As the high tide of the pandemic recedes, what are we to make of — and what must we do about — the debris and damage left in its wake? Most every public and private enterprise in our country, of course, confronts these urgent questions. Yet they beat with a particular urgency on college campuses. Our business is not filling empty shelves or filing back orders, but instead informing young minds.
For more than a year, however, we could reach those minds only across flat screens.
How great has the damage been? Now that we can disconnect from Zoom and reconnect with students, turn off flat screens and turn on classroom lights, do teachers face a different kind of disconnect and flattening? One that is not electrical and spatial, but instead is intellectual and psychological?
A spate of recent articles and essays suggest that this may well be the case. Last month The Chronicle published “A ‘Stunning’ Level of Student Disconnection,” in which the reporter Beth McMurtrie reviewed the responses from faculty members asked to share their “experiences with student disengagement.” This was followed last week by an essay in The New York Times by Jonathan Malesic. The piece attracted an impressive number of comments — nearly 1,500 — and continues to light up Twitter.
How could it not? The essay’s headline — “My College Students Are Not OK” — is a sly teaser, boding a bleak tale of the freshly dug graves of academe. Malesic tries to live up to the title’s grim promise with a dire dispatch from the front lines. In last fall’s classes, he reports, a third of his students were invariably absent, while those who did show up either hid furtively behind their laptops or slept openly at their desks.
Yet he fails to give us a percentage — either precise or approximate — of those hiding or sleeping. Moreover, he notes his classes were “small,” but doesn’t say how small. Does this mean 10 students? Twelve? Twenty? The numbers matter. Are they statistically generous enough to support Malesic’s sweeping assertions? If the numbers are too few or too skewed, it is not clear we can give more weight to his conclusions that the “students weren’t doing what it takes to learn,” indeed that “they didn’t even seem to be trying.”
Perhaps aware of the fragile evidentiary basis to his claims, Malesic also cites three professors in the University of Texas system, in which he taught last year. Not surprisingly, they reaffirm his experiences and reiterate his insights. One colleague remarked that, upon her return to the classroom, her students seem unresponsive. “It’s like being online!” she exclaimed. “This was my experience too,” Malesic adds. “In my classes, it often seemed as if my students thought they were still on Zoom with their cameras off.”
Here’s the funny thing, though. I often thought this about many of my own students not just last year, but last century. A time before Zoom, or the internet, was invented. Back then I would tell colleagues and friends that I have students who “sit there like bumps on a log.” Or in contemporary parlance, students who tapped the mute button. I had such bumps way back then; I have such bumps now. How many bumps? From one third to one half. And the percentage does not vary a great deal, no matter how great an emphasis I place on class participation.
As a result, I am not sure what to make of Malesic’s experience. Like he did, I also teach at a public university in Texas (the University of Houston); like him, I have been teaching a long time (since the fall of the Berlin Wall); and like him, I teach a writing workshop from time to time.
Of course, the persistent presence of bumps in my classes might say something about my teaching. But it might also say something about the dynamics of class participation. The caption below a wonderful Gary Larson cartoon — a family is sitting in a semi-circle and staring at an empty space — reads “In the days before television.” This captures, I think, the category mistake we are stumbling over. Students back then were not waiting for smart phones to play dumb. They were already quite good at playing dumb — namely, preferring to keep mum — when there were still fat screens topped by rabbit ears.
Students back then were not waiting for smart phones to play dumb. They were already quite good at it.
Holding back, rather than holding forth, is what many, if not most students — and the occasional teacher — seem to have done ever since the days of the Academy. Isn’t that Socrates, after all, staring off into space amidst the philosophical hustle and bustle of Raphael’s “School of Athens”? Yet, there are still those students, thankfully, who hold forth in class. In my three courses this spring semester — about 25 students in two, and 10 in my workshop — there were always five or six students who talked. And talked some more, not only engaged by the books but also engaging the more reserved students. (And they continued to talk with one another in chatrooms both before and after class.)
My experience was not unique. When I prodded colleagues at UH and other public universities, they mostly offered similar accounts. There were students who were engaged, others who were not; there were some well-written papers, many more that were not; there were the many who attended and the few who disappeared. But such things always “happen,” as one UH colleague observed. A colleague at the University of California at Davis reported that his experience has not been nearly as “dire” as Malesic’s, while another UH colleague concluded that for “every student I can think of with serious depression and social anxiety, I can think of several others who have done fine work and been even cheerful.”
How can we account for this disparity between Malesic’s circle and my own? Perhaps we have become captive not only to certain metaphors, but also to certain biases. McMurtrie notes that the 100 respondents for her article were “self selected.” So, too, for Malesic: A dozen friends contacted him with similar accounts after he posted his experience in the classroom on Facebook. But those with experiences like Malesic’s are more apt to reply in kind than those with different (and less dire) experiences. We are, according to Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, machines that jump to conclusions — especially when they confirm our own biases. (Including my own, of course. After all, I selected my respondents.)
Obviously, there are several studies, cited by McMurtrie and Malesic, that track worrisome upticks in the levels of disengagement and anxiety among young adults since 2020. No less obviously, these findings must not be dismissed or ignored. As someone who not only taught through the pandemic but also is the father to two children in school during the same period — one finishing college, the other starting high school — I think I understand some, if not all, of the hardships and challenges that have confronted my students.
But I also think it is dangerous to generalize when there is only limited data — data, moreover, about an experience that we will need many years to fully measure. As a historian, I wonder if we have the necessary perspective to make sense — or, at least, make a sensible narrative — about how our students experienced a plague that is not only not past but stretches into our future.
I wonder if we have the necessary perspective to make sense about how our students experienced a plague that is not only not past but stretches into our future.
Yet both past and future are mostly absent from Malesic’s account. For example, he does not say if the sense of disconnection he diagnosed in his students last fall persisted through spring semester this year. For both pedagogical and ethical reasons, it is important to know if a widespread condition of anomie and apathy still plagues his students.
Second, he ignores what the French historian Fernand Braudel called la longue durée, or the “long haul” of history. Malesic’s approach is simple and stark — an Edenic before and hellish after. Before was a time when all students showed up to class, talked up their books, and wrote up their papers. Come March 2020, we were heaved into the After, where students failed to show up even when their bodies were slumped behind desks.
How like the perspective of those who lived through the French Revolution, historians might observe. To contemporary witnesses, the taking of the Bastille marked a great tear in historical time, an event so seismic that it cracked open the vast divide between the ancien régime and the new world the revolutionaries thought they were creating.
Yet as historians ever since Alexis de Tocqueville have understood, the events of 1789 represented a continuation, not obliteration, of trends that had been underway for decades, if not centuries in France. The problems Malesic describes did not first appear in 2020, but instead are embedded in the warp and woof of the past. As McMurtrie rightly notes, it may well be that the “strains of the past two years simply accelerated longer-term trends.”
Neither the strains nor trends are going away. But to deal with these issues that loom so large over the future of the academy, we must not only keep in sight their evolution across the past but also our inevitably flawed and limited perceptions of the present.
