they publish, it will come out of their limited time, as it did for others before the three-day weekend was floated. Whether the untenured or untenurable publish or not, the shirkers, slackers, and shuckers will glory over them because they have tenure and promotion(s) that supplant accomplishments. Many or most of the shirkers, slackers, and shuckers will not have published much but will act as if they once did and will again once their demands to teach from their beds are met.
A few fellows will publish much. They who could not and thus did not get hired at a Research One will glory that they work at a place dedicated to personalized instruction “yet” they themselves possess such talent that they teach and publish [and find their way to campus unassisted and dress themselves and …].
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Dr. Dew Fuss: “You know what makes me so terrific?”
Dr. Rue Fuss: “I have no knowledge of anything that makes you terrific.”
Dr. Dew Fuss: “I am terrific because I do the job I was hired to do.”
Dr. Rue Fuss: “Indeed. I’ll alert the media.”
Dr. Dew Fuss: “In fact, I am so great that I can do all of this and have four-day weekends as well.”
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Ply Seven: More Suckers! The long-weekend brigade, I have noted, have wasted much of their own time pursuing more time to waste on themselves. Perhaps worse, brigadeers waste faculty meetings, senate meetings, and committee meetings with new scams. Shirkers shirk their responsibility to learn how to work faculty governance, so colleagues must perform the simplest tasks for the shirkers. Of course, that is what makes shirkers shirkers. Slackers leave it to suckers to create principles of scheduling that make slackers’ slacking possible. Shuckers run their spin past the productive faculty: “Are you too busy or too selfish to discuss at great length how we might secure more personal time for me?” Scam artists importune colleagues who are readily found on campus every day to hatch schemes whereby eighty-minute periods never fall near weekends. Spinners leave the hallways of their departments unpopulated on Fridays so that suckers can do their advising for them [which probably benefits both of their academic advisees].
Who pays for our preening poseurs? Only students, staff, untenured and untenurable instructors [and a few tenured suckers who don their hardhats, swing their lunch pails, and work without whining], and those who have sacrificed much to secure their progeny more than an empty credential must pay. Isn’t that a pittance to secure our glorious, indolent elite?
What is to be done to torment the shirkers, slackers, scammers, suckers, and slugabeds? I suggest two ploys.
Ploy One: Advocate that every member of the faculty with less than a five-day teaching schedule must publish on the school website his or her CV. Loose a “culture of evidence” on simulators and dissimulators alike. Make the long-weekend crowd maintain an up-to-date curriculum vitae on an accessible web site so that the entire university may see what we are getting for all this time off. Those who miraculously discover that they teach best when they confront students [and colleagues and committees and their offices] least must favor campus with accounts of what they accomplish once they have Fridays or Mondays free. Those who teach five days per week need not reveal what they have been able or unable to accomplish, but all who teach fewer that five days per week must reveal their accomplishments. This will not necessarily shame scammers, for many of them lack the self-awareness that is a prerequisite for shame. Those who have enjoyed a T Th schedule for a decade or more must point to the myriad ways in which students, tuition-payers, colleagues, the University, and Knowledge have profited from that time away from campus.
Ploy Two: Make eighty-minute sessions available in ascending order of seniority. No one actually needs weekends of three days or more, but newer faculty could put the time off to better use than, say, those who have proved over the last ten or fifteen years that they are incapable of publishing and disinclined to change their teaching. So direct the down time to those who can use it best. If there are eighty-minute periods left once the tyros have been accommodated, then associate professors and then full professors may sidle up to the trough.
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