The Great Desert University has put the eefus on my scheme to earn enough to pay off the Renovation Loan by teaching a couple of sections of excruciating undergraduate literacy courses each semester.
First, pleading penury, the West campus canceled all 2008 fall courses taught by adjunct faculty (part-timers).
Next, the administration announced that henceforth tenure-track faculty will be discouraged from teaching in summers and intersessions. Instead, adjunct faculty will teach those sections.
Why?
Consider: if you’re full-time faculty, GDU has to pay you a percentage of your salary for each summer course you teach. When I was on the teaching faculty, I earned over $4,000 for teaching a summer section; today, with the raises in pay I would have experienced during the past five years, they’d have to pay me around $6,000. But as adjunct? I earn $3,500. Without the Ph.D., an adjunct gets a munificent $3,200. So, you see the motivation.
Moving on, the next fiat announced that all on-line courses henceforth will have no enrollment caps!
Understand:
* The National Council of Teachers of English recommends that college writing courses enroll no more than 20 students per class.
* I personally did a study comparing two concurrent sections of Writing for the Professions, each with 30 enrolled students, with identical syllabi, one on-line and one face-to-face, and discovered that the online section required exactly twice as many hours to prepare and teach as the in-class section (“Parallel On-Line and In-Class Sections of ‘Writing for the Professions’: A Practical Experiment.” Educational Technology and Society, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2000).
At GDU, Writing for the Professions . . .
- is one of two courses that fill the upper-division literacy requirement (the university has more than 64,000 students!)
- is required for the global business major.
- is required for the post-baccalaureate teaching certificate.
- fills a requirement for the B.A. in English education (i.e., the undergraduate teaching certificate).
- fills a requirement for the accounting major.
- fills a requirement for the social work major.
- is the course to which upper-division students with substandard writing skills and with learning disabilities are referred.
- is a recommended course for students whose first language is other than English.
Every section offered on-line fills within days after the course schedule is published, leaving students begging for overrides.
All of which is to say that demand for the course is huge, students by and large loathe it, and half of them would kill to get into an online section that at least doesn’t make them traipse to campus and spend three hours a week sitting through a class they don’t think they should have to take in the first place.
It is, in short, a demonic course from Hell.
Removing the caps for on-line sections means any on-line section will enroll upwards of 100 students. Possibly LOTS upwards. Think 200. Think 300. In a writing course!
Well, thanks to GDU having “accidentally” double-enrolled the two sections I agreed to teach this semester, I have 80 students right now. But at least I’m being paid to teach the equivalent of four sections.
What this new policy will do is require FAs to teach possibly twice that many (possibly more) students for one-fourth of the pay. Yes. In a five-week summer session.
There’s only one way anyone dumb enough or naïve enough or desperate enough to agree to any such arrangement could possibly survive: cheat the students. Deny them anything even resembling “education.” The sole way you could cope would be to have every single assignment be a group project, so that instead of 100 or 200 papers to grade per assignment, you’d have 20 or 40.
I do group projects right now to cut down the workload. But I start with two or three individual assignments, so that I can identify the strongest and weakest students and so the students have an opportunity to get some one-on-one instruction. Reading the last raft 80 papers of drivel damn near killed me. The next five papers will come over my transom in the form of five group projects, each on average six or eight pages long. Let’s say the average length of papers handed in for these next five assignments is seven pages. That comes to FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE PAGES (count’em: 525) of copy in which verbs don’t agree with subjects, facts are wrong, words are used incorrectly, paragraphs are incoherent or nonexistent, logic is tortured, grammar is even more tortured, punctuation is wrong in every way imaginable. And on and on.
That’s for 80 students, divided into 15 groups. Five hundred twenty-five pages of bad copy to read, analyze, think about, comment upon understandably, and try to explain how to fix, in one month. That follows the two individual papers they’ve written so far (about 320 pages), coming to a total of 845 pages to process over the semester, in addition to three online quizzes. That’s more pages than War and Peace! And Leo Tolstoy this bunch ain’t.
Imagine the workload for a class of 200 “writing” students. Even if you made every assignment a group project, the number of hours required to cope with the tsunami of careless, toss-it-away, don’t-give-a-damn copy would reduce your $3,500 pay to well below minimum wage.
Better to greet customers at Walmart! At least most of the customers want to be there.
And indeed, what on earth would be the point of enrolling in such a course? The only point is to get a rubber stamp in your transcript so you can proceed through to your rubber-stamp degree in accountancy or social work or global management, a meaningless degree if ever there was one. To say nothing of the vacant teaching certificate that ensues from courses like this.
So it is that one of the great universities in the land (as it would style itself) defrauds its students, exploits part-time faculty, and makes a joke of what America calls education.
Artwork: Gustave Doré, Illustration no. 34, Divina Commedia (L’inferno)