“The first thing I want to say to you who are students, is that you cannot afford to think of being here to receive an education; you will do much better to think of yourselves as being here to claim one.”
My grandmother, who was the youngest of fourteen kids raised on a ranch in the remote Sierra mountains, was a teacher. My mother, that same grandmother’s daughter, was a teacher. I am a teacher. My niece is a teacher. It’s like being in the mafia. Once you start teaching, you can’t really leave.
Sometimes people refer to me as a “professor,” which I am not, neither in job title nor in practice. Professors reach a rank where teaching is only half or maybe even a quarter of what they do. They supervise grad students who teach, but in any given semester at a big school like Berkeley, where I’ve taught for 25 years, they mostly do research. The teaching is left to those same grad students and to lecturers like myself. Our union is AFT, which mostly represents K-12 teachers, not researchers or administrators. Teaching is 100% of what we do. We are teachers in higher education.
During the pandemic, a writer I used to know started posting some interesting things about teachers on social media. We were “liars,” because apparently a teacher told her kids that it was okay to accept people whose gender identities change. We were “cowards,” because we wanted to wait for vaccines before returning to work. We were “lazy,” “entitled,” “greedy” and so on. I had thought she liked me, thought she maybe even respected what I did for a living. After all, didn’t her kids go to school?
I make a lot of jokes in class. Sometimes my students laugh at them, oftentimes, they don’t. Since cancer treatment, I have these memory holes where I forget someone’s name, forget what I was talking about, a perilous moment for someone engaged in the act of teaching. A couple of weeks ago this happened and I joked that I must have a brain worm like RFK Jr. Then I was reminded of a friend who looked very concerned when I mentioned my passport was expired and that I didn’t really worry about it. But part of me expected that the next time I taught, someone would walk through the door and cuff me. That didn’t happen.
“Any situation in which some men prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence… to alienate humans from their own decision making is to change them into objects.”
The actual little red book that most teachers read.
Many of us who teach do wonder if this moment is the end of the road for our careers. Already friends at smaller colleges are losing their jobs. People will always want to go to Berkeley, I think… but what happens if Berkeley is stripped of its capacity to do the kind of life-saving research that keeps people like me alive? What happens if Sociology is shut down, if Judith Butler is burned in effigy yet again and this time it’s on campus? What if Berkeley is no longer Berkeley? What if budget cuts come down from DC and over from Sacramento and the admins who have never had a conversation with a person who teaches in my program decide we’re too expensive, what happens if the fact that I teach a class on gender and writing with Audre Lorde and Judith Butler (!!!) on the syllabus means I’m a personal target, what happens if those admins decide writing doesn’t matter and students can just ChatGPT their way to graduation?
There is no answer to any of these questions other than this: we try to find a way to keep teaching. I don’t write about my students publicly because they have not given me permission to do so, but I will say that in spite of the bellyaching I see on Reddit’s professor pages and the occasional gripes we share in our offices behind closed doors, for every difficult student, there are dozens and hundreds and thousands of empathetic and intellectually curious ones. If I were to tell you of some of the personal challenges my students have overcome, some of you would be on your knees. The stories are harrowing. But they keep showing up. So do we; I’ve seen colleagues teaching with broken limbs and after losing their parents and with breast pumps in their offices (we didn’t have medical leave until the union pushed for it), and my oncologist laughed out loud when she saw me grading papers with a chemo pump in my arm. Sometimes we’re martyrs for the cause, and the cause is your children’s lives and their futures. We do this job for our students. The money is a joke. We are punching bags at best and actual targets for shooters at worst.
Sure, there are students who don’t want to be there, but for every one of them there are far, far more who fought tooth and claw to get into college knowing that college – and public colleges in particular – is still one of the few remaining things that can actually lift people out of poverty. When Clark Kerr drafted the California Master Plan for Education in 1960 it was a revolutionary idea that every single person in California was entitled to an education at a community college, a Cal State, or a UC. And whether you teach at Laney College in Oakland or UC Berkeley, you teach those students with the same level of respect and compassion and commitment, or you get a different job.
But I guess that what makes us committed also makes us disposable. There have been a million budget crises in my years of teaching, hundreds of times when I seriously worried about being laid off. Even with all my seniority, I am still aware, daily, that this job is not guaranteed. In the past tenured faculty often dismissed lecturers when we talked about this concern. Now, with the news coming about Columbia and Penn and every other school being targeted, and with the gutting of the Department of Education, tenured faculty are not sounding so smug. Maybe they should actually start talking to us. Maybe we could even work together.
Right now, though, everything feels grim. There are rallies and marches to save science, save higher education, and people who went to Yale and Harvard sit in DC and tell us that college doesn’t matter, nobody needs it, that you can just get a job by snapping your fingers, I guess. No, of course college isn’t for everyone, nor should it be. Nobody should be forced to attend college. But for those who want to pursue it, kneecapping the DOE and choking the funding streams that keep colleges functioning is not just going to impact us woke professors.
It’s going to impact your kids, the ones I’m teaching, the ones I will hopefully get to keep teaching. And like millions of other lazy, greedy, selfish teachers, me and my colleagues are teaching them how to do critical thinking and rhetorical analysis and writing, a few of the last bastions we have against actual indoctrination as opposed to the imagined kind, and the last protection against technology doing our thinking for us. Maybe someone will walk into my classroom and cuff me some day, but I’ll still probably be grading papers in jail. And my students? Hopefully they’ll still be able to articulate their ideas clearly and forcefully, the most dangerous outcome of all.