Seated on a stage, waiting to give a presentation on “How I Teach” for my college’s admissions office, I thought about a scene from the film version of Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry, starring Burt Lancaster as a salesman turned tent-revival preacher. In the scene, he recalls one of the steps on the road to his conversion:
“‘What are you selling today, Elmer, some gold-plated vacuum cleaners?’ ‘No sir,’ I said. ‘You can get better vacuum cleaners at Sears and Roebuck. And you can get ‘em cheaper. But you can’t beat our electric toasters at any price.’ And the man sat down and wrote me the biggest order of the year. I didn’t make that sale, Lord, you did.”
Before it’s over, Elmer is sliding across the stage like he’s stealing third base, and -- with terrifyingly insincere charisma -- he’s brought the congregation back to that old-time religion.
I’ve seen a few professors who can do that sort of thing for the admissions people, but I don’t think I have a talent for it.
Yet here I am, with two colleagues, about to speak to a few hundred high-school juniors and their parents: probably skeptical, jaded, and exhausted by their grand tour of liberal-arts colleges all over the Upper Midwest. Several important administrators are looking on, armed with statistics and quotations from the updated missional literature. I have just been introduced, and I am about to stand up.
What should I say? It’s always absurd to tell someone, “Just be yourself.” Which self should I be? Should I be dynamic and entertaining, or should I try to be a serious professor with big, important ideas? Should I talk about my teaching methods -- my pedagogy -- or should I just give them a representative episode from one of my classes? Should I be assertive about my beliefs, or should I do my best to be charming and inoffensive?
Who is my real audience, anyway: the parents, the students, or the administrators? Am I here to win converts? Am I here to scare the wrong sorts of students away? Am I auditioning for something? Will my head explode like that guy in Scanners?
I know this experience is getting more common among professors at church-affiliated colleges like mine. All of the admissions research says that prospective students and their parents want to know something about the mysterious people who do the professing. They want to ask us questions in a public forum; they want to visit our classes; they want private meetings with department chairs; and they want us to call them on the phone to explain why they should come to our college instead of some other place.
I understand. When a single year of college easily costs more than a luxury car, parents are demanding some kind of accountability. They want to kick the tires and look under the hood, even if they can’t tell a carburetor from a fuel injector. It doesn’t help that the publicity materials produced for colleges invariably seem as slick as advertisements for the latest anti-anxiety medication.
Case in point: I don’t understand the recent trend towards vacuous slogans: “We are Oberlin: Fearless.” Are they the Marines? Anybody can claim to be fearless. And what exactly is Oberlin not supposed to be fearing? Are we supposed to think, “Global Warming, Unemployment, Terrorism . . . No Problem.” Wouldn’t it be more honest to say, “We’re Oberlin. And We’re Freaked Out, Man!”?
If I were a parent or a prospective student, you can be sure that I wouldn’t take any college’s publicity material at face value, particularly given what I know about the transformation of most teaching positions into part-time, no-benefit, transient positions. I would make speaking with a variety of professors and students a higher priority than inspecting the dorm rooms, athletic facilities, or the quality of the landscaping.
So I am glad -- for all of the complications and discomfort -- to be involved in a public examination of my pedagogy and persona, to show that we care about teaching and the development of our students as whole persons. It’s an honor to be asked, since it means that I am probably regarded as representative of the college in a positive way.
Even with those feelings, my first talk was not very good. I was partly paralyzed by my conflicting thoughts. I didn’t know the genre. I didn’t know what to expect from the audience. So I ended up offering the most banal generalities about the liberal arts, interdisciplinarity, and teaching for multiple levels of intelligence. I probably didn’t drive anyone away -- nobody pelted me with rotten fruit -- but I don’t think I impressed anyone, either.
It went better the second time. Instead of talking about my teaching, I gave them a quick demonstration lecture involving a reading from “The Fall of the House of Usher,” a famous daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe, and a phrenological head. It was essentially about the same things as the first talk, but the pedagogy was demonstrated rather than described. It’s just like they say in creative writing: show, don’t tell. They even applauded at the end without prompting, so it seemed like I had their good will.
But the presentation was one thing; the questions that followed were another. No one, in either session, asked anything about my particular teaching or research, and there was an undercurrent of skepticism in the questions.
Most of the questions were civil and appropriate:
Professors have ready answers for those questions. But other questions -- important ones, clearly -- did not relate to us so much as to the offices of career services or financial aid:
Audiences, like presenters, have a low tolerance for awkward silences, so sometimes revealing things get blurted. Maybe the parents are not exactly seeking answers so much as feeling us out, seeing how we react to the seemingly irrelevant or provocative question. How we respond tells them a lot about how we are in the classroom, whether we are truly open to dialogue.
I suspect that just appearing to be a “normal human being” with reasonable views, who respects the audience, goes a long way toward repairing the negative image some people have of professors. I think it also helps to dress professionally, smile a lot, and avoid using defensively obscure jargon.
That’s easy enough, of course, if you feel comfortable with public speaking, but the most important and difficult part, is honesty and directness in response to questions -- especially when dealing with parents who seem skeptical. On two occasions, parents asked questions that seemed opportunistically hostile, as if they smelled blood in the water:
Taken aback -- and uncertain of how to offer a balance between positive spin and an undeniable fact of my identity -- I remained silent on the first question and handed off the second question to another panelist, an assistant professor who teaches in the sciences.
He said something like: “We explore the intricacy of natural forms, and it’s hard for many not to imagine a superior creative force behind it. We celebrate that wonder.”
That’s all true -- up to a point -- but it was probably not the precise answer a few parents wanted. Even so, why provoke a confrontation? Why cause parents with fairly fixed ideas to send their child -- who may have different or more flexible views -- to some other college that offers less room for conversation and what we generally regard as the allied goals of intellectual and spiritual growth?
In such a situation, it pays to have at least one senior faculty member on the panel, who can radiate the kind of integrity that is needed in such contexts. Fortunately, we had one present, and here is what my senior colleague said in response to the same question (although with the other still in mind):
If you want biology classes based on the inerrancy of the Bible, then I believe you can find that somewhere else. But if you want classes that are welcoming to people of faith, that are open to dialogue from all kinds of perspectives -- an education that strengthens belief through questioning ways of knowing instead of straining to protect brittle orthodoxies -- then maybe we have what you are looking for.”
Such a tension -- between the frank truth and the pleasing obfuscation -- animates every second of those presentations, particularly for untenured faculty members with administrators looking on. There is always the danger of boosterism and pandering, of overplaying the positive and trying too hard to please some parents to get their student to enroll without thinking too much about whether he or she should enroll at our college instead of some other place that better matches their needs and expectations.
If you try to please one person -- just to make the sale -- you might lose several others who were, in fact, well matched to your campus before you distorted their impression of it. Over the long term, years of trying to placate the more outspoken parents can transform institutional culture, after many bitter and lasting conflicts, into something nearly unrecognizable, just because it is easier to be nice than to stand for something.
If a college tries to accommodate everyone -- to be all things to all tuition-paying people -- then it will eventually cease to have an identity. It will become a grinning salesman without scruples, a gold-plated vacuum: shiny on the outside and empty on the inside. And you can be sure there are people prepared to fill that void with their aggressive convictions.
It’s an outcome I am glad we have avoided, even if it means some uncomfortable moments in which one must choose to tell the truth and leave the consequences to providence.