Recovery time: Good morning my dear boiled eggs. Did you enjoy your trip to Austin? Do you uphold patriarchy and celebrate classic Western masculinity?
Egg: You are so annoying. Old white men need a little space in the vocabulary of human endeavour. I speak for them all. Then there it is!
Recovery time: 🤮 One theme in the responses I hear from people about this column has to do with body functions and body fluids. People say they’ve sniffed coffee out of their noses and nearly peed their pants while reading our texts. We have to push harder to get them to actually pee. Higher education needs more fun, Gordon.
Egg: Rachel, I can tell you that I had a lot of fun because of your help. The greatest gift you have given me is your friendship. These may be the last words I say to you.
Recovery time: Liar, liar, pants on fire. You can’t help yourself. Every text you send me is filled with wonderful things. Also, people tell me, “I didn’t know Gordon Gee was so funny!” It seems like you hide it well.
Egg: I think a thick skin and a sense of humor are the antidote to the usual gripes and complaints in college. Besides, there are so many damn funny things happening on campus, why not laugh?
Recovery time: Now, let’s get into the silos of expertise and knowledge. I think we can agree that expertise is important and that American higher education is an expert factory. We need to continue to produce PhDs with specific knowledge of science, medicine, history, and the global and diverse world—all of which we teach. This is even more important now that our government is providing dangerous “advice.” Welcome back, Measles! I mean, there are a lot of people here in your beloved state of West Virginia who think COVID-19 isn’t real and/or eat horse repellent. I feel sorry for those poor horses whose poop is crawling with robot larvae.
Egg: I must admit that some of your analogies are clearly meant to irritate me. It’s hard to believe you’re a Yale graduate. (Actually, it’s not that hard to believe.) Of course, some of the advice the government is proposing is dangerous, especially when it comes to public health. But they also raise legitimate questions that should not be ignored. I hope you are not a member of AA.
Recovery time: Alcoholics Anonymous? WTF, Gordon?
Egg: Academic Antifa.
Recovery time: Ouch. Anyway. I think we agree that we have to protect and sustain disciplinary knowledge and we need to sustain research and scholarship to keep our country healthy and our democracy alive. But many faculty, no matter where they teach, including small private colleges and regional public universities, act as if they are still training mini-universities and are simply preparing students for graduate school.
Egg: This is because universities are organized around departments and colleges rather than ideas. I think we need to reorganize universities around centres, institutes and working groups, making undergraduate and postgraduate courses very flexible and making disciplines less of an organizing principle and more part of the creative process. Knowledge doubles every few hours, so we need to develop ideas and creative work at the same pace. College is an elephant and one needs to be a ballet dancer, not just an elephant in a tutu.
Recovery time: So we agree: professionals are stupid. I disagree with some faculty because I feel we are not serving our students in today’s world. When students come to us from community college and choose to major in creative writing (to my dismay, I realize I may lose my job), they cannot take courses that will complete them intellectually without jeopardizing financial aid because everything must count toward degree completion. Given the way my college and many other colleges are set up, I can’t even teach with a history or engineering professor.
Egg: Rachel, what I’m trying to say is that it’s not that you are out of tune with the faculty, it’s that your colleagues are out of tune with academic reality. Many times I see people clinging to the status quo, even to the point of a death spiral. As president, I would ask, “Why are we doing this?” The answer is, “This is the way we’ve always done it.” Many people believe that certain sacred questions are unchallenged. Holy Cow is the best burger in my opinion.
Recovery time: Well, there is a lovely image. When you slash and burn and destroy everything that is good and sacred at West Virginia University—
Egg: You know how to get really irritating. I doubt you’ll show up in front of my office with a megaphone –
Recovery time: Being annoying is one of my few superpowers. But no, I’m going to throw stale bow-tie cookies at you or write nasty columns. Have you ever tried to reimagine how to fundamentally change things? Are there any real conversations about inquiry-based learning? Could WVU create a “university within a university”—a pilot college centered on issues rather than majors, attracting faculty who want to try something different to serve today’s students? Have you heard of any places (besides UATX, more on that later) that are doing cool things to break away from the tyranny of the discipline? I have.
Egg: There was no slash-and-burn farming. This is a necessary process to begin the transformation of universities, a process now underway at many institutions. The tyranny of disciplines and faculties makes it almost impossible to create new, more thoughtful ways of organizing universities. The guild mentality requires loyalty to discipline rather than loyalty to the university –
Recovery time: You know I wrote this back in the fall, right? I love interrupting you. (Little Jewish girl from New York ruins Mormon politeness. Oh my god!)
Egg: – meaning it’s difficult to launch new and interesting courses within universities. This is why legislators created the Civic College, for example, because universities refused to think about new, creative ways of teaching and organizing.
Recovery time: Oh sure, some states mandate innovation on their citizens, like your patriarchal little friends at UATX trying to turn back half a century of social consciousness?
Egg: Well, part of the reason is the belief among many in the political world that institutions are rife with wokeness. I reject this premise (despite the large amount of “wokeness” that exists in parts of many universities).
Recovery time: I don’t know what “woke” means, and certainly you’re not denying the real structural inequalities that exist in the legal foundations of our society. Really, Gordon, you were the dean of a law school (centuries ago). When I say that higher education has changed little over the past century and a half, several presidents have pointed out that if that were true, I wouldn’t be here. Is coeducation an awakening? Is it awakening to look critically at our sometimes ugly history? But if you say we can do a better job of teaching why diversity (of all kinds), equity, and inclusion matter, I agree. Everyone yelled, which resulted in a large group of people feeling condescended and excluded.
Egg: If university faculty could become more attuned to the changing nature of the world in which our universities operate, they would find ways to foster new and different structures within universities that would provide multiple paths for scholarly dialogue and salvation.
Recovery time: But we tend to stay within our little silos. We’re also just swinging the “cancellation” pendulum back and forth. I wonder if part of the problem with majors and departments is the way we’ve traditionally rewarded faculty, which is, we all act like we’re mini R-1s.
Egg: Now let’s get started for real. My question to you is, when are you going to give up tenure?
Recovery time: Once you find me another job with better benefits. oops. No, because being a full professor is the most luxurious job in the country. You can also have your elephant wear a tutu. I adore a baby pygmy hippopotamus named Mars who lives in Wichita.
