If You’re Wondering What Your Tuition Might Be Buying …

… you might be interested in why I left the college teaching ranks

With a nod to one of the best film-review openers ever written — Jay Cock’s January 1977 Time critique of Barbra Streisand’s A Star Is Born (“Rock ’n’ roll is not the only problem with A Star Is Born, nor even the basic one. Still, it is a fair place to start.”) — this late-in-life teacher offers the following:

Jasmine Reed is not the only problem with college education today, nor even the basic one. Still, she’s a fair place to start.

Jasmine Reed* was a student in one of the TV History courses I taught at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU), outside Nashville, from 2021 to 2023. My first encounter with her came by way of a group email she sent to each of her instructors for a coming term, informing us that her name is Jasmine, not, as incorrectly listed in school records, Jonathan. And her pronoun preferences are she and her.

She said that in sending the email she hoped that her name and preferences would be respected in the coming term.

Off we were.

Setting aside for another time the question of whether a student sending such a notice to an instructor is appropriate — SPOILER ALERT: It’s not — Jasmine had set a tone in sending hers: Academia, at least as I’d come to experience it since a mid-career transition back in 2010, had officially changed. In the teacher-pupil transaction known as education, the students are now in charge. And feelings are the new currency.

(In my reply to Jasmine, I told her that I employ a mandatory sign-in-sheet for my classes and that however a student chooses to sign in — Ben for Benjamin, Terry for Theresa, Jasmine for Jonathan — is how I refer to that student in class. In presenting this common-sense hashtag-free approach to college, I’d hoped to set my own tone for the term. SPOILER ALERT: It didn’t take.)

Classes began the following week. And if from the start Jasmine proved herself a good attentive student she proved just as quickly that her obvious-to-most status as a trans student was to be the lens through which that attention was paid. (Surely it can’t be considered wrong to note that with some trans persons the trans part is quite clear.) Her class comments and questions chiefly pivoted on the issues of gender and sexuality, for instance, even when the material did not. When I screened the first three-minutes of the groundbreaking genre-shifting 1980s drama Hill Street Blues, a visibly upset Jasmine objected to the 13-seconds of it that showed old-school male officers laughing at the mention of a just-arrested transvestite — despite the fact that showing this behavior was one of the points of the scene. To a mention of an envelope-pushing 1970s TV movie that dealt with a lesbian romance, she offered an audible “Yay” from her seat in the back row. And she corrected those in the room who referenced her with the wrong pronoun — as soon as our first class, when one front-row student who’d heard Jasmine answer a question but had not yet seen her seated in the back row said, “I agree with him.”

Small points each, but they began to add up. I started to feel on edge teaching a course I’d been offering fairly confidently at different colleges for more than a decade. I found myself scrubbing my planned PowerPoint slides for potential flashpoints, wondering why I was. I debated dropping from the class altogether a planned discussion of the seminal 70s sitcom M*A*S*H*, knowing its 11-year history would be reduced to a dissection of the crossdressing Max Klinger character. And I took note of some students being hesitant in how and what they said when speaking in class, knowing Jasmine would be evaluating what she heard.

Jasmine seemed to be hijacking the course a bit, compromising its learning objectives in the process.

Four weeks in, on a brief between-classes break, I received a routine email from the university’s Disability & Access Center Office, reminding me of the handful of my current-term students who had registered with the office and thus were to be afforded continued accommodation. One of the names listed was Jonathan Reed. This early into a term, I tended to know all my students by their first names, and Jonathan didn’t ring a bell. A quick review of the sign-in sheets offered no help: no evidence of that name among the collective 70+ plus signatures. Confused but running late to class, I resolved to figure it out later that day.

As it happened, that next class was the one with Jasmine, and when I walked into the room to see her in her usual back-row seat, I made the connection. Mystery solved. But the name-confusion was so top of mind as my lecture began that soon into it, when Jasmine raised her hand to ask a question, I head-nodded her way and absent-mindedly said, “Jonathan?”

An understandable brain-fart, I thought. And a quick scan of faces suggested no one noticed. Not wanting to give the mistake further attention with an apology in front of the room, I quickly said, “Jasmine, you have a question?” and moved on.

A few minutes later, so did Jasmine, right out of the room. In tears.

Ten days and three missed classes later, I emailed her to ask why the absences. Jasmine’s reply:

“Good afternoon. I’ve had to miss class due to anxiety attacks. But I would like to explain why at least. Last week, you deadnamed me in the middle of class. It was a brief moment, but everyone heard it. While I don’t want to accuse you of intentionally acting with malice, the context of the situation definitely felt malicious, which is why I left. …. By using the wrong name for me, I have been outed to the entire room. Not just that though, now they all know my deadname. I don’t feel safe in that room anymore. It feels like all eyes are on me and now everyone knows that I’m trans. I enjoy the class a lot, and I can’t afford to drop it, but I don’t know what to do. What do you think the best course of action is?

Thinking of all that goes into the day-to-day role of a college instructor — the syllabus creating and updating, the PowerPoint designing, the test giving and grading and the assignment reading, the office hours, the academic administrivia, and the actual teaching — part of me chuckled at first, thinking the note a joke. Then most of me sighed, realizing it wasn’t.

All of me knew, however, that I as a college instructor wasn’t going to be cast in Jasmine’s personal drama.

Re-reading the email, I focused on the one sentence that involved an actual question: What do you think the best course of action is? I sent a reply.

“As I see it, Jasmine, the best course of action is the one that leads back to my classroom, where you’ll continue to get every bit the education on the subject of television history that I’ve been offering you and the 20 other students in the room for the past month. Anything other than that sounds like a matter for your advisor and counselor.”

“As to the use of the wrong name,” I added, “it’s called an accident. They happen.” (And indeed it did happen in another of my classes with another trans student the previous week, who laughed when he saw my embarrassment and said, “Don’t worry about it. I get it.”)

What I chose not to write to Jasmine? That had she been the adult that college students are thought to be and not fled the class in tears, I’d planned to take her aside privately when it was over to explain what happened. And yes, to apologize. Which in turn would have obviated the over-the-top victim-claiming social-justice-warrior email in front of me (“You deadnamed me” … “I don’t feel safe in that room anymore” … “all eyes are on me”) and its unacceptable allegation that a teacher deliberately outed a student during class. With malice.

Even in unjust times, not everything has to be a crusade.

I sent copies all three pieces of correspondence to the office of dean, along with a full note of explanation. Lucky me, as it turned out, because that’s where Jasmine headed next. And where over the next two weeks she received the consoling and hand-wringing she didn’t get with me. In the end, “after much discussion” she was allowed to drop my course and replace it with another, penalty-free.

And three months later I was out of a job.

Budget shortfalls and enrollment declines, I was told. Maybe. I read the news, too. But I’d wager The Incident played its part: Instructors who don’t coddle students risk inflaming them, provoking apprehension among higher-ups in today’s New Academic Normal looking at enrollment figures. Thus, they’re expendable. Students’ feelings come first.

The apprehension is real. Still dealing with sizable aftershocks of the earthquake that was COVID-19, higher education is suffering (though it’s been suffering for a while, since before the pandemic). And something has changed in that suffering. Be it cause or effect, college students seem to have been allowed, even encouraged, to act like children. Free of consequence, at that. And just as often they seem to be treated as children, too, though I’m unsure which came first.

Soon after I was hired at MTSU, I was encouraged to participate in a Zoom meeting set up by the university. It was called Creating an Effective Syllabus and Assignment Sheets. The upshot of what I heard: When it comes to communicating with students, instructors should “write with clarity what the expectations are for the assignment” and provide “positive reinforcement” to guide students through its completion.

I found this instruction itself … odd. My expectation for any assignment I’d doled out over the years is that students complete it, based on what I tell them it is in class, with the resulting grade providing any needed positive reinforcement (or negative, as the case may be, which can often be just as beneficial). After twelve years of schooling, 17- to 21-year-olds know how to do homework. Read this, research that, write a 1500-word paper. It’s not complicated.

“Avoid deficit and punitive language, [as that] makes students afraid,” the Zoom hosts continued. Instead, come up with “helpful” words that encourage the students — though steer clear of “complex wording [as] students may not know what certain words mean.” (Examples given of complex wording: narrative and symbolism.) Show the students the “steppingstones” of the assignment, came the suggestion. “But don’t confuse them. They may not read all of what you write if you write too much.”

Most important, “Don’t make the students feel like they are being set up to fail.”

The word again: feel.

In short, take the students’ hands and walk them through what to do and how to do it.

When did this become a university education? I thought.

I came to wonder how far the gap between these instructions and the unsolicited suggestion a student gave me one day later that first term, following a class in which I’d screened a scene of TV violence from the 1970s so shocking at the time that it led to government intervention into what and when networks can broadcast certain programming. He came up to me and said without a hint of self-awareness that I should have preceded the video by saying it was okay for students “to rest their heads on their desks until it’s over.”

The kind of suggestion I myself had last heard in my Philadelphia kindergarten.

(For the record, I actually had already issued multiple written and verbal warnings ahead of the class, indicating with each that attendance for the session was optional. For the Irony File: After showing the history-making TV clip in a TV History course, a clip that aired on network television in 1974, a student in the class reported me to the school dean anyway. Because, well, 2020s.)

Far smarter and far more pedagogically trained folks than I have been weighing in on the current state of academia. But for my money, whether it’s a byproduct of the flying blind that’s been post-lockdown (with students parlaying a bottomless stack of get-out-of-jail passes they’ve been given into unchecked end-runs around assignments and attendance) or of Zoom meetings suggesting that instructors not be “punitive” or “make students afraid” or of generational differences in parenting (a just-released study reveals that 26 percent of Gen Z respondents have brought a parent with them to job interviews), higher education now seem as much about care-giving as it does education. On some days, more. College students can seem infantilized today, largely unaware of or indifferent to basic life concepts such as challenge and consequence. The kind without hashtags.

My grading process was spelled out in every syllabus I distributed, yet the common reply when I sent out a warning email to students who’d missed multiple class sessions: “Is attendance even graded? I have anxiety about coming to class.” (Again, the excuse could not be challenged.) “I’ll try my best to return soon,” one student actually answered. “I’ve just been bummed, man.”

Could I penalize or even fail students for shoddy attendance and missed assignments? Yes. And I did. Or I tried. I didn’t always succeed. Students have gotten practiced at gaming a system that’s falling more and more into their controls anyway (the stack of get-out-of-jail passes): They know they can file a grade appeal, claim anxiety, and (usually) win a new grade. “You’re free to issue any mark you think is fair,” a colleague told me. Left unsaid but noted in his facial expression was that most likely I was on my own beyond that if a student objected.

Factor into this the hot wind of today’s casual let-it-all-hang-out approach to life in general that’s fanned by social media — the student who not once but three times detailed for me (emphasis on the word detailed) how and why her menstrual cycle led to repeated class absences, the student who told me as class began that he’d be leaving the room for about ten minutes at some point to pick up the lunch order he placed on his way to class (“I have to eat, man!”), the student who emailed me from the stall of the women’s room across the hall to tell me that because she was verging on passing out due to extreme vomiting she might not return to class.

Eyes would roll in derision if I said something like not in my day. But, honestly, prior to five or so years ago, was it in anyone’s day?

I find myself thinking of my first teaching job, in Chicago in 2010, with students who, while still every bit the frustration that students can sometimes be, showed up on time (for a three-hour night class, no less), brought none of their personal issues into the room, turned in assignments correctly and on time, and engaged both with the material and the discussions it sparked. These students would have been born in and around the early 1990s.

Teaching in 2021, with students born in and around the early 2000s? Night and day different. Night. And. Day.

Right now, whatever teaching I’m choosing to do is with 50+ learners, through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), a non-profit initiative that began in 2001 and which today is affiliated with about 100 colleges and universities nationwide in service of older students. I welcome the change. These enrollees appreciate, even value, being in the classroom. Learning (and community) is the reason they’re there. Still a teaching challenge, it’s rewarding, interesting, fun.

I do miss my undergrad classes — or at least as I enjoyed them with the handful of students each term who demonstrated that they, too, valued being in school. Who cared and contributed and took their tuition money seriously. (On average, this amounted to about ten percent of each class enrollment.) I miss the interactions and the mentorship and the sense of promise I felt for them at each semester’s end. But I don’t miss the frustrations and challenges of the tilting field of higher education reflected in the other 90 percent, who run the gamut from indifferent to invisible. When colleges learn again to say no to students once in a while, to push back on their claims of perceived offenses, to re-establish and support the rules of learning, I’d love to try again.

Mostly, I don’t miss students like Jasmine Reed, who, in my opinion, should have been sanctioned or even expelled from the university for her unfounded career-compromising allegation against an instructor.

I never got the apology I thought I deserved from her or from the school after it “investigated” the incident. But I did get a bit of a last chuckle. Three weeks after Jasmine left my classroom in tears due to my using her old name, I received an email from the Registrar’s office noting that her course-drop was official.

It listed her as Jonathan Reed.

*A fictional name for a real person