Chapter 7: “Academia for Me had Always Been About Achieving Distinction”: David’s Story

A few weeks into the “COVID year” of 2020-2021, Alejandra’s first at university, I knew her pretty well. She was obviously a very strong writer and serious about her education. I knew that she missed her parents dearly, though they lived not far away, that she treasured her family. She wrote a lot about how much they meant to her, and even posted a photo of them dressed up as famous Mexicans for Halloween. I knew that her Latino heritage was really important to her and that she was already getting involved on campus with La Casa Latina. I already knew about some of the things that she found frustrating about PSU, and some of her fears. I already expected her to be very successful and hoped that she would become one of the former FRINQ students I would stay in touch with for many years to come. So I am really grateful that she has been, and I am not particularly surprised by how successful she has been.

But if Alejandra had taken a class from me even a few years before, I doubt that I would have learned much about her beyond the fact that she was an “A” student. Given how hard it is for New Majority students, especially, to connect with faculty at PSU, she might have eventually asked me for a reference for graduate school. But I would not have been able to write a very detailed letter of support, as I would not have known very much about her. I very much doubt that I would have encouraged her to think about graduate school, and she would have had to remind me of what her academic interests were.

I would not have met her beloved family or have known what scene in which TV show is most likely to break through her resolve not to cry in public. I would not have witnessed her “big sister” dozens of our FRINQ students as our peer mentor. And I would not have benefited from her many kindnesses to me, especially in reminding me that caring deeply about our students is at the heart of what educators must do. She has always seen what is best in me and encouraged me to remember what is most important.

I sometimes wonder how many Alejandras I missed knowing well in the many years and thousands of students I worked with before teaching FRINQ. The time I reserved for research and writing six academic books that so few people read could have been much better spent building relationships with students. Why did it take me so long to figure that out? Why are professors at public universities, funded by student tuition and public tax dollars, so seldom focused on teaching and supporting our students?

So I thought I would devote a chapter to explain what this looks like from the faculty point of view, about how easy or even natural it was to become a professor who did not make students his priority, even after I left my tenured job and was being paid “just” to teach, and how I had to move my focus outside of academia to return to it with the capacity to make knowing and encouraging students such as Alejandra the center of my work.

Unlike nearly all of my FRINQ students, education for me was always a means to distinguish myself, not to fulfill family obligations. Though I had some detours along the way, by my late thirties I had a tenure-stream job, a book coming out with Harvard University Press, and a large grant from the Canadian government funding my second.

Then, in 1999, I decided to give up my tenured position for family reasons so we could return to Portland. Though I very much doubt I would have given up my tenured job if I had been single and childless, I also thought the move could be good for me.

For academics, getting tenure can be a bit like the dog who finally catches the car. It is very difficult to get a tenure-stream job, requires many years of single-minded focus and hard work, and usually some good fortune, too. Then meeting the requirements for tenure can be very demanding. I had enjoyed that challenge, including the challenge of spending several years researching and writing a sophisticated book published by a leading university press. But very few people were reading that book, and it was clear that very few people were likely to read any academic book I wrote.

One memory in particular stands out. I had spent the morning going through interlibrary-loan books on the topic of my second book, using them, in part, to arrange to order some more. Then I had a meeting of ninety minutes or so with an academic committee I was serving on. I got back to my office with about fifteen minutes to spare before one of my classes met, and realized that my career had gotten to the point where teaching had become a sort of bothersome interruption from my research and committee work. It was almost as if time with students was getting in the way of my real work.I got back to my office with about fifteen minutes to spare before one of my classes met, and realized that my career had gotten to the point where teaching had become a sort of bothersome interruption from my research and committee work. It was almost as if time with students was getting in the way of my real work.

Very little of my academic training involved learning how to teach. I had been very excited upon becoming a teaching assistant in graduate school. I set aside large blocks of time for office hours. I led discussion sessions and graded exams. I delivered a guest lecture in a class of several hundred students.

But virtually no one came to my office hours, and I could see that the university was set up to reward faculty and graduate students who focused on research rather than teaching. One of them even referred to teaching undergraduates as “making mud pies.” No one else put it that way, and some of my professors made themselves very available to undergraduates and valued teaching and students. But I noticed that those professors tended to advance less rapidly, or not get tenure at all, than those who made research their priority.

And I learned that as a graduate student my chances of someday landing an elusive tenure-stream position depended almost entirely on becoming a productive scholar. In the four years I spent on my Ph.D., working about 80 hours a week, I do not recall receiving any formal training whatsoever on how to teach. In fact the graduate advisor at that time cautioned teaching assistants not to spend too much time teaching.

And it took me a long time to prioritize teaching even after I left my tenured job.

Still hungry for distinction through writing, I hoped that shifting my attention to academic books that might appeal to a broader audience would bring me the readers I craved. Every few years, I churned out a new one. None of them involved any archival research to speak of, but they all required a great deal of reading, thinking, and writing, time that I could have spent focusing on students. None of them sold many copies or drew much attention. I believe a grand total of two people have written to tell me that they appreciated one of my academic books.

As I gradually realized that I was very unlikely to ever write a widely read book, I put more and more of my attention into volunteer work. I served on the boards of several small non-profits devoted to social justice and co-founded and led one that facilitated some 50,000 letter exchanges between youth in Ghana and the Pacific Northwest. That work took me into many low-income schools in both places and led me to an educator and high school that eventually had a big impact on how I taught: Debra Tavares at Reynolds High School. Her deep commitment to her immigrant students, most of them facing many daunting challenges, inspired me to volunteer in her classroom, though I often felt acutely out of place.

I remember one particularly awkward but important exchange with a young man, we will call him Jose, who was several years behind in school and often skipped class. One day Debra was talking about racism in students’ lives, in the school. Jose, who was enjoying his lunch, leaned back, looked me in the eye, and asked, “Do you like Mexicans?” One day Debra was talking about racism in students’ lives, in the school. Jose, who was enjoying his lunch, leaned back, looked me in the eye, and asked, “Do you like Mexicans?”I asked him to repeat the question to buy myself some time. He repeated his question, and I decided to simply answer: “Yes.” But my mind was racing. No student had ever asked me anything like that before.

In truth, I felt put out by the question. Did he not realize how much time I spent getting to and from and in his school? All for free? Besides, there was a picture of Mexican-Americans on the cover of one of my books. Then it slowly dawned on me that Jose of course had no way of knowing any of those things, that to him I was just this old white guy who occasionally showed up in his class and seemed to have no interest in him. And I could safely assume that he had in fact encountered many white teachers and other adults who had not treated him well, who in fact did not seem to like Mexicans.

So after considerable thought, I came up with an innovative strategy about how to interact with Jose next time I saw him. I asked him how his day was going. He broke out his huge smile and told me his day was going great, and how was mine? I made a point of checking in with him every time he was in class after that, and in fact I found that every single student would, regardless of how disinterested they seemed, talk to me and engage in their academic work if I took a sincere and stubborn interest in them.

My many hours of volunteering with Debra gave me the intensive training in teacher education that graduate school and working in academia had not. I was not there as a guest speaker or any sort of expert. My role was simply to support her and her students. This gave me plenty of time to observe how she taught, how she provided her students with a series of short, intensive activities, often inviting them to think and write about their own lives. I still tease her about how she would stand on top of a chair and threaten to give everyone an “F” who did not get to work. But the other side of her Latina-mom persona was a deep regard and interest in each student. They knew that they could tell her anything and everything about their lives without fear of being judged, that she would give them as much time as she could and do anything in her power to help them.

“Teaching takes not just heart, but also the heart to be heartbroken,” she liked to say. I could see the tremendous joy and power that flowed from her open-heartedness, the sort of moral authority she had with each particular student because they knew she cared about them. And I slowly began to make some of those connections myself in her classroom.

I remember reading a piece by one student, I will call him Roberto, that I was particularly impressed with. He wrote eloquently about wanting to graduate from high school on the one hand and on the other about how hard he had to work after school in his dad’s landscaping business, work that left him so tired that he spent most of his time at school skipping class and hanging out with his friends.

“Wow,” I told Debra, “this is so powerful and well written! Where is Roberto? I’d love to talk to him about this.” “He’s out in the halls skipping class,” she replied, and soon set out to track him down. Roberto appeared, looking very sheepish, and I told him that I had written several books–this being one of the few moments when that seemed relevant–and that he was a very strong writer and could not only graduate from high school but go to college if he wanted to. Maybe there he could learn how to expand his dad’s business? From that day on, Roberto gave me regular updates on his academic progress. After the class ended, he would find me in the halls. The last time was right before he graduated.

I had a harder time, truth be told, understanding how to connect deeply with my own college students. After we moved to Portland, I had taught extensively for Oregon State University (OSU) Ecampus (online) and occasionally face-to-face for the University of Oregon and many classes in a variety of formats for PSU, as well as having two brief appointments at private colleges. The faculty at the two latter institutions, whose students tended to come from more prosperous families, of course seemed much more student-focused than those at the public universities. But OSU’s Ecampus required extensive training, and their staff were not shy about assessing course content and persuading faculty to improve it.

As my teaching slowly shifted solely to PSU, I taught mostly in their impressive Extended Campus program based in community colleges that catered to older, returning students on Portland’s outskirts, people with jobs and usually families. The program’s leaders inspired me and pushed me to improve my pedagogy, and their students usually knew each other well and brought a great deal of life experience to the classes. But PSU terminated that program, for reasons I never understood. Student-focused programs always seem to be vulnerable in public universities. And most of my students at public universities seemed to assume that their professors were too busy to offer them much individual attention.

George D. Kuh, a leading scholar of college teaching, calls this “the ‘disengagement compact’: ‘I’ll leave you alone if you leave me alone,’” the unspoken but widely understood deal that faculty and students commonly make with each other (28). Indeed, if I could make a good living and get good teaching evaluations with plenty of time left over for other activities, who was I to complain? So although I took pains to be a good or at least acceptable professor, university teaching seldom consumed me in the same way that my books or my volunteer projects did.

But those volunteer projects had displaced the books as my primary interest, aside from my family, and those volunteer projects had led me to several conclusions: life is hard; we need each other; we are at our best and are most happy when we are in caring communities; I could work effectively with a wide range of people, including people who had suffered much more than I had, if I listened more than I talked and gave them my full attention. The connections I was making with students from very different backgrounds than my own at Reynolds High School made me less and less willing to just be just a “good enough” college teacher.

Teaching Freshman Inquiry at last enabled me to use at PSU what I had been learning about life and teaching outside of academia. There were several reasons for this. First of all, nearly all the students were straight out of high school. Their expectations of college were not set.

Second, FRINQ was overseen by University Studies (UNST), which took undergraduate teaching very seriously. I had an orientation of several days before teaching the course, where I learned how to teach without lecturing, how to facilitate discussions, and how to work with students who had experienced, or were experiencing, trauma, among many other practical skills. I now had, at age 60, a group of colleagues in UNST who were primarily interested in teaching, especially New Majority students. I worked with a peer mentor not much older than most of the students who had been through a much more intensive teacher-training program than I had.

Third, the great majority of my students were from immigrant families who had gone to low-income high schools such as Reynolds and already had a track record of overcoming daunting challenges. Most of them were highly motivated and, given the chance, eager to connect with and support each other. And the class lasted three terms, the full academic year. So we had nearly nine months to get to know each other. I was also nearing retirement age and, thanks largely to my publication record, making a good salary despite not being tenured. So I could afford the career risk that focusing on teaching brought. Few PSU faculty are so fortunate.

Teaching FRINQ never became easy. The classes took, on average, at least twice and probably about three times as much work as my classes had before, and of course each year there was not only another seventy new students to get to know, but more and more alumni of the course that I tried to keep up with and support. I have heard some horrific stories and have needed to learn about trauma-informed teaching and how to support students who share that they are considering self-harm. I have spent a fair bit of time in UNST and Office of Academic Innovation (OAI) workshops on such topics. Student-focused teaching requires a deep commitment to one’s students, and that is very time consuming and at times exhausting.

But my time working with vulnerable populations outside of academia taught me that these sort of intense relationships are a normal part of most people’s lives, and that the privilege of not knowing many people who are vulnerable is attached to living a very narrow life. People sometimes refer to academia as an ivory tower. I think of it more as a bubble of privilege, but a bubble that, at colleges like PSU, most students are excluded from. People sometimes refer to academia as an ivory tower. I think of it more as a bubble of privilege, but a bubble that, at colleges like PSU, most students are excluded from.And the bubble is in many ways a very comfortable place to be.

Those of us inside the bubble tend to feel that we have earned our right to be there by devoting so many years of our lives to the hard and highly competitive work of research and publication, to scholarship. Even after giving up tenure, I was able to regain partial entry to the bubble through a combination of my social capital (people assume that an old white man knows what he is talking about), scholarly reputation, luck, and a willingness to teach online or in the evenings and some hours away from my home. But, at the end of the day, it is still a bubble, and most of life happens outside of it.

Being part of that larger world was, for me, the great payoff, what made teaching FRINQ wonderful as well as challenging. I deeply enjoyed sharing life with these young adults and doing what I could to encourage and support them–and to being encouraged and supported by them. Once I knew my students deeply, it became impossible to imagine not making them the most important part of my job. And at the end of that first year of teaching FRINQ I had made a larger contribution to the taxpayers of Oregon in particular and to the world in general than all of my books combined.

So, to answer the question I posed at the start of this chapter, why it took me so long to become student focused, I would answer that I was simply reflecting the values of academia in particular and, more generally, of the culture in which I was raised. Academia for me had always been about achieving distinction, to be special and set apart. My socialization in graduate school and the realities of the academic job market led me to privilege my research above all else. Publishing highly regarded books and articles was apparently the only way to get and keep a job and to win status in my chosen profession. This is a fact of life widely understood inside the academic bubble, if not outside of it. I needed a set of intense experiences outside that bubble, mostly with people from very different cultural backgrounds than my own, in order to understand what I had been missing.

Many years ago, I served on a committee that was examining PSU’s curriculum. As the meetings progressed, and reflecting on my time at PSU and other public universities, I remarked that it seemed to me that what our undergraduates most needed was not a revamped curriculum but rather faculty who were more dedicated to teaching. One of my colleagues responded that the quality of teaching at PSU did not concern her much; she had sent her daughter to a student-focused, private college. I thought this was an unusually candid assessment of how white faculty, at least, often view academia.

Tenured jobs at research universities offer us the opportunity to focus on our scholarship while offering a high degree of job security and a salary generous enough that we can send our own children to better colleges than most of our students can afford. Perhaps this is what Kashindi Heragi is getting at when she remarks that she detects a sense of white privilege when she interacts with her white professors, that we believe, deep down, that most PSU students should just be grateful to be going to any college, that they are not “our” kids.

Once we decide that our students are in fact “our kids,” it is much easier to make them our priority. Indeed, some students started referring to our class as a sort of family. Some of them brought family members to class. I have seen dozens of my students graduate and met their proud parents, and I have been to a few weddings. I expect to spend several if not many hours a week of retirement in their company, perhaps volunteering in their classrooms or with their organizations, certainly having coffee or lunch, to keep sharing life with the people who have so often inspired, encouraged, and taught me.