Let's think harder about (not) canceling classes

I know it's a bit late in the game, but I'd like to propose a new mission for the Task Force on the Undergraduate Experience. Before reorganizing Tufts into a series of residential colleges, expanding the writing requirements, or otherwise improving the scholarly interaction between students and faculty, I suggest the Task Force set its sights lower. How much lower? Let's start here: we need to dispel the notion that "education" happens only in the classroom, and only when time in the classroom is devoted to whatever happens to be on the syllabus for that day. To read the recent punditry addressing the call for faculty to cancel classes the day after a US military invasion of Iraq, one might think a Tufts education is a very limited (and limiting) thing. If that's not an idea worth debunking -- via Task Force if necessary -- I don't know what is.

Let me be clear. The question of canceling classes in response to a US military action is plenty complicated, and I make no claim to having sorted out the issues. But, really, there have to be better arguments against it than the notion that students' tuition is wasted if professors stray from the lesson plan for a day. Somehow, though, that claim seems to have floated to the top of the recent op-ed and editorial criticisms in the Daily. Indeed, if most Tufts students take such a narrow view of what their money and time here buys them, then I suggest we cancel classes for a day to discuss that dire state of affairs, war in Iraq be damned!

Before the obsession over costs-per-class becomes the defining way to think about the wisdom of an action like that proposed by the Tufts Coalition to Oppose War on Iraq (TCOWI), let's pause to think through some implicit assumptions of this perspective and their implications.

We can start with a suggestion, one I admit is a bit selfish, or at least faculty-centric: be careful what you wish for. Many faculty (the vast majority, I'd hazard to guess) see class-time as a small fraction of their responsibilities to students. My calendar and my days, at least, are dominated by other interactions with students, and I'm quite sure I'm no outlier on this front. To reduce the faculty's educational role to only the time spent in class demeans the efforts we expend in other settings. Should we instead close our doors (literally and figuratively)? Decline to talk about career plans, suggestions for internships, ways to navigate the road ahead?

Or, how about those letters of recommendation? There's something to think about, for all you reductionists out there. Does anyone think those tuition dollars are going to get you the kind of letters that help you, if all that matters -- and, hence, all you get -- is face-time with a professor in a classroom setting?

Posing the issue in these terms risks being misread as just another self-pitying (and tired) assistant professor. Do not misunderstand me. The problem, from my view, is not the many interactions and commitments outside the classroom. Truth be told (we can tell the truth here, right?), these are the things that sustain many of us. Rather, the problem is how easily -- and wrongly -- these other facets of life here are discounted (OK, ignored) by those who want to reduce their education to terms captured by the simple-minded calculation of tuition dollars per class.

At its core, that sort of reductionist mindset begs a question seldom made explicit, but one that deserves to be laid bare: if the returns on students' tuition dollars are reducible solely to time spent book-learnin' in the classroom, then should it ever be OK to depart from the regularly scheduled programming during class time? The true-believers, with fingers poised on their calculator buttons, always at the ready to translate their tuition bills into cost-per-class terms, may well say "No." They may even see that as a principled response.

Principles, though, tend to be easiest to cling to in the abstract. So, let's get specific. Should Tufts' faculty have gone on with business as usual in the immediate aftermath of 9/11? It's a point worth considering, no? I don't recall much outrage over the wasted tuition dollars when many professors (rightly, in my opinion) chose to depart from regular lesson plans in the first hours and days after the tragedies of 9/11. If memory serves, in fact, such ad-libs were encouraged by the Tufts administration. So what, exactly, are the differences between the two cases in question, and what makes these differences meaningful, at least to those among us at peace with the 9/11 response but at odds with the TCOWI proposal?

Just a few questions, framed, I hope, to help folks think about the issues in broader terms (we don't really want to divert the Task Force from its already ambitious work, do we?). Now, please, discuss.

And if you want to do that during class time, it's fine by me.

Gary McKissick is an assistant professor in the Political Science Department and Community Health Program.