“But he doesn’t seem to know our names…” I remember reading this in a student feedback form years ago, from a unit being taught by a senior colleague. I actually thought it was pretty impressive, and a mark of the Bristol spirit, that such an eminent scholar would be teaching a beginners’ course for first years without a hint of complaint, rather than (as often seems to be the case elsewhere) insisting on limiting his exposure to students to advanced seminars where they could be expected to do most of the work themselves. I can also fully appreciate the difficulty, as one gets older, of learning names and retaining them; apologies to any of my students reading this, but my short-term memory is basically rubbish these days, and the effort of learning the names of all the second-year ancient historians for the unit in this half of the year has driven out roughly 60% of the names of the first-year ancient historians that I memorised back in the autumn. (The good news is that, according to our discussion in a class on digital history, today’s students don’t bother with blogs, so I may be okay).
Now, my defence would be that I want to know all my students’ names, I’m just finding it a struggle these days, and so end up apologising a lot. I’ve no basis for determining what the balance was between can’t and won’t in the case of my distinguished colleague, nor indeed whether the student’s concern was more with an apparent lack of inclination to get friendly than with a failure to manage it in practice. But this does leave me wondering how far there have been changes, not just in my cognitive abilities but in the expectations of students about their teachers and of lecturers about their duties when it comes to the personal and emotional aspects of the relationship.
One reason I found myself thinking about this a couple of weeks ago was reading an article by Paul Mason on modern working conditions, which mentioned in passing the idea of emotional labour, increasingly expected from service workers: it’s not enough to make a decent espresso, “you have to smile and mean it”, at the risk of losing an essential part of your wages or even of getting fired for insufficient sunniness. Now, personally I’m quite happy on most occasions to have no conversation whatsoever beyond the specifics of the transaction, and would consider giving a bigger tip to someone brave enough to be open about having a lousy day in a crap job – but I can see both how an apparently genuine friendliness from a barista or waitress can be a pleasure, and how employers are likely to try to exploit that. Prima facie, the more that students are conceived as customers, the more we may expect to find that emotional labour is expected of their lecturers.
Of course, it isn’t that the relationship between lecturers and students in the past was not personal. Indeed, one of the reasons why lecturers feel themselves ever more under pressure, one might suggest, is that (at least in the humanities) the default model for that relationship remains to a significant degree the small Oxbridge tutorial, where the pedagogic dynamic could play out over three years of fairly intimate intellectual exchange – and so we run ourselves into the ground trying to recreate that dynamic with vastly more students and significantly fewer resources. In the same way, the friendliness and simulacrum of a personal touch expected of baristas today is only partly new; it’s also partly an attempt at recreating a version of the sort of relationship that a shop-keeper or pub landlord would have had with his or her customers in a village of a few hundred people, all of whom had lived there all their lives. We (well, some of us; clearly I am more of a happily alienated urbanite than I thought) would prefer multi-faceted, personalised relationships, where someone not only serves you coffee but is also the niece of your mother’s bridesmaid’s sister who was two classes below you in school, to the anonymous, instrumental relationships of mass society. Even I quite like the feeling of being recognised when I go into a cafe that I frequent regularly.
In other words, most of us, a lot of the time and at least in certain contexts, would prefer to live in villages, and modern capitalism seeks to provide an equivalent experience as a means of parting us more effectively from our money on a regular basis. And (in a much narrower frame), most lecturers would, at least in certain contexts, prefer to be teaching in some sort of idealised Oxbridge, maybe without the fancy dress, or at least a pre-expansion university with lots of small seminar groups and plenty of opportunity for discussion and development. I don’t actually know what ideas of university most students are operating with or where they get these from (parents? teachers?), but I feel reasonably certain that they will likewise involve a certain amount of expectations based on an actual or idealised past, and the import of guidelines on personal tutoring and the like is to try to get some way towards that goal with staff-student rations of 15-20:1 rather than 5:1.
But there is more going on. After all, the point about one’s relationship with the shop-keeper in this mythical pre-modern village was that it was multi-layered and personalised – you knew them, they knew you – not that it was automatically friendly. The idea that one’s relationship with the barista should appear to be not just personal but actively pleasant, and that it’s the job of the barista to make it so, is, I think, a new one; hence the idea of ’emotional labour’. Is it the same with lecturer-student relationships today? My experience of Oxbridge tutorials was that you got the time and the attention of the lecturer, not that you liked them or expected them to like you – indeed, the whole thing could be downright scary and/or unpleasant, but (mostly) in retrospect also productive and educational. Lecturers were – and were allowed to be – curmudgeonly, short-tempered, impatient, dismissive and sceptical, and I don’t recall feeling that they should be compelled to be anything else. Negligence, laziness and unreliability were problems; grumpiness was part of the rich tapestry of university life.
I do feel, admittedly without any hard evidence, that this has changed somewhat. It isn’t formal or explicit, but it seems to be there in, for example, anxieties about the tone of feedback; not whether or not the feedback is helpful but whether it might be upsetting – everything has to be framed in terms of constructiveness, which makes pedagogical sense (what’s the point of feedback that just points out errors?) but which also seems to involve something of a slippery slope towards the avoidance of any negative comments at all. The underlying drive of the National Student Survey seems less about whether students are actually learning than about whether they’re enjoying the experience; given that this, and other surveys of customer ‘satisfaction’, are what increasingly set the expectations of our role, the implication is that we are indeed responsible for the emotional state of our students as well as their intellectual development. We should be supportive, available, welcoming, patient, tolerant, forgiving – and not in the least judgemental if they don’t like economic history or if they prioritise sports or partying over their studies so long as they get ‘their’ 2:1.
It is perhaps worth stressing that I do actually like my students (well, all but one or two) and enjoy trying to enthuse them with the subject, even if this also sometimes leaves me exasperated. Is such attitude a pre-requisite for the job? I’m reminded of this exchange in Buffy:
Principal Snyder: I mean, it's incredible. One day the campus is completely bare. Empty. The next, there are children everywhere. Like locusts. Crawling around, mindlessly bent on feeding and mating. Destroying everything in sight in their relentless, pointless desire to exist. Giles: I do enjoy these pep talks. Have you ever considered, given your abhorrence of children, that school principal was not, perhaps, your true vocation? Snyder: Somebody's got to keep an eye on them.
Many if not most lecturers entered academia not because they love students but for quite different reasons, and people whose idea of fun is an eight-hour stretch in an archive with as few other people around as possible are not necessarily equipped with the sort of people skills or outward-focusing emotional intelligence that now seems to be in practice more or less a requirement for the job.
Does this make them less good teachers? As I said, I come from an era where academics could be as brusque, dismissive, uncaring, cold, and unimpressed towards students so long as they knew their stuff. Some of my lecturers I remember with enormous affection, others still with an twinge of past resentment – but I learnt from all of them, and there’s no automatic correlation between the ones I learnt most from and the pleasantness of the experience. The attitude of “oh God, another one; okay, show me if there’s anything about you to make me care what you think” can be a spur as much as a discouragement. Today the appropriate line is more like “of course what you have to say is interesting, but let’s think about how we can make it even better” – even if that’s basically untrue.
To quote another Buffy stalwart: “Tact is just not saying true stuff. I’ll pass.” That isn’t my style – I would be falling over myself to find the positive in student work whether or not this was expected – but I’m not sure if that makes me any better as a teacher, and I’m not sure if the energy that other, less doormat-like colleagues have to invest in ‘being nice’ is the best use of their time. However, niceness is no longer a matter of personal inclination but a core competence. It’s increasingly clear that education is just another service industry, desperate to keep its customers happy and so requiring its employees to do emotional as well as intellectual labour.
[Incidentally, it was an enormous relief to find, in the course of the aforementioned seminar discussion about digital history, that a fair proportion of my students still know about Buffy. My pop cultural references are not completely out of date. Admittedly this arose as a result of attempting to explain to a sea of blank faces what I was talking about when referring to Firefly…]
Sphinx 
I don’t know how or whether to respond to this, because I have no experience of what the academic past was like and how different things actually are. So I might be off base.
But I think the difference between the barrista and the village shopkeeper is a good analogy, because not only are the relationships different in tenor, but they preside over different kinds of transactions. You can barter and call in (real or invented?) favours from the shopkeeper and this was a viable business model. If customer and barrista operate this way, the result will not be the continued supply of coffee which is the goal of the whole transaction.
So, I think that Oxbridge tutorial feedback and modern academic feedback are different things. Negative feedback in a tutorial can be contested, clarified or superceded by new feedback. Tutor and student barter and each individual comment is only part of the transaction. A comment on an essay is a fundamentally different kind of feedback. It is often the whole transaction and it is immutable and unilateral.
I think this means that negative feedback stings more – to this extent expecting academics to behave differently is about customer satisfaction. But I think it is about more than this, because the different dynamic means that negative feedback cannot be used to produce the increased academic performance (or at least not in the same ways) which is the goal of the whole transaction.
Thanks so much for this really interesting point. You’re certainly right that the tutorial feedback is in practice a quite different thing; it’s solely about the development of the student’s understanding, as part of an ongoing process of education, and can indeed be contested, clarified and in due course overlaid by improved performance or a different approach next time. The problems with feedback on assessment in other contexts are:
(i) it’s not necessarily part of an ongoing process or relationship – I may never see this student again (especially if they don’t bother coming to talk to me about their work, as most of them do – I do miss the ability to compel them to attend essay tutorials), so while the idea of the feedback is to help them improve, this is something that is supposed to happen elsewhere, either in their conversations with their personal tutor (if they attend those meetings) or as part of a process where the student him- or herself is supposed to draw the right lessons from different bits of feedback over a period of time;
(ii) the feedback is closely tied to the mark, which is treated as an inviolable bit of academic judgement and hence *not* negotiable; hence, as you say, the whole thing becomes a single one-sided transaction, and the role of feedback becomes less a matter of education and more – or at least partly – a justification of that mark against hypothetical objections or appeals.
Of course this is one point where the barista analogy starts to become less and less helpful; if I’m *really* unhappy with the cup of coffee I’ve been given, regardless of how friendly the barista is, I would expect to be given a new one. Lecturers are not going to go that far down the route of ensuring ‘customer’ satisfaction, or at least not openly, since that then devalues the product that is on offer – so the emotional labour is partly dedicated to trying to get the student ‘customer’ to accept the mark/feedback as fair, even if they don’t feel happy about it. Which is a different sort of situation.
“people whose idea of fun is an eight-hour stretch in an archive with as few other people around as possible are not necessarily equipped with the sort of people skills or outward-focusing emotional intelligence that now seems to be in practice more or less a requirement for the job” – hey, some of us are!
The point about emotional labour is interesting. I did, naively, expect that once my barmaid-ing days were behind me, I would no longer need to put in the same kind of emotional effort. If anything, the reverse has proven true. In a bar, people are quite happy to ask for what they want, or to ask for recommendations, and managing expectations (theirs, of your service, and yours, of the amount of effort you will need to make) is relatively straightforward. Perhaps it is cynical to view it in terms of a power relationship, but at least when you work behind a bar or in a shop, the terms of that relationship are clear.
The biggest shock in my previous job, though, was realising the level of service expected of archive and library staff by undergraduates: I had quite a few exchanges with a clear subtext of “what am I paying all this money for if you won’t hand this to me on a plate?” Getting across the idea that they are paying to learn skills so that they can conduct theit own research was not easy.
Also, re: Oxbridge, there’s a fine line between “show me why I should care about your ideas” and “this place started going downhill as soon as it admitted people like you.” Sadly many of my Oxbridge experiences were on the wrong side of that line.
I think there is a difference between people who embark on academic careers because they like working in archives but then discover they also have to deal with people occasionally, and people who embark on careers in managing archives where the need to deal with other people is clearly part of the job description from the beginning, even if they’re not happy about it. This was focused on the former rather than insultng archivists…
Yes, of course – that was a slightly gratuitous attempt at countering stereotypes, though archives really are much nicer without all those pesky readers…
But as for my last point, I hope it offered more than the expression of a personal grievance. I agree with cmdelislefm above that the Oxbridge system of small supervision groups offers the potential for a more collaborative, negotiatory kind of feedback – but both the student and the supervisor need to be invested in this relationship for it to work. If the chosen analogy is that of a village shopkeeper offering credit and allowing bartering, we should also allow for the possibility that they could refuse service to someone on a whim – someone who might have nowhere else to go. The barista might be a cog in a corporate machine, but at least the machine has accountability built into its structure; by extension, while you can’t give a better grade just because someone is dissatisfied, I imagine your feedback is at least recorded, so that there is some measure of accountability in case it all goes badly wrong.
“Maybe I sound whiny to you,” said the girl, “but I simply want my history major to mean something.”
“Well, there’s your problem,” said Zoe.
Couldn’t resist quote from Lorrie Moore short story!
Interesting points and particularly about accountability. Whereas I do agree that there has to be accountability in a system, what happens if as you say “it’s not necessarily part of an ongoing process or relationship – I may never see this student again (especially if they don’t bother coming to talk to me about their work, as most of them do – I do miss the ability to compel them to attend essay tutorials)”. Isn’t it true that the increasing pressure of accountability can become a Kafkaesque paper trail where the lecturer seeks to justify his/her results at the end of the year… ? Don’t you worry that the grip that the government has over schools and their accountability measures will creep more invasively into higher education?
Thanks for this (and sorry for delay in approving comment). In brief, yes, no sane person would want to have to endure what state school teachers have to put up with. There is certainly more freedom and autonomy within higher education, partly because of the idea that the students are adults and so can take some responsibility – but the mechanism towards which they’re pushed, as I suggested, is the customer satisfaction survey. There is accountability, but it’s very diffuse; except when students make a direct complaint to their tutor or via the staff-student committee – which, understandably, they’re generally reluctant to do – then all we know is that some students are unhappy about something, and it’s difficult to know what. Maybe there’s a specific problem with one member of staff and the feedback they offer, but we can’t know that from the survey; we just know that there’s unhappiness with feedback, say, which gets attributed to the department as a whole. Rather like the Research Excellence Framework, which likewise refuses to identify the performance of individuals, it can be seen as a means of making the conscientious people work harder as they can never know if they’ve done enough…
Put another way: if I had more or less sole responsibility for the education of a given student, and could monitor their development (and the amount they put in) over a period of time, it would be much easier to hold me to account for failures while also giving me an opportunity to defend my approach. In the current system, everything is dispersed across a whole department (if not several), so more or less impossible to blame individual lecturers – but also much harder to check whether student is doing their bit to try to learn as well.