a_preamble_tips.md

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The COVID-19 pandemic has irrevocably changed the way college and university instructors are teaching and students are learning. The shift to remote learning will, in some instances, be permanent, both here at the University of Virginia and in universities across the country. While digital pedagogies have existed for decades, many faculty and students in the humanities relied upon them for the first time under the conditions of a global pandemic. At the UVA, the suddenness of this shift to largely digital and online learning, and the crisis within which it took place, have left little time for reflection. Few instructors, students, and staff alike have been fully able to find reprieve, let alone recover, grieve, or rethink our way through digital pedagogy.

Another consequence of universities’ shift to online learning during the pandemic was corporations and higher ed institutions' shock doctrine approach to implementing certain tools and policies.¹ Part of this shock doctrine has arrived in the technological form of what writer and pedagogue Jeffrey Moro calls “cop shit,” which he defines as “any pedagogical technique or technology that presumes an adversarial relationship between students and teachers.” This describes much of what is offered to public universities by private corporations seeking to make a profit, from Zoom itself to more specialized software intended to detect cheating or attendance. A second part of the shock was the overall lack of consent-solicited from students and University employees regarding the circumstances of pandemic instruction. Despite repeated calls from students, faculty, and community members for the University to stay fully remote during the Fall 2020 semester, UVA went ahead with a hybrid semester and bringing students back to Charlottesville.

A final aspect of the shock may be yet to come, as UVA prepares to expand its online course offerings over the next few years. During a presentation on possible models for future online courses in a December 2020 meeting of Board of Visitors, faculty representative Ellen Bassett said many faculty were “dragged… kicking and screaming” into online learning, though “it has been remarkably rewarding.” “Faculty are interested in [online learning],” she went on to say, “but a little bit skeptical.” Board member Thomas De Pasquale added that in years prior, faculty had been “adamant that they would never go to online learning.” The pandemic, it seems, has pushed UVA’s faculty to engage with digital pedagogy in ways that align with the Board’s plans for growing the University’s offerings. We fear that moving forward, faculty experience with online teaching—something Bassett admitted in her own case was still limited to “Zoom and Collab together”—is being conflated with faculty acceptance of it as a new norm at the University.²

Yet despite the shock of sudden policy changes, throughout our pandemic year, UVA leadership also desired to continue reproducing normality in decidedly abnormal circumstances. The decision to maintain certain in-person elements last Fall speaks to the fact that better than any other. Students were invited back to campus with promises of an “on-Grounds experience,” most instructors and staff were paid the same wages to work in-person under dangerous conditions, many faculty were handing out the same workload and assessments to overburdened students, and University leadership expected instructors to adapt their courses to online and hybrid models overnight while maintaining the same level of educational quality.

This search for normality during a pandemic, which has claimed the lives of over 590,000 people in the United States at time of this writing, is itself potentially fatal.³ Students and employees of the University of Virginia are risking their health and their lives to recreate normal pedagogical conditions, but some have found this to be a strenuous—if not impossible—task. It does not take much digging to find student and employee testimonials scattered across the internet about how stressed, depressed, and terrified they are as a consequence of hybrid learning. Moreover, we have discovered that many normal pedagogical conditions were themselves damaging to teaching and learning to begin with. Cop shit in classrooms, for instance, was an accepted practice at UVA, as were harmful methods of academic assessment, unhealthy attitudes toward work and achievement, and unfair labor practices. These come together to create what historian and teacher Kevin Gannon refers to as “classrooms of death,” where higher education is reduced to learning a discrete set of skills and regurgitating a certain amount of information, all while reifying certain unspoken norms regarding race, gender, citizenship status, socioeconomic background, and ability.⁴

In this Manifesto, we argue for a pedagogical practice that rejects these “classrooms of death” and instead embraces the alternative, what Gannon names “learning for life.” This starts with treating students, instructors, and other University employees as full people who have been brought into a community with one another by love and need alike: love for learning, love for the things we study and teach, love for the people we work with, yes, but also, the need for money to pay the bills, need for jobs to pay off the debt, and the need for healthcare to keep ourselves alive.⁵ We say “full people" to describe a basic social truth: when students walk into a classroom to learn or instructors walk into a classroom to teach, they bring their worries, wants, anxieties, and joys with them. Further, we argue that this way of thinking about the people in higher education must extend beyond faculty and students. The learning community at UVA and elsewhere is only made possible by the labor of thousands of people who help keep our classrooms clean, our computers running, and our physical needs met. Everything that happens in the University is connected to pedagogy in some way.

Each of us has brought our own unique perspective as a PhD student in the Humanities to the writing of this Manifesto. While we do not always agree on the particulars of where problems come from or where their solutions lie, we share a belief in the humanities, and higher education more broadly, as a potential force for social good. We share the belief that UVA, and universities across this country, has continuously fallen short of that potential. We share the belief, along with thousands of students and workers, that UVA can and must become a better version of itself.

Audience

We have written this Manifesto with several overlapping audiences in mind to reflect the diverse, intersecting experiences of this past year as well as the varying levels of power each group holds. If you are an undergrad at UVA reading this: this document invites you to reconsider your relationship to the University. Is UVA a product you buy? A club you join? Or a community to which you owe and from which you are owed? If we are to take seriously the interconnectedness of our UVA community, all of us are responsible for the good and harm we contribute to the world and, indeed, to the interconnected web of our relationships. Certainly, those at this University with more power than we have are responsible for structuring that web in ways that keep all of us safe. However, just because they have abdicated their responsibility doesn’t mean we need to as well.

If you are a worker at UVA reading this: we wrote this document as fellow workers in an act of solidarity. Several of us know firsthand the sudden and punishing workload increase, the pressure to compromise our health to do our jobs, and the expectation that high standards must continue to be met in the face of crisis. UVA was asking a great deal from its workers even before the pandemic, and didn’t pay most of them nearly enough, particularly the Black and Brown employees and contract workers who constitute the majority of its dining and custodial staff. Task forces or one-time emergency financial aid do not provide the solutions to this unequal labor distribution. All non-tenure workers at UVA deserve wages fixed to the cost of living and full healthcare coverage. We deserve hazard pay when we’re asked to risk our lives for our jobs. We deserve an active role in governing the University, because without us, there would be no University.

If you are a faculty worker: as fellow teaching staff at UVA, we share your frustrations about the many ways in which it feels like our agency is circumscribed and we recognize your intermediary position in the University hierarchy. You are neither powerful enough to change policy meaningfully on your own nor powerless enough to totally abdicate your sense of responsibility. As graduate students, the six of us know faculty at UVA who are happy to support ongoing organizing efforts, students who speak out, and progressive politics outside the University. But now we need faculty who will not just support, but lead and initiate critical changes in our community. Leadership begins with implementing crucial reforms in your classrooms. Furthermore, it means confronting obstinate and toxic colleagues, organizing with non-academic University employees, and rejecting some University administrators’ business-oriented approach towards pedagogy.

If you are a decision maker, a person with power, a dean, provost, VP or president at UVA reading this: the following are not suggestions or requests, but demands. We do not use this language lightly; rather, it is a dimension of this document to which we gave a great deal of thought and consideration. Ultimately we decided this phrasing was necessary, both in order to reflect the urgency with which these changes must happen, and to respect the form in which many of these calls to action were originally made by student, faculty, and community activists. We also choose to address the University and its leadership in this fashion because we believe that UVA, as a public institution, can and must be accountable to its public. The demand for a democratically governed University is more important than ever, as UVA increasingly relies on private sources of funding to run. Many of you in positions of leadership must also consider the state of affairs we describe less than ideal, but nevertheless feel unsure as to what you can do to change it. We want to remind you that you do have power. Many of you have people on your payrolls. Some of you can grant your workers healthcare. You can do away with grades. You can leverage UVA’s strong financial position to borrow more money for workers. You can use UVA’s immense resources to lobby politicians. We all have levers we can pull.

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Notes

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1. “Shock doctrine” as defined by journalist Naomi Klein is the practice of using disasters, social upheaval, or other instances of crisis to push through aggressive neoliberal reforms such as privatization and social austerity. ↩

2. Board of Visitors Board Meeting – December 2020 Meeting, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJnGlmaSKEY. ↩

3. weiseng, “COVID-19 Corona Tracker,” Corona Tracker, accessed April 29, 2021, https://www.coronatracker.com. ↩

4. Kevin M. Gannon, Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto, Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2020), 17. ↩

5. We draw here from the work of several scholars of labor and higher education; namely, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, who write in “The University and the Undercommons”: “The university needs teaching labor, despite itself,” yet disavows those who “teach for food” as occupying a temporary (and distasteful) stage of being. Katina Rogers builds on this argument in Putting the Humanities PhD to Work to describe the ways in which love for teaching—and for academic work more generally—is pitted against these base material realities and used as justification when employers fail to meet them: “The rhetoric of love is one of the mechanisms that can lead people to endure underemployment, insufficient wages, and poor working conditions.” See Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013), 33; Katina L. Rogers, Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and beyond the Classroom (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 21-23. ↩